Middle East Land for Peace?

By William R. Doerner

If George Shultz ever had any stomach for Middle East diplomacy, he has long since lost it. He has come to deplore the region's treacherous politics and brutal methods. In 1982 he was the chief architect of a peace plan that failed dismally, underscoring for him the futility of well-intentioned initiatives in a conflict poisoned by four decades of hatred and mistrust. In 1983 the death, of 241 U.S. servicemen in their bombed-out Beirut headquarters showed him the dangers of direct intervention. Returning from the region last October, Shultz seemed ready to wash his hands of the whole mess.

Yet here he is, flying back to the Middle East this week to launch a new round of peace talks on behalf of a President with less than a year left in power. Shultz's mission is prompted less by dreams of an eleventh-hour diplomatic triumph than by a desperate need to halt the bloody cycle of Palestinian riots and Israeli reprisals that erupted last December in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The continuing violence, which has left at least 59 Palestinians dead and hundreds more wounded by Israeli shootings and beatings, has fueled a burning sense of urgency about easing if not solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. It has become increasingly clear that efforts to end the unrest will probably be futile unless a negotiating process leading to some form of Palestinian self- rule is started. But the latest U.S. initiative aimed at achieving that goal is stirring political turmoil in Israel. That domestic struggle could render the Jewish state incapable of engaging in serious diplomacy at the very moment when compromise may be essential.

At the heart of the debate is the principle of "land for peace," according to which Israel would agree to make territorial concessions in the Arab regions it has occupied since 1967 in return for the establishment of peaceful relations with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as well as with neighboring Jordan. Shultz regards such a trade-off as absolutely essential to any progress in the Middle East conflict. But the Israeli leadership is bitterly divided over the issue. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who is head of the Labor Party, is amenable to the principle. But Peres' partner in Israel's national unity government, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, is opposed to any territorial concessions. Said Shamir of the land-for-peace idea: "You can't conduct negotiations and ((can)) certainly not achieve peace by announcing every day that you're ready to accept everything."

The increasingly bitter sniping between the two top Cabinet officials led some Shamir aides to hint that the Prime Minister was considering sacking Peres. But such a move would probably force the next election, now scheduled for November, to be held much earlier. Shamir is reluctant to take such a drastic step. Yet the national unity government now exists in name only, largely because of frictions over the peace issue.

No matter when the next election comes, the campaign has already begun. The central issue: Israeli policies in the occupied territories. Israel's friends abroad are hoping the debate will provide an opening for new ideas in dealing with the Palestinian crisis. Yet just the reverse seems probable. Despite the waves of foreign criticism over the country's harsh methods of handling the unrest, the domestic political benefits seem more likely to fall to the hard- lining Likud than the more moderate Labor Party. A poll published last week by the Tel Aviv daily Ma'ariv indicated that 64% of the sample favored either the current policy or an even more stringent one and only 19% favored withdrawal from the territories.

In addition to conferring with Israel's divided political leaders, Shultz will travel to Jordan, Egypt and possibly other Arab countries in an effort to lay the groundwork for broader negotiations. Jordan's King Hussein has not overtly opposed the new U.S. effort but insists that any solution to the Palestinian issue must receive some kind of international guarantee -- a condition that is acceptable to Washington but not Shamir. For his part, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak feels strongly that any solution must go beyond the deliberately vague Palestinian "autonomy" called for in the 1978 Camp David accords and determine the final status of the occupied lands.

As Shultz prepared to begin his peace mission, widespread unrest continued to roil the occupied territories and even spread to a new region: the Druze villages of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel from Syria in 1967 and formally annexed in 1981. Some 8,000 stone-throwing protesters clashed with Israeli police in three villages. In all, 33 demonstrators were injured by rubber bullets and tear-gas canisters fired by police in quelling the disturbances. In the West Bank and Gaza, at least three Palestinians were killed last week as Arab youths stoned cars and torched buses to enforce a general strike.

The Israeli army, already under fire for its conduct, found itself embroiled in another controversy over a ghastly incident in the West Bank village of Salim. There, army officials said last week, Israeli soldiers forced four suspected riot leaders to lie on the ground last Feb. 5 and ordered an army bulldozer driver to push a mound of earth over them. Miraculously, the victims were dug out alive by villagers after the soldiers left. Army officials ; announced that two soldiers had been arrested for allegedly participating in the incident.

The turmoil spread beyond Israel's borders. Israel's foreign-intelligence service, MOSSAD, was widely suspected of involvement in two bombing incidents in the Cypriot port of Limassol last week. In one, three senior officers of Fatah, the main faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, were killed by explosives hidden under the seat of their car and detonated by remote control. Although the P.L.O. denies it, the three were apparently in Limassol to arrange the purchase of the Sol Phryne, a rundown ferryboat that the P.L.O. intended to use for a voyage dramatizing the plight of 130 Palestinians deported by Israel.

That planned voