Israel's Geneva Gamble

...i.e., the questions of a Palestinian state and sovereignty over Jerusalem At the same tune, the differences separating Tel Aviv and Cairo are minimal "We don't want anything that is vital to Egypt, the Egyptians don't need anything that is vital to us," says Dayan frequently What he means is that Israel is prepared to withdraw from the Suez Canal and allow it to be reopened under Egyptian control, and Cairo could countenance an Israeli presence at Sharm el Sheik to guarantee free passage to the Gulf of Eilat If left alone, therefore, Israel and Egypt could amve at an acceptable compromise relatively easily and sign a peace treaty on that basis It is of course highly unlikely that the Egyptians would conclude their own separate deal with Israel and leave the other Arabs to fend for themselves Still, an interim agreement in principle or merely an informal understanding on all basic issues could be reached Implementation could then be either explicitly dependent on future agreements with the other Arab countries or earned out in stages Since in any interim solution Israel's concessions would have to be territorial while Egypt's reciprocations would have to be political in nature, Dayan never beheved the generals at Kilometer 101 could make much progress Generals can do no more than draw military lines on maps In Geneva, military and political negotiations can be linked Even the optimists are aware that to avoid renewed warfare in the foreseeable future, Israel will have to make very considerable territorial concessions "But the Egyptians must understand the nature of reciprocity," remarked a high-ranking Israeli official recently "The more peace they give, the more territories they get" In practice, this could range anywhere between two extremes from narrow Israeli disengagement in exchange for simply demilitarization and UN presence in the evacuated areas, up to evacuation of most of the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for Egyptian recognition of Israel and mutual renunciation of the use of force in the Israeli-Arab dispute And by the end of the first phase of the military committee talks at Geneva, Israeli optimists saw a better-than-even chance that some agreement along the above lines could be achieved NOT SO the pessimists, whose main villains are US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the present Labor Alignment leadership According to this scenario, Kissinger promised the Arabs that shortly after the Israeli elections Washington would force Israel to retreat from practically all the territories taken in the 1967 war, without receiving in return either secure and defensible borders or a genuine formal peace with its neighbors Prune Minister Golda Meir and General Dayan, trying desperately to avoid defeat at the polls, cooperated with Kissinger, presenting the public with false hopes of a peace settlement In fact, the -pessimists maintain, should Israel actually accede to any withdrawal from the West Bank of Suez without first obtaining Arab recognition of secure boundaries, the process of attrition would become irreversible Soon the nation would find enemy troops poised on the outskirts of Jerusalem and a short distance from Tel Aviv, with every Israeli military airfield lying in staking range of Arab antiaircraft missiles Next would come the demand to comply with "the national rights of the Palestinians," necessitating a further retreat to the checkerboard boundaries of 1947 and the read-mission of hundreds of thousands of hostile Arab refugees into what would be left of the Jewish State At this stage Israel would face the choice of either signing away its national existence or fighting a war in which its chances of survival were incomparably worse than at present In last month's campaign, speakers for the opposition Likud grouping assured voters that a tough Israeli posture at Geneva is the only way to achieve peace and security Labor Alignment candidates, meanwhile, hammered on the theme that the present leadership is the only one both sufficiently firm and flexible to achieve a compromise at Geneva that will lead to a settlement consistent with the basic security requirements of the country Thus, despite their differences, both sides agreed that the talks are the place where at least a start should be made toward a permanent peace with the Arabs This indeed reflects the keen desire on the part of all Israelis to put an end to the intermittent warfare that has plagued their country since its rebirth—a desire that probably has not escaped the gleeful notice of those Arabs who remember an old Kissinger maxim The party who is more eager to reach an agreement is the one that loses more in negotiations But General Dayan is extremely conscious of this maxim, too Accordingly, he lost no opportunity during the last round of preelection speech-making to stress that much of the outcome of the Geneva conference would depend on the patience and tolerance of the Israeli reservists who may have to stay in uniform for a long time to come Dayan returned from his postelection talks with Kissinger two weeks ago still believing that the chances for progress at the talks were better than 50-50, but even more firmly convinced that the road to a settlement will be a rocky one, strewn with numerous crises, occasional breakdowns and possibly a renewal of shooting along the front lines Maintaining its composure in this new political and military war of attrition may prove to be the hardest test Israel has to face in the immediate future...

...THE OPTIMISTS VS THE PESSIMISTS Israel's Geneva Gamble BY ELIAHU SALPETER MOSHE DAYAN TEL AVIV WHAT impressed a friend of mine who participated in the first phase of the Mideast peace conference at Geneva was the positive as well as the negative parallelism between the two sides In his many private conversations with Egyptian officials and journalists, he found that they, too, are tired of the 25-year-old war and would like to make a fresh start But, again like the Israelis, they are afraid of being forced to agree to terms they consider unacceptable, or worse, of being tncked into disadvantageous concessions under the pretense of advancing toward a full-scale peace settlement Here, however, the parallels end For the Arabs, a mistake at Geneva might, at most, result in their getting less than they hoped for from their opening victories in the Yom Kippur War For the Israelis, retreating one step too far could amount to stepping into the abyss Indeed, after a quarter-century of being told by even such "moderates" as Al-Ahram editor Mohammed Hassanein Heikal that a permanent Jewish state in an "Arab Middle East" will never be tolerated, the Israelis understandably entered the current negotiations with all the caution of a navigator setting sail on an uncharted, hostile sea True, some of the dovish leaders, like Foreign Minister Abba Eban, seem to believe that Israel's less-than-stunning victory last October has made the Arabs feel it is more "honorable" for them to negotiate now than it was after June 1967 But most people here, whether optimists or pessimists, suspect that the initial Egyptian and Syrian military successes, the Soviets' full backing, and Western Europe's cowering before the "oil weapon" have whetted Arab appetites beyond a point that could ever be safely satisfied at a conference table The two groups offer completely opposite scenarios, though, for the coming weeks and months The optimists, who include a majority of the doves and many hawks in the Labor Alignment (which ran in last month's elections as a "peace party") anticipate hard and tense bargaining that will nevertheless produce real progress toward some kind of settlement, if only with the Egyptians Few would admit it, yet except for the ultra-doves the optimists tend to think essentially along the lines propounded for several years by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan His argument, it is understood, runs roughly as follows A formal and complete peace treaty is virtually impossible at present Mutual distrust runs too deep, and the gap between the minimum the Arabs are demanding and the maximum the Israelis can afford to ELIAHU SALPETER leports regularly in these pages on Israeli affaus give is too wide This is especially true regarding the West Bank...