Momentum in the Middle East: Can This Be Peace?

...But just as the finale has never been seriously in doubt, so the choice of plots conducive to that denouement was never great...

...The only Jewish holy place there is the Western or "wailing" Wall...

...The latter are increasingly concerned about the Sephardim, and the more self-confident among them now face the issue of what ,the violent foundation of Israel did to the Palestinian people whose country it had been for 1,300 years...

...Not only money, but development, is flowing to the Arab world because of the great oil squeeze...

...An especially well-informed Palestinian journalist envisages the country becoming a Hong Kong-type "labeling facility" for Israeli goods to be exported to the Middle East...

...The October war was a battle for limited objectives...

...Most Arabists note ironically that Arab arguments now command more intellectual support abroad solely because the Arabs have bloodied Israel...

...It never was...

...But temporizing is not in the Arab interest either...

...West Jordan and East Jerusalem are "people" much more than "territory" issues...

...But Faisal is not much given to humor, and his point clearly was that money was no object...

...Yet, he represented a country where sympathy for the Arab cause, although it doubled last fall, doubled only to 7 per cent —a factor noticed and interpreted in different ways in Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Amman...

...the great wrong done to the Palestinian people...

...Arafat is magnetized by the chance to lead Palestine from behind a desk instead of from behind a gun...

...The only important ground rule was that Sadat could not make a separate peace without retrieving Golan, or some of it, for the Syrian ally, and preferably not without doing something about Palestine—West Jordan...

...Jordan proposes a federation of East and West Jordan : Israel's governing coalition would support this...

...Israel cannot make war for long without replenishment from the United States...

...Kissinger had an added advantage: Concerned perhaps more than any of his predecessors with how historians may judge him, he was precluded by his Jewishness from being pro-Israeli...

...The Ashkenazim of central Europe are the intellectuals and businessmen of Israel (and by and large the most tolerant of Arabs, and the most attuned to the sufferings of the Palestinian diaspora...

...The war satisfied Arab karamah—honor—and gave the United States a much-needed excuse to become more even-handed in the conflict between Israel and its older neighbors...

...The most vocal force against a settlement are the rank and file Palestinians, in exile...

...Elements of Solomon's temple are also being unearthed from under the great, gilded Mosque of Omar, but these will have to be reassembled somewhere else, and the most sensible site would be somewhere in West Jerusalem...

...It is often a surprise to Westerners, used to hearing about Arabs and Jews as enemies, to learn that two-thirds of the Jews in Israel—69 per cent of Jewish children—are migrants from Arab countries, or descendants of such migrants...

...high commissioner, such as Libya had from 1946 to 1951...

...If the Arabs fail to bail out these new-found friends —or if a Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv makes resuming relations respectable—Africa may defect from the Arab cause...

...The catalyst for peace was Egypt's president, Anwar as-Sadat...

...Israeli spokesmen are cagey about discussing the issue...

...The Sinai issue between Israel and Egypt is an issue of territory—not of people—and of mutual security...

...Eventually, everybody still has to go to Geneva for those final confrontation talks...

...However, a counterpoint to better U.S...

...Because the status quo, since 1967, has favored Israel, Israel has temporized up to now...

...They admit that only two of Israel's more than 100 generals are from this group—a sensitive point in what is probably the world's most militarized society—and that European Jews get preference in housing over long-setded Sephardim...

...presence, arguing that the frontier is peaceful...

...presence) on the heights...

...Exactly what Rabin will finally settle for is unsure, but it is the Palestinians, not the other (Bedouin) Jordanians, whose revenge Israel fears...

...This demilitarization requirement is more cosmetic than meaningful, but it has a psychological morale quotient in Israel...

...A more complete peace will presumably give similar access to Israeli shipping...

...Both sides possess a tactical nuclear capacity, and any nuclear initiative would compel a nuclear response...

...During this time, and behind this U.N...

...transferring the Wall and an access corridor to Israeli rule, as part of West Jerusalem, or an Abu Simbel-type operation to dismantle the Wall and re-erect it in present West Jerusalem...

...A caller tells a conservative Arab economist who is close to Faisal that the Arabs are as unprepared for wealth as Israel is for peace...

...More for less has been offered by a forty-man Japanese delegation which has careened through the Middle East...

