They have met more often on the battlefield than at the bargaining table. Now, Arabs and Israelis, among the world`s most stubborn adversaries, will begin to explore whether they can change the climate of conflict in the Middle East.
No one expects this to be easy. At best, the Middle East peace conference, which opens Wednesday in Madrid, could become one of this century`s most complex, difficult and long-running negotiations. The odds of success are not good, and the risks of failure are high.
Despite the polar differences in their perspectives, Israel and all its Arab neighbors have come, warily, to a common conclusion that now is the moment to sit down together for the first time.
They have been brought to this point by the insistent prodding of Secretary of State James A. Baker III, whose eight months of personal diplomacy benefited from the end of the Cold War, America`s stature in the Middle East as victor of the Persian Gulf war, and not a little by the exhaustion of 43 years of strife since the founding of the state of Israel.
Arabs and Israelis have signed onto a process whose eventual outcome is impossible to predict. ”The pressures that got them to the conference table are the same pressures that will make it very difficult for them to walk away,” said former U.S. Middle East envoy Joseph Sisco.
In the short term, though, both the Arab and Israeli participants can look forward to gaining some immediate benefits that have little to do with the lofty goal of establishing a true peace in the Middle East.
The participants are coming to Madrid, at least partly, based on the narrow calculations that doing so will help them get something they want from Washington-such as loan guarantees and foreign aid-or help achieve other political goals.
Israel, for instance, literally can`t afford to stay away. Always mindful of Israel`s image in the U.S., Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has asked Washington to provide $10 billion in loan guarantees badly needed to pay the costs of resettling Soviet Jews. The Bush administration has linked its attitude on the loan to how the peace talks progress. The conference also gives Israel something it has sought since its creation-Arab recognition in direct negotiations.
In Syria`s case, too, the road to Washington passes through Madrid. President Hafez Assad, who said no to so many peace proposals in the past, is seeking to build up relations with the U.S. in light of the waning influence of Syria`s longtime patron and arms supplier, the Soviet Union.
King Hussein of Jordan is moving back into the good graces of the U.S. after picking the wrong side-Iraq-in the gulf war. By doing so he clears the way for $56 million in annual aid that was suspended during the gulf crisis.
The Palestinians, whose fate is at the center of the Middle East conflict, finally get a seat at the bargaining table, for the first time giving them a direct voice in talks about their future.
If those factors are sufficient to draw both sides to negotiations, are they enough to keep them there? Are the participants coming to Madrid sincerely seeking an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, or simply going through a political exercise doomed by an unwillingness to compromise?
American officials, having set up the procedure for peace talks, have left it largely to the Arabs and the Israelis to decide whether to make the most of it. President Bush, for instance, will open the conference Wednesday by encouraging good-faith bargaining, but without putting forward an American vision of how a future peace may look.
”A lot of the momentum has to come from the parties,” said one senior administration official. ”We can`t make it happen without their willingness to compromise.”
It is too early to know whether the limited concessions on procedure that the participants made to get to this point will be followed by the far more difficult compromises on substance necessary for this peace process to advance.
Predictably, everyone has turned up their most uncompromising rhetoric in advance of next week`s events. In Israel, Shamir bumped his government`s more dovish foreign minister, David Levy, to personally lead the Israeli delegation to Madrid.
Meanwhile, Arab leaders set out their demands-an immediate halt to Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the eventual return of all territory, including East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.
Richard Murphy, a top Mideast official in the Reagan administration, expects the opening conference in Madrid to be a ”television spectacular”
that shouldn`t be confused with the behind-closed-doors diplomacy that will follow in bilateral talks beween Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and a joint delegation of Jordanians and Palestinians.
”We`re going to hear at the outset one side saying, `I want all the territories back,` and the other side is going to say `Not one inch,` ” said Sisco.
If Baker has a strategy for getting beyond that formula for deadlock, he has so far held his thoughts to himself. His aides hope the initial talks prove to be a ”mind-altering experience” for the participants that breaks the longstanding ”taboo” about direct talks between Arabs and Israelis.
What so far seems to be most lacking is any sense of goodwill, a key ingredient necessary to reach compromise. None of Israel`s Arab adversaries is approaching these negotiations with the kind of boldness that Egypt`s late president, Anwar Sadat, demonstrated in traveling to Jerusalem and making peace with Israel more than a decade ago.
American officials say they won`t be surprised if the bilateral negotiations quickly stall, making it likely that the parties then will turn to the U.S. and Soviet Union to play their agreed role as the ”driving force” in seeking to bridge those differences.
Baker is considering pressing forward with a proposal that Israel freeze settlement activity in return for an end to both the Arab economic boycott and the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. But that may be more than the parties can handle this soon.
Privately, Baker told King Hussein that he hopes negotiations between Israel and Palestinians could produce an interim agreement within a year giving limited self-rule to Palestinians in the occupied territories-basically picking up where so-called autonomy talks between Israel and Egypt left off a decade ago.
Under that formula, limited self-rule would last for five years, and there would be talks during that time to determine the final status of the territories-pitting Israel`s claim to the lands with Palestinians` demand for their own Palestinian state.
U.S. officials also hope to find a way to persuade Israel to give up its self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon, and they believe that there can be improvement in the relationship between Jordan and Israel.
But officials say one of the ”hardest nuts to crack” is the impasse between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 war, annexed in 1981, and claims as vital to its security.
Assad made clear in talks with Baker that recovering the Golan was his dominant interest in going into negotiations. And Baker assured Assad that, in U.S. eyes, the land-for-peace forumula of UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 applies to all fronts in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the Golan.
After Madrid, Baker`s instinct is to back off and permit the parties to try to find their own compromises. But the reality is that a strong U.S. role will be necessary to keep them at the bargaining table, just as it was needed to get them there.
