The historic talks in Morocco last week between Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and King Hassan II represent a last-ditch attempt to breathe new life into the deadlocked Middle East peace process while there still is time. The message from Ifrane, the Atlas Mountain resort where the two leaders met, is one of both hope and desperation.
It was the first publicly acknowledged meeting between an Arab leader and an Israeli head of government since the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat`s dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November, 1977. But the peace process it hopes to ignite still remains infected with deep hostility and strewn with numerous unsuccessful attempts to get negotiations started.
Efforts by the United States and the United Nations to end the Middle East crisis began as soon as Israel was born from the battlefield smoke of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
But with each successive war in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, the goal of a comprehensive peace has become more and more elusive, producing only one enduring peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and a few truce accords.
Israel stated its willingness to exchange most occupied Arab lands for peace after the 1967 war, but the Arabs met in Khartoum that year and declared their opposition to any recognition, negotiations or peace with the Jewish state.
The U.S. became earnestly involved in Middle East peacemaking in 1970 when it midwifed a cease-fire between Israel and Egypt along the Suez Canal. But a UN peace initiative that followed in its wake failed over demands for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory captured in the 1967 war.
After the 1973 Mideast War, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shuttled among Israel, Egypt and Syria and attained disengagement of forces. Sadat saw his limited military successes in the war as enough of a boost to Egyptian honor to undertake his peace initiative four years later. Israel and Egypt signed their peace treaty in 1979, and Israel completed its withdrawal from the Sinai in April, 1982.
But two months later, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization. In May, 1983, the U.S. negotiated an agreement between Israel and Lebanon for the withdrawal of Israeli troops; the pact fell apart less than a year later under pressure from Syria, which was kept out of the negotiations. Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from Lebanon last year.
In September, 1982, moderate and hard-line Arab states agreed for the first time at Fez, Morocco, to a peace proposal calling for a Palestinian state in exchange for what implicitly appeared to be acceptance of the Jewish state. But Israel quickly rejected the plan, which also called for a total Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory.
President Reagan also proposed a peace plan in September, 1982. Reagan`s plan called for a Palestinian ”entity” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip governed in association with Jordan in exchange for peace and Arab recognition of Israel. Both Israel, then under the right-wing rule of Menachem Begin, and the PLO rejected the plan.
In February, 1985, Jordan`s King Hussein tried to open a joint Middle East peace initiative with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, based loosely on the Reagan plan and the ”land-for-peace” arrangement in UN Resolution 242. The joint bid collapsed a year later when Hussein ditched Arafat as an
untrustworthy partner.
With only the success of the Sadat initiative as a precedent, Peres allies, in discussing the Moroccan summit, have done their best to foster a sense of deja vu.
”Hassan is following in Sadat`s footsteps,” said Abba Eban, chairman of parliament`s Foreign Affairs Committee.
But the Middle East of 1986 is a vastly changed region, with new conditions in Israel and the Arab world that militate both for and against the success of any peace process.
Hassan, who rules a North African kingdom far from the front lines of the Arab-Israeli conflict, did not meet with Peres to resolve the difference between Morocco and Israel. Acting in his capacity as current chairman of the 21-member Arab League, his role was that of an interlocutor, trying to find common ground between Israel and the Arabs on which to rebuild the peace process.
The talks with Peres, however, didn`t produce much commonality. Hassan pressed the Israeli leader to accept the 1982 Fez Arab peace plan, which calls for a comprehensive settlement based upon total Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab lands, recognition of the guerrilla PLO and an independent Palestinian state. Without elaborating, Peres said his counter-proposals did not go beyond the general guidelines of Israel`s bipartisan coalition government, which call for direct peace negotiations with the Arabs with no preconditions. He rejected any dealings with the PLO.
Both Peres and Hassan have said publicly that their contacts will continue, but any immediate beneficial impact still is unclear. Indeed, in the short run, the inconclusive results of their meeting may make it more difficult, rather than less, for other Arab moderates to enter into direct, publicly announced contact with the Israeli government.
King Hussein has a majority of Palestinians as his Jordanian subjects, and his relations with them have been severely strained lately as a result of his break with Arafat and the closing of the offices of Al Fatah, the dominant PLO guerrilla group. Sharing common borders with Syria and Iraq, both of whom have strongly condemned the Peres visit, Hussein lacks the Moroccan monarch`s luxury of geographical and political distance.
The semi-official Jordanian newspaper Al Dastour has attacked Hassan personally over the Peres visit, saying that despite Hassan`s position in the Arab world, ”his political influence on the Palestinian problem is nil, and Morocco remains 5,000 kilometers from the territories under dispute in the Middle East.” Analysts here say such remarks reflect the icy personal relations between Hussein and Hassan.
In Israel, reaction to the Moroccan summit has been filtered through a prism of deep disillusionment over the peace treaty with Egypt. Many Israelis share a sense that the sacrifices they made for peace have not been matched by an Egyptian willingness to truly normalize relations. For many Israelis who thought that the opposite of making war with Egypt was making love, the cold peace that exists today has left them deeply suspicious about the value of further treaties.
If the peace with Egypt required Israel to relinquish the Sinai desert, any future negotiations will center around the future of the occupied West Bank, a territory with far more historical and security significance to Israel.
Half of Israel`s population today believes that security considerations do not allow the exchange of any West Bank territory or peace. A substantial number of these right-wing Israelis also have deep religious attachments to the West Bank, which they call by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria. They have warned Peres he would face a civil war if he traded any of it away. Peres has less than three months left before he must hand over the premiership to right-wing Likud Party leader Yitzhak Shamir under their power- sharing agreement. Unlike Peres, Shamir does not share Peres` concern for achieving peace. Since Peres` return from Morocco, Shamir has criticized the talks and restated his own unwillingness to trade any territory for peace.
On the optimistic side, Israeli officials and Middle East experts view the Peres-Hassan talks as an astute political and diplomatic move with definite short-term benefits and possible long-term promise.
The mere fact that the Middle Eastern enemies met publicly after several secret contacts represents a breakthrough that has weakened the Arab coalition against the Zionist state.
”This shows that pluralism exists in the Arab world,” said Eban.
He said the Arab world now is divided into three camps–one, involving only Egypt, which has formal relations with Israel; a second made up of rejectionist states like Syria, Libya and Iraq and a third consisting of moderate Arab countries who do not dispute Israel`s sovereignty despite their lack of relations.
”We must act within this pluralism,” he said. ”We must maneuver quickly in a manner to move these countries from the third camp to the first.”
Officials also note that the divided Arab reaction to the summit, with only Syria severing ties with Morocco, contrasted sharply with the unanimous Arab ostracization of Egypt after the Sadat initiative. Experts say the varied response to the Peres meeting underscored the deep divisions in the Arab world today as a result of the worldwide oil glut and the Persian Gulf war.
As far as Hassan`s downbeat assessment of the talks is concerned, officials and commentators here maintain the Moroccan king was speaking to his constituency in the Arab world, not to Israel. The Fez plan that he presented was not a diktat but an opening position in a diplomatic process that hopefully will be continued, they say.
”Anwar Sadat`s historic address to the Knesset on Nov. 20, 1977, was no less intransigent in its tenor than the later Fez plan,” said the pro-Peres Jerusalem Post. ”Hassan`s purpose was to serve as a peace catalyst among the more moderate Arab states, notably Jordan, which remains reluctant to meet the issues head-on by conferring with Israel.”
Hassan also can expect political gains from last week`s summit, particularly an improvement of his relations with the United States which have been strained since his 1984 political union with Libya. Hassan entered into that union in the belief that it would give him a free hand against Polisario rebels in the Western Sahara, but he is known to view the union now as a political liability.
Analysts also noted the summit has eased the isolation in the Arab world of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, making a long-sought summit between Peres and the Egyptian leader far less controversial for Mubarak at home. Indeed, senior Israeli officials say Peres` next area of concentration will be resolving the Taba Sinai border dispute, which has done much to block the path toward normalized relations with Egypt.
At home, the talks in Morocco have eased Israelis` sense of isolation in the Middle East and boosted Peres` popularity, already running high because of his successful handling of the economy and the withdrawal of most Israeli troops from Lebanon. Many Israelis now hope Peres will find a way to wriggle out of the leadership rotation, scheduled for Oct. 7.
Just where the reawakened peace process goes from here is uncertain. Hussein is trying to rebuild his political base in the West Bank with a five year $750 million economic plan, but so far he has failed to raise the money from Arab oil countries and the U.S. Saudi Arabia still provides millions of dollars to the PLO, maintaining Arafat`s leadership of the organization and his viability among most Palestinians.
As with the Sadat initiative, the U.S. was conspicuously absent from the secret preparations for the Peres-Hassan summit, although well-informed sources say Washington helped Israel and Morocco draft a joint communique at the end of the talks. Vice President George Bush is due to arrive here Sunday at the start of a Middle East swing, and the Moroccan summit has provided a new backdrop to what was thought to have been a bland political junket.
Independent analysts, however, wonder if the Reagan administration, which has largely ignored the Middle East since its debacle in Lebanon, will be willing to get deeply involved in a torturous Middle East peace process with preparations already underway on the long run-up to U.S. presidential elections.