...Israel's own proposals for the area involve the retention of military posts along the river...

...But the government has been largely of Polish and Russian origin...

...Such countries as France, Germany, Britain, and Italy offer not only arms but other barter deals to insure continued oil supplies—steel mills, refineries, low-cost housing for crude...

...The French, for whom arms are by far the main export to the Third World, are the most brazen: The Cactus and Rattlesnake ground-to-air missile systems, developed in cooperation with South Africa, will soon be installed in Saudi Arabia to shoot down the Mirages France formerly sold to Israel—if the Mirages now being sold to Abu Dhabi and Kuwait (which in time of war would probably be based in Syria) don't get them first...

...Arab proposals for East Jerusalem, with support from the Pope—who fears what he calls the "Judaization" of the old city—all involve its return to Arab rule...

...A still more emotional issue is East Jerusalem, a city, in Kissinger's words, "considered holy by three great religions...

...When an American diplomat commented last year that probably American Jews would be prepared to bankroll the operation, Faisal said that, in that case, "I'll build them a facsimile in New York...

...But even for Israel, Jerusalem is essentially a political holy relic, rather than a religious one...

...Kissinger himself certainly shares this neutralistic view...

...The Israelis say the Geneva conference is between recognized states, and that PLO leader Yasir Arafat has no role in it: But Kissinger wants Arafat there at a later stage, and Arafat is ready to go—although many of his followers are as unprepared for peace as are the Israelis...

...The military balance, particularly in the air, precludes blitzkrieg victories...

...Jordan, which is as much a U.S...

...Terms for agreement are not especially difficult: The big decision is to agree at all...

...Israel is opposed to a U.N...

...Yet the October war cost Israel sympathy...

...pressuring Israel...

...Most American experts on the Middle East think the labor, social, and economic ties which an independent Palestine will have with Israel—the need to keep the road link to Gaza and the frontier into Israel open for daily commuters—will be Israel's best guarantee of peace...

...One problem is that most speak Arabic, not Hebrew, at home...

...at long last...

...Judaism, even in Israel, is a fellowship more than a faith, and most members of the Israeli cabinet are agnostics...

...King Faisal has offered to pay for this...

...Present West Jordan would be separated from Gaza, and treaty use of a road across southern Israel would be necessary...

...First hints to the outside world of what Sephardic discontent means in terms of internal politics came when an extremist group, the "Black Panthers," began protesting racial discrimination in Israel against Sephardim...

...Thus, karamah on both sides was satisfied...

...As Kissinger told Jordan's King Hussein in January, "On Golan, the first withdrawal will be the only withdrawal...

...Sadat is not Nasser's heir but an Egypt-firster, anxious to deliver the country where western civilization began from dependence on the oil sheikhs or the atheistic Russians—anxious, above all, to draw investment to Egypt and to make Egypt prosperous enough to be, once again, the Middle East's first nation...

...The United States is the only country of consequence acceptable to "both sides," and the only country in the world capable of Russell Warren Howe, a former foreign correspondent with wide experience in Africa, is now based in Washington...

...But it would be hard to find an American diplomat in the Middle East, from Jerusalem to Kuwait, who did not agree with Senator J. W. Fulbright that "absolute military security of one nation means absolute insecurity for its neighbors" and that time is no longer on Israel's side...

...For Hussein, it means the chance to begin negotiations on the West Bank and, eventually, East Jerusalem...

...The issue of East Jerusalem is a highly emotional one for Israel...

...Permanent peace could only mean a return of all Sinai to Egypt, with a U.N...

...Much depends on the development of political thinking in Israel over the next few years, as the strange new notion of peace establishes itself in minds conditioned to believe in permanent war, and beset by fears of Arab revenge...

...But the notion has little support among Palestinians—not only among the 500,000 Palestinians in exile in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, but also among the 700,000 Palestinians in Palestine, on the West Bank...

...Only Israel and Syria were shocked by the threat of peace, and for similar reasons of internal political division...

...high commissioner plan, since he or she might do the job of introducing democracy so well as to eliminate the threat of the sort of one-party system which the PLO presumably wants...

...Kissinger's skill deserves the plaudits it habitually receives, but any American secretary of state is in a peculiarly advantaged position...

...shield, they would negotiate with Israel for continued social and economic links and with Jordan for political links...

...The current trend to dump the founding fathers and grandmother seems likely to find its ultimate expression in an Israel more conscious of its Middle East-ness, more empathic to the concerns of its neighbors...

...This, indeed, could be the best guarantee of that permanent peace for which Kis* singer is working...

...Even before the oil weapon—which hurt Europe, Africa, and Asia more than America—was deployed, it was clear that a peace-seeking Sadat was so attractive to Washington that the pressure on Israel to compromise would be great...

...As time wore on, and the snows in Jerusalem and Damascus gave way to a highland spring, it became clear that even moody Hafez Assad of Syria had more political freedom to reach for peace than a bewitched and bothered Golda Meir...

...He visited the Middle East earlier this year...

...Such a federation would give Jordan a dynamic Palestinian majority, as Singapore gave Malaysia a dynamic Chinese majority...

...There is a verbal agreement between Sadat and Kissinger that non-Israeli shipping will be able to use a reopened Suez on its way to Ashdod or Haifa...

...The October war was launched by Egypt and Syria against an Israeli occupation army whose government was even more confident that there would be no conflict than Egypt's foreign minister Zahariah Mohieddin, waiting to address the United Nations, had been six years before...

...Africa is something of a test of Arab "maturity...

...He agrees they can't: There will, he says, have to be a real "Arab Marshall Plan...

...Israel plans, if this happens, to reopen only five African embassies: Abidjan, Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa...

...force in Sharm el-Sheikh, along with demilitarization requirements, the latter being tied to the thirty-mile range of the present generation of short-range ground-to-ground missiles...

...It is one of the quirks of history that the 1967 war, which Israel launched, rebounded against its victims and particularly Egypt...

...buffer zone near the Israeli border and a U.N...

...Arafat may set up a government in exile...

...In January, a senior military source in Jerusalem showed this reporter what Israel's final acceptance would be on the northeast front—a pullback from the exposed, vulnerable October conquests and from the eastern Golan watershed, including the Golan city, El Quneitra, and with demilitarization (through a U.N...

...Both subjects are, in fact, Palestine—the heart and cause of the whole tragic Mid-East conflict...

...experts similarly share Fulbright's concern to "redress...

...The PLO is also divided on the U.N...

...His ticket for admission to a field of quasi-direct diplomacy with Israel was the October war, whose lessons for Israel were harder than Vietnam's for America...

...Read: Whatever may be said at the time to save face for Assad...

...It may not be long before Arafat, too, or someone like him, has an ambassador in Israel...

...They want him or her to preside over a freely elected government for about five years...

...In Israel, as elsewhere, it is hard to imagine that the Right can win...

...Despite King Hussein's reasonableness, any government in Jerusalem finds agreement with Jordan difficult...

...The great bulk of the population is Sephardic, originating in the Arab countries of the Levant and North Africa...

...Already Palestinians from Nablus and Deir Dibwan commute daily as far as Haifa...

...He has started by knowing how it will all end, then has experimented with a few chapter-sequences to reach the finale...

...Mirage sales now total 138 to Saudi Arabia, 110 to Libya, 32 to Abu Dhabi...

...In short, peace is coming to the Middle East...

...Kissinger believes that the Soviet Union will want to open an embassy in Tel Aviv later this year, and Jerusalem will welcome this...

...Israel, at least with Ariel Sharon, was less fortunate...

...But at the southern, Sinai end of the negotiations, it was clear from the start how the Kissinger detective story would end, since "permanent" peace was the objective...

...The cleavage between extremes in Israel seems likely to become greater...

...Many, but not all, Palestinians would accept a federation with East Jordan (nearly half of whose 1,750,000 people are Palestinians) on "states' rights" lines...

...For Sadat, it means freedom now to reach a virtual final settlement with Israel...

...An absence of external threat could shatter the multipartite unity which had, until then, built and saved the nation...

...It is, fortunately, hard to be pessimistic: Syria cannot make war without support from Egypt and Jordan...

...but supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other radicals would not...

...The caller is getting ready to scoff and name a figure, but the economist names the same figure: "It will cost about $4 billion yearly...

...Do Arabs seriously think that 400 million Africans can pay today's oil prices because the Arab countries are offering Africa $200 million at one per cent, and $500 million of fresh investment...

...The great powers want it—in different ways, but with apparently equal fervor: The only proviso is that the Soviet Union needs to permit a certain visceral tension in the area to retain Moscow's influence in what is, after all, its legitimate geographical sphere—Russia's Latin America...

...Peace should mean security for Israel and its neighbors...

...They oppose letting Israel negotiate just as Arab wealth and oil power, and the October war, have robbed Israel of its ability to temporize...

...Not only was the territory of Israel purposely spared— and the fighting restricted to parts of occupied Egypt and Syria—but in Egypt's case, the advance was stopped by Cairo before it was stopped by Israel's counterattacks...

...forces in the first line of hills...

...relations with Egypt and the Arab oil states may well be closer Soviet links to Israel, prompted, paradoxically, by the latter's growing Russian population—nearly 50,000 new Russian Israelis every year—and partial socialism...

...Although divided by clan and often by ideology, most West Bankers seem almost united on one point: They want a U.N...

...He wants U.N...

...Hussein himself wants, in the immediate future, an initial pullback of Israeli forces from the West Bank lowlands beside the Jordan River, returning to Jordan much-needed farmland and the city of Jericho...

...Rabin even succeeded in a minor domestic victory of considerable import in the negotiations: He replaced the negatively radical-right presence of the National Religious Party in the governing coalition with the progressive group of Meir's bete noire, Shulamit Aloni...

...But peace is the new battle, and "black gold" and the superpowers are its generators...

...protege in the area as Israel, had been ready for peace for years...

...Young Israelis tend to be either excessively militaristic and "right-wing," or part of the world campus revolution...

...Peace was an unknown...

...When Kissinger went to the Middle East in late April, he had to pretend that Israel wanted to retain more land, and Syria had to pretend it did not know that Israel had a fallback position already agreed...

...Israel's right-wing opposition Likud (Unity) group wants retention of the whole territory because it was part of "pre-Roman Canaan...

...East Jerusalem is predominantly Muslim and Christian...

...Egypt's war was not left to the generals...

...The conventional wisdom has it that bombing strengthens the resistance of the bombed...

...At the beginning of the year, anyone talking to "moderate" Abba Eban, "hawkish" Moshe Dayan or his equally hawkish present replacement as defense minister, Shimon Peres, could not help but agree with Uri 32 Avnery, the darling of Israel's young, middle-class, intellectual peaceniks: "Israelis are afraid of peace...

...An independent Palestine might bring other blessings to Israel...

...If France cannot keep pace with demand, there is a Mirage plant in South Africa, and there soon will be one in Pakistan...

...No one is quite sure if he was joking...

...But what Kissinger calls "Arab romanticism" still exists, and there will be times when it is in Moscow's or Peking's interest to fan those sentiments...

...Most black African countries broke relations with Israel in the fall...

...The importance of the Western Wall to Israelis would be recognized in whichever of three ways is most acceptable to Israel: Israeli participation in an Ecumenical Council having oversight rights to the Holy Places...

...Israel "won" the pre-agreed release of its prisoners in Syria, and Syria "won" the pre-agreed Israeli concession to withdraw beyond the October advance on the Damascus road...

...Irredentism about "destroying Israel," of a type similar to that of the Irish Republican Army in Ulster, will probably continue on a limited scale, with bombings inside Israel and other incidents: But these will continue for some years anyway, and failure to give the West Bankers their independence would exacerbate rather than limit such activity...

...But by maintaining pressure and violence on the Golan front, Syria helped bring to power in Israel a general-premier, Yitshak Rabin, who could make the peace concessions he wanted to make...

...Whether federated to Jordan or not, the realistic long-term view can only be of an independent Palestine, composed of the West Bank and the Mediterranean enclave of Gaza—a relic of the earlier wars which Egypt does not want back, and which Israel has frequently talked about giving to Jordan...

...To the outside world, what is important is not the anachronistic persistence of prejudice against certain sorts of Jews in Israel—every country has its faults— but the existence of a burgeoning political revolution...

...Power remains the factor which confers legitimacy on causes: History may say that on October 6, 1973, Sadat declared peace on a reluctant neighbor...

...Each side would control the ridges overlooking its lowlands, and the new Israeli border would be roughly seventeen miles east of the pre-1967 one...

...This is important both to Sadat and Hussein...