STAND-OFF IN THE MIDDLE EAST

...The prospects for peace soon, then, are not bright...

...In Egypt the race is between economic development and population growth, and so far population is winning- a fact easily grasped in Cairo, which has a population of 7 million, about twice that which it could decently support...

...posture be...

...Exactly-recognition of two balancing claims to rights...

...I was convinced of this before I went on this trip, on the basis of evidence supplied by others...

...In any case the PLO is a terrorist organization, its program is impossible, and there is no way Israel can easily withdraw, he said, because of the constant danger to its national security...

...Thus each time we sat down for an interview, coffee, tea or soft drinks were first formally dispensed all round, in a context in which to refuse would have been rudeness, and by the end of a long day there was among us a considerable tendency toward waterlogging...

...Not surprisingly, he tended to belittle them...

...After visiting Palestinian camps and talking with various PLO spokesmen, I suspect this is true...

...For Hussein also the Palestinian question is the heart of the problem, and small wonder...

...that night an always-exactly-the-same finished product would appear on the local news...

...the law of return which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew from any country who "returns" to Israel inevitably means an expansionist policy for Israel, they said...

...The umbrella organization of this guerrilla movement is the Palestinian Liberation Organization, headed by Yasir Arafat...

...Rome apparently would be satisfied with some kind of special status for Jerusalem with international guarantees of free access to the holy places...

...The most sensible comment on the matter that I heard came from the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem: "Peace," he said, "is the only real answer to the exodus of Christians...

...Recently, however, President Anwar el-Sadat expelled the large Soviet military mission-the members of which were reportedly very unpopular with the Egyptian people-and the USSR is now holding back on its aid...

...At the moment the great Christian concern about Jerusalem is the fear that the holy places will become museums rather than centers of living faith, and the source of this concern is the gradual exodus of Arab Christians from the area, some say under Israeli pressure...

...Some in Israel think Arafat should be recognized and that conversations with him should take place, but they are very definitely in the minority...

...In each country we had extended, highly informative question-and-answer sessions with key political figures: the Prime Minister of Egypt, the President of Lebanon (incredibly, his first press interview in 41/2 years), the Deputy Foreign Minister of Syria (who confirmed his nation's hard-nosed reputation), King Hussein of Jordan, and the President and the Premier of Israel...

...Not all Palestinians would go home by any means, especially those who are more successful where they are, but all want the right...

...Most young Arabs who want higher education, for example, have to leave the country, and many do not return...

...Supposedly the Ford administration is in the midst of a "reassessment" of our Middle Eastern policy, and it is currently holding up Israel's request for arms and economic aid...

...The Palestinians have demonstrated that they are willing to fight to win back their land...

...Since the termination of Secretary Kissinger's most recent attempt at shuttle diplomacy, much has been written about who was to blame for its failure...

...Before the talks collapsed, Syria and the PLO, egged on by the USSR, were already organizing Arab opinion against Sadat for going as far as he did in the way of compromise...

...to accept other citizenship would seem to say that they are giving up on achieving a nation of their own, and this they will never do...

...Unless Mr...

...In November of 1973 the Bishops of the United States Catholic Conference wrestled with the problem...

...In this connection some Egyptian officials stress that Egypt is largely made up of believers, mostly Moslems...

...citizens are and will remain sympathetic to Palestinian claims, I think, but Israel's claim to sheer survival will be paramount...

...The Jewish underground, they say, waged war on soldiers and military targets...

...But what do you do if the two rights turn out to be mutually exclusive, at least in the eyes of the contesting parties...

...He may very well be right...

...on the contrary, it will get worse because the younger Palestinians are even more militant than their fathers...

...Simultaneously, much is being said of the need for Israel to take new initiatives, new steps to break the diplomatic logjam, possibly including withdrawal from the occupied lands and negotiations with Arafat and the PLO...

...they raid over the border into Israel, thus provoking Israeli retaliatory raids, hardly to the joy of the Lebanese...

...A failure there would greatly increase the chances of war...

...The arrangers of our visit thought of everything except the toll our daily schedule would take of the human condition, but if the trip was exhausting, it was also eminently worthwhile...

...At this point, what else is possible...

...Other and wealthier Arab states helped with only a fraction of this, to Egypt, immense cost...

...Most Israeli leaders think the answer to this question is yes, and Arafat himself is ambiguous, speaking at one moment of pragmatic compromise involving a limited-area Palestinian state and at the next moment of a long-range dream of a secular, pluralistic state so attractive that Israel would spontaneously change its present basic character...

...Both groups have for years done much charitable work in the area, and their sponsorship opened doors for us in country after country...

...The PLO is recognized by the nations of the Arab League as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people...

...But Egypt, he assured us, has no desire to drive Israel into the sea...

...Israelis and American Jews alike fear an "erosion of memory" on this point, but I cannot believe that this will happen, oil or no...

...Nonetheless, he said he did not want to hide the underlying Israeli suspicion, the great fear, that Israel's neighbors do not accept it as a permanent state...

...On the one hand, at some point people in the area have to start believing each other...

...In Jordan too the refugees tried to operate as a state within a state, and in 1970 Hussein was driven to strike back, in a move the Palestinians call Black September and have never forgiven...

...Palestinian leaders are divided among themselves, and the PLO represents an uneasy coalition of forces...

...It seems clear that he at least accepts Israel as a permanent part of the Middle Eastern scene...

...What you do, if you are in the United States, in my view, is to sigh and continue to urge on all parties the need for peace...

...Except in Jordan, Palestinians are not eligible for citizenship in the other Arab countries, and they say they do not mind...

...But official spokesmen assured us that the top leadership of the PLO condemned random terrorism outside of Israel, and it is apparently a fact that some who have engaged in such action are in PLO prisons right how...

...rights and wrongs are inextricably mixed in a historical mish-mash, and the situation in the area probably represents the most tangled can of worms on the international scene...

...As for Pope Paul, he no longer speaks of internationalization which nobody seems to want...

...Francis, by any means...

...we were to hear them repeated over and over again throughout the course of the trip: Israel must obey UN resolutions 242 and 338 and withdraw from occupied Arab lands, and Israel must recognize the rights of the Palestinian people...

...This is not to say that Palestinian opinion on PLO strategy is unanimous-far from it...

...Kissinger's mission, just as a warning to the Secretary and Egypt's Sadat that the PLO would resist any separate Egyptian-Israeli peace...

...with the American Ambassador in Lebanon and several UN spokesmen...

...there will thus be no threat of Communism in their country, they say...

...The Middle East simply does not offer a neat ethics textbook kind of case...

...The Palestinians we talked to always insisted that they were not anti-Semitic ("we too are Semites") but anti-Zionist...

...Apparently the conventional wisdom in Washington at the moment is that Israel will fare worse at Geneva than in Mr...

...Recognition of the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state with secure boundaries...

...The Lebanese would, he assured me, solve them the Lebanese way, by conciliation and compromise...

...Kissinger's choice of Egypt for his shuttle diplomatic efforts...

...American Jews and Israelis alike should be conscious that in the long run time is on the side of the Arabs...

...No one is quite sure of the exact significance of this state of affairs...

...Arafat and his colleagues presently at the top of the PLO would undoubtedly be tough to negotiate with, but if they fail, their successors will be well nigh impossible...

...In between the top-level interviews we met and had lengthy give-and-take sessions with a wide variety of others: with spokesmen for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in and out of the refugee camps...

...Arafat is no St...

...Apparently our arrival in a body and our red-carpet reception made us news: in each country impossibly stiff and crowded group pictures of us appeared, often on the front page, and at every official interview TV cameramen would appear and pan solemnly around the room...

...This is true for two major reasons: first of all, the determination of the Palestinians themselves...

...Italian sisters teaching deaf-and-dumb children, virgins far from home mothering scores of obviously loved and loving children...

...james o'gara is the Editor of Commonweal...

...For friends of the Arabs and the Israelis alike the first thing to note is that the present state of armed truce, with an outbreak of war eminently possible, is preventing the peaceful development of the whole region...

...Washington seems to blame Israel...

...alongside could still be seen the shattered hulks of Jordanian tanks, rusted reminders of the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967...

...They differ among themselves on many points but on the need for their own state they are absolutely adamant...

...I see nothing wrong with this, if it is part of an even-handed policy...

...We visited Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel, working on a packed, early-to-rise-late-to-bed schedule...

...The Middle Eastern trip I was on was a 2 1/2 -week working expedition with a dozen other Catholic editors, a journey taken under the auspices of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, whose national secretary, Monsignor John G. Nolan, is also the president of the Pontifical Mission for Palestine...

...What we have, then, is a stand-off...

...A few days after we left bitter fighting broke out in the streets of Beirut between Palestinians and the right-wing Phalangists, a nationalist Christian group whose leader we had previously talked to...

...with a population of 37 million, it is the only Arab country able to move independently on policy issues, the only Arab state strong enough in terms of size and people and in military terms to make war or peace alone with Israel...

...The good far outweighed the bad...

...if this is ever to happen, the United States will have to give a stronger lead in this direction than it has yet...

...and, constantly, with dozens of unofficial, representative private citizens in every country we visited...

...This has emphatically not happened, and the presence of the Palestinians throughout the Arab world constitutes strong pressure on the various governments away from accommodation and peace with Israel and toward constant bellicosity and war...

...The resulting friction is exacerbated by the presence of 300,000 mostly Moslem Palestinian refugees, who in their camps operate as a state within a state, controlling their own areas, stopping cars on the highways for security checks and the like...

...with information ministers of the various countries...

...policy will represent a threat to Israel...

...I am convinced that fresh initiatives are essential, and I see no harm at all in promoting such an approach as a matter of official policy...

...As for international guarantees, which the U.S...

...Without the creation of such a Palestinian state, within mutually agreed borders, no Middle Eastern settlement is possible...

...When we interviewed Israel's Premier Yitzhak Rabin he, like the President, took a firm line on the Arabs in general and the PLO in particular, in a session that lasted almost an hour and a half...

...What specifically can one say on this point with reference to Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization...

...At one point the Israelis believed that with the passage of time the Palestinians would be absorbed by the other Arab states and would gradually forget about their desire for nationhood...

...nevertheless, to realize how relative the term is, one has only to consider George Habash, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: this Marxist-oriented guerrilla leader with a Christian background makes Arafat look moderate, espousing sheer terror tactics and openly seeking a new Arab-Israeli war...

...These are the people who once lived on much of the land now occupied by Israel...

...Theoretically Palestinians should be allowed back, but hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries now live where they came from...

...Their desire for a national state of their own is intense, and in this they reminded me of the Irish...

...In the end Hussein won, but casualties on both sides were heavy, the scars are still there, and the King lives under constant threat of assassination...

...Meanwhile, what should the U.S...

...As Premier Rabin sees it, Israel can win 20 wars without threatening the survival of the Arab countries...

...Negotiation with the PLO was out of the question...

...That they had an arguing point was illustrated shortly before we arrived in Israel when 20,000 Israelis gathered on the site of Samaria, an ancient Judean capital on the West Bank of the Jordan river...

...If he is pessimistic, he has reason...

...with representatives of the Arab League...

...Egypt alone has ten times the population of Israel...

...All in Israel sympathize with the Palestinian refugees, he emphasized, even though it was Israel which was first attacked after partition in 1948...

...It is, first of all, the area's greatest and oldest nation-state...

...so too what seemed a basic unconcern by some churchmen as to whether or not Melkite Archbishop Capucci was in fact guilty of gun-running (under cover of a Vatican diplomatic passport) for which he had been convicted by an Israeli court, in favor of insistence that as an archbishop he should have been tried by an ecclesiastical rather than a civil court...

...With the United States as Israel's big arms supplier, Egypt for years depended for its arms on the Soviet Union...

...Cairo streets are constantly crowded, from morning to night...

...It is generally said that Arafat did not dare discard his assertedly empty holster at his recent UN appearance lest the younger militants in the PLO think he had abandoned them entirely in favor of the paths of diplomacy...

...One thing is sure, despite Jewish demurrers: in the general Middle Eastern cast of characters, Egypt's Sadat is at this stage the moderate, a skilled conciliator of conflicting domestic and foreign forces...

...The Arab states are plagued by problems, and Egypt, where we went first, is a good example of some of the more crucial of these...

...Indeed, if the overwhelmingly approved November resolution of the UN General Assembly becomes a fact and a Palestinian state is created in the now-occupied territories, and if a mass return to it then takes place-two sizable ifs-some Arab countries will miss the Palestinians sorely...

...There are over 100 million Arabs as compared with only 31/2 million Israelis...

...They * are convinced that Israel will do better seeking an over-all peace settlement with the Arab nations as a group than in bargaining away advantage after advantage for partial solutions with individual Arab countries...

...a Mass sung by German priests at the site of the Annunciation, beautifully done in a way we never hear in the United States, alas...

...Secondly, the problem will not lessen and eventually wither away...

...the PLO guerrillas murder women and children...

...Hence Mr...

...Most of the would-be settlers were Orthodox Jews who believe that they have a historical and religious duty to settle the whole biblical land of Israel...

...Since 1967 alone Egypt has spent $25 billion for military purposes...

...As far as the Church is concerned, some things in the Middle East put me off: the rivalry between the competing religious groups over prerogatives in the holy places, for example, struck me as scandalous, even though I had been forewarned...

...We have to face the fact, he said after a long discussion, that some problems are simply insoluble, and this is one of them...

...It certainly defies easy moral analysis...

...Lebanon provides an extreme example of what the presence of the Palestinians can mean...

...as a result Cairo cabbies drive as madly as their counterparts in Rome, with one addition: they never take their hands off the horn, and a ride through Cairo's crowded streets is a shattering experience...

...I had seen reports of growing Moslem-Christian tensions and asked the Lebanese President about them...

...When we interviewed the President of Israel, he stressed his country's desire for peace and the heavy burden placed on Israel by military preparedness (Israelis are the most heavily taxed people in the world, with 56 percent of the nation's income going to the national treasury through taxes and compulsory loans...

...Everywhere we went we were treated with the Middle East's traditional hospitality...

...if it loses one, however, it is finished...

...Thus the President, whom we talked to, is always a Christian...

...For this the 27-year-old conflict with Israel is a major cause...

...This took some political courage, for at this point an independent Palestinian state means Arafat and the PLO, and Israeli officials freeze when they are mentioned, refusing even to consider conversations with them...

...the latest occasion was the raid on the Tel Aviv hotel during Mr...

...Indeed, a case can be made that Israel up to now has been far more brilliant militarily than diplomatically...

...After my return from the area, I talked to a very knowledgeable journalist about the matter...

...with assorted religious dignitaries, from Pope Chenouda, the Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Christians in Cairo, through the Moslem Grand Mufti of Lebanon and the Catholic Bishop of Jordan to the Apostolic Delegate in Jerusalem...

...a half-dozen of Mother Teresa's Indian sisters, ministering to the poorest of the Arab poor...

...the Arabs were not and the resulting violence created the first refugees...

...Ultimately, it is still true that Israel can be understood only in terms of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died in the heart of Christian Europe while the West closed its eyes and its doors-a fact which was determinative in the later creation of Israel by the United Nations...

...Basically, what bothers the Israelis is this question: would an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders to permit the creation of a Palestinian state only begin a new phase of agitation and crisis...

...Lebanon is a state delicately poised on the knife edge of religious pluralism...

...the existence of such militancy often makes things very difficult for Arafat with extremists within his own organization...

...Israel is firmly in control of these once-Arab lands, and if it has any intentions of giving them back in the near future, I saw no signs of it, while I did see considerable Israeli construction work in occupied areas...

...the Premier always a Moslem, and so on...

...In Lebanon the Palestinian commandos substantially outnumber the regular army and are completely beyond Lebanese control...

...As for Israel, people forget that Premier Rabin's chief critics are more, not less, hawk-like than he, and this includes the minority religious parties that support his coalition...

...Add to this the very nature of the proposed Palestinian state, commonly envisaged as made up of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan, which was once Hussein's and which he had ambitions to regain...

...Sadat certainly does, while Premier Rabin flatly told us it was Egypt's fault...

...with a select group of Jordanian 'Senators...

...But in other respects they are, ironically enough, very like the Jews: they are intelligent, articulate, high achievers, on the average much better educated than their fellow-Arabs, and they tend to be very successful, given half a chance...

...The problem of the Palestinian people is at the heart of the Middle Eastern question, and no solution in this area is possible without their inclusion and agreement...

...As time goes by, the Arab countries will inevitably approach Israel in technological and industrial development, and the military result could be a disaster if a framework of lasting peace in the area is not created now...

...Kissinger's step-by-step diplomacy...

...Naturally, Israelis who even refuse to consider Egypt's Sadat a moderate totally refuse to consider Arafat in any such light...

...His Prime Minister described two points which he called essential for peace...

...An attractive, energetic and youthful-looking man, he made a good impression on the group but we left depressed...

...But Moscow does not like being squeezed out of the picture, and the Russians will make trouble for Sadat if they can...

...Kissinger can persuade either party to yield further, which is possible but unlikely, we will all go to Geneva, with the USSR back in the picture...

...It was to help meet this problem that Bethlehem University was recently founded by the Christian Brothers, but it is small and only nibbles at the edges of the problem...

...In Israel shortly before we got there Senator George McGovern told a news conference that peace in the Middle East could not be achieved unless there was "an independent national homeland" for the Palestinians...

...Each nation, he said, perhaps with Vietnam in mind, must be able to defend itself, regardless of the guarantees of its great friends...

...it is the closest thing they have to a government in exile, complete with its own army, and they treat it accordingly...

...At the moment, of course, all talk of a Palestinian state is purely theoretical...

...The PLO wants the West Bank and Gaza, but it will not be satisfied with that...

...some argue that when Sadat in a sense turned toward peace he was in fact also turning toward the technologically-advanced United States for future assistance...

...Before an uneasy truce was achieved a few days later, over three hundred were dead and hundreds more were wounded...

...Nonetheless, when one argues for the necessity of risk-taking, as I do, there is one thing we should never forget: it is not we but the Israelis who take the risks.t: it is not we but the Israelis who take the risks...

...Israelis particularly resent any suggestion that the PLO is not so very different from Jewish underground forces in the days of the British mandate (the spokesman for Israeli Premier Rabin's conservative opposition, Menahem Begin, was in the old days himself a leader of the guerrilla force known as Irgun Zval Leumi...

...This is a hard question, and I doubt that anyone -including Arafat himself-can be completely sure about the answer...

...the fighting was fierce and before it was over Syrian tanks in force invaded Jordan in support of the Palestinian guerrillas...

...Recently tension between the two communities has grown, based partly on the Christian community's emphasis on the country's original Phoenician, non-Islamic character but even more on the Moslem suspicion that they now outnumber the Christians...

...His own particular guerrilla organization within the PLO has raided and killed inside Israel with little discrimination...

...They will keep the Middle East on the boil till their claims to a homeland are recognized...

...After Egypt's moderate efforts through Secretary Kissinger failed, he asked, how will it be possible to solve the Middle East's problems in the larger cockpit of Geneva...

...One is surrounded by the stuff of biblical history, but the here-and-now intrudes and it is difficult to keep a long-range perspective...

...not far away is the village where Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was born...

...Despite the fears of some American Jews, I do not think any newly emerging U.S...

...I returned more convinced than ever...

...While I was there I traveled on the road to Galilee where Jesus walked...

...Moslems and Christians throughout the Middle East expressed great concern over Jerusalem, which is sacred to all three faiths, but the President and later other Israeli officials claim to perceive no great issue, seeing what they envision as almost complete autonomy for the shrines as the answer to any problem...

...has talked about and which the USSR recently suggested, he thinks they have never worked and would not work now...

...This last point, I should note, was echoed by Arab leaders throughout our visit...

...But other things left me enthusiastic: Franciscan sisters from England leading totally dedicated lives as they provided medical care for thousands of Arabs...

...Recognition of the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, especially the refugees: this involves, in our view, inclusion of them as partners in any negotiations, acceptance of their right to a state and compensation for past losses to be paid not only by Israel but also by other members of the international community responsible for the 1948 partition plan...

...Most of the discussion ignores the underlying political realities on both sides...

...It is difficult to know how much weight to attach to such statements...

...On the other, a wise and experienced Christian Arab told us that no Arab leader in his heart of hearts was really reconciled to Israel's continued existence...

...At one point it was almost equally divided between Moslems and Christians, and government posts are still allotted accordingly...

...Israel wants peace but must have a peace that gives security...

...Of all the national leaders we talked to, King Hussein of Jordan was clearly the most pessimistic...

...The essence of the PLO philosophy as he sees it is that the Jews are not entitled to have self-determination and their own state...

...Thus our guide pointed out Jacob's Well, where Jesus met the Samaritan woman...

...what the Israelis call terrorists the Palestinians call freedom fighters...

...The purpose of the protestors was to dramatize their call for additional Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied region, an area which would theoretically be part of the new Palestinian state, and they had walked 20 miles to demonstrate "that the West Bank is within walking distance of the heart of Israel...

...The rest of the Palestinians are scattered, living and working throughout much of the Arab world from Jordan to Saudi Arabia...

...As one put it, "Rabin would not last a day if he tried to withdraw from the West Bank...

...The Palestinians are an attractive people to Westerners...

...Out of a total Palestinian population of some 3 million, more than a million still live in Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank of the Jordan and in Gaza, while something less than another half-million live inside the pre-1967 borders of the state of Israel...

...Israel cannot run that risk...

...The need for heavy arms spending is keeping both sides impoverished...

...Yet Egypt does not have vast wealth like Saudi Arabia and is actually in serious financial difficulties...

...So much for conciliation and compromise...

...an English priest who came out years ago and got so involved in caring for Arab waifs that he never went home...

...In the end I suppose we must look to deeds rather than words on this score...

...To which there was only one possible conclusion, as one of my companions pointed out: Middle Eastern television must without question be the dullest in the world...

...Exact refugee figures are hard to arrive at, given different definitions of the term, but about three-quarters of a million are still in refugee camps under UN auspices...

...Many Israelis, however-doves as well as hawks-do not agree...

...Two of the points they called for: "1...

...It is for this reason that many foreign-policy commentators say that risks must now be taken for peace, and I agree completely...

...The Jews were originally willing to accept partition, he said...