The New Perils of Peace

YOU'VE never had it so good," Israel's prestigious newspaper Ha'aretz told its readers last week as it editorially noted the second anniversary of the Suez Canal ceasefire. Few Israelis would disagree. Not only has there been no shooting along the canal, but terrorism by Arab fedayeen is down sharply, and, most important, the threat of a confrontation with Russia was removed when Soviet forces withdrew from Egypt. For the first time in all of its 24 years, Israel had no challenger in the Middle East--and in many ways was finding the new situation more difficult to cope with than the threat of war.

As Israelis looked on last week, relations between Egypt and the Soviet Union deteriorated to what Beirut's An Nahar called "the cold war stage." Each country recalled its ambassador from the other's capital for consultations, and when Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev sent a note to Egypt's President Anwar Sadat urging "consolidation" of their "friendship," Cairo spokesmen publicly said that it offered "no new channels." Meantime, top U.S. officials speculated that the Soviet pullout may have gone further than Sadat originally intended--that when he asked the military advisers to leave, the Soviets took their air defense units too. Since those Soviet missiles had stopped Israel's penetration raids into Egypt in 1970, the effect was to leave that country at the mercy of the Israeli air force.

Sharp Division. Israel thus had an unprecedented opportunity to seek real peace with its neighbors. So far, the government has shown no signs of wanting to seize that opportunity. To be sure, no one expected serious negotiations to begin until after the U.S. elections. Even Egypt's Premier Aziz Sidky and Foreign Minister Murad Ghaleb have indicated that they see no hope for the mission of United Nations Mediator Gunnar Jarring, which is supposed to get under way again this month. But Israel's response to the Soviet withdrawal has been to stand pat, publicly calling for direct negotiations in full knowledge that Egypt would refuse; Cairo considers direct talks tantamount to Israel's dictating the terms of peace.

Yet behind its fac,ade of unity, Israel's Cabinet is sharply divided on just what terms to offer. At issue is the question of the territories--Egypt's Sinai and Gaza Strip, Jordan's West Bank and the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, Syria's Golan Heights--that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. Israel has so far refused to budge from those territories on the grounds that it needs secure borders against the Arabs. But what happens when that threat is removed? Three factions in the Israeli Cabinet suggest different solutions:

>One faction is led by Premier Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. They want to maintain the status quo--in effect to keep all or most of the occupied territories. Last month, at a meeting of Labor Party leaders, Dayan demanded what one critic called "practical annexation." Dayan would like to create an economic union between those Arab areas and Israel, with a free flow of labor and capital. Arabs would be allowed autonomy on purely local matters.

> A second group is headed by Deputy Premier Yigal Allon, and includes among others Haim Bar-Lev, former chief of staff of the Israeli army and now Minister of Trade and Industry. They propose, at least as an interim arrangement, the four-year-old "Allon Plan," under which most of the occupied West Bank would be returned to Jordan, except for fortified Israeli settlements along the Jordan River.

>The third group is led by Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir. They argue that integration of the occupied territories would give Israel a troublesome Arab minority and threaten the country's existence as an independent Jewish state. They advocate returning all of the occupied territories except for Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Although they are in a minority in the Cabinet at the moment, the doves have backing from the secretary-general of the powerful trade-union organization Histadrut. They could also gain strength from the fact that Mrs. Meir's relationship with Dayan is decidedly cool. "I never know how I stand with him," she said only two weeks ago. Dayan in the past has been heard to complain that the Premier had a "vocabulary limited to 200 words, which are being repeated by her again and again because of a queer belief that they are being well received by the public."

Which faction comes out ahead may well be decided by domestic instead of diplomatic concerns. Problems long submerged in Israel's siege mentality are surfacing. The economy is uncertain. The need to spend 40% of the budget on defense is being questioned.

Demands are rising for better housing, health and education facilities. "In simplest terms," explains a Bank of Israel official, "the less need we have for guns, the greater demand there will be for butter." Already days lost by strikes this year threaten to set a new record; chocolate makers and coffee roasters were out last week and so were milkmen, dock workers and the government social security workers.

Another of Israel's perils of peace, ironically, is how not to appear too secure. The country has already begun to make economic adjustments: overtime for 10,000 defense-plant workers has ended after five years because Israel has caught up on ammunition supplies. The next move will be to trim the budget without damaging the economy. But a fifth of Israel's $3.1 billion in revenues comes from State of Israel bonds purchased by Jews living abroad, or from private foreign donations. The donations are easier to get, a government budget expert frankly admits, for "an Israel facing a new Auschwitz rather than an Israel facing peace."

Beyond their territorial and economic concerns, Israelis are increasingly disturbed by the fact that the 400,000 Arab citizens of Israel may be doomed to second-class citizenship in a Jewish state. The issue flared up with ferocity two weeks ago, when Arabs born in the border villages of Biram and Ikrit near Lebanon tried to return to their homes after a 24-year absence. They had fed and sheltered Israeli soldiers during the 1948 war, but at Israeli insistence they were evacuated to deny Arab terrorists a "safe house." For security reasons, argues the government, they have never been allowed to return, although no one in either place has ever committed a rebellious act toward Israel. Most of their land has been reapportioned among Jewish settlements.

After the affair was revived this summer, Mrs. Meir, fearful of setting a precedent for letting other Palestinian

Arabs reclaim their land, ruled again with her Cabinet that they could not go home. Protests over the government's decision have been widespread. Allon voted against it. Greek Catholic Archbishop Joseph M. Raya, who is leading the fight to let the villagers return, accused Israel of disregarding "basic human justice." He wrote to Mrs. Meir: "As some Jews in the past history of the western world recognized that the only way to become full citizens was to become Christians, must now Arabs become Jews to enjoy the fullness of citizenship of the very land of their birth?" A delegation of Israeli intellectuals, headed by Poet and Newspaper Columnist Haim Hefer, 47, met for nearly eight hours with Mrs. Meir --and threatened to become a permanent body of opposition.

In short, Israel's internal problems of peace are outdistancing its problems with its neighbors. "The Labor Party is called upon to decide what kind of state it wants," Ha'aretz editorialized recently, "and this decision cannot be put off indefinitely." Sensitive to the criticism, the government is preparing to advance the next national election, scheduled for November 1973, to March or April, as a means of obtaining a necessary new mandate more quickly. The precise timing of the election will be decided later this month, after Party Leader and Finance Minister Sapir returns from a visit to South America. At present, Mrs. Meir, 74, seems likely to be the compromise candidate for another term as Premier, if only to avoid an open fight among such potential successors as Dayan, Allon, Sapir and Eban. But before the balloting is over and a mandate established, the perils of peace that Israel has postponed for so many years will be fully and loudly debated.

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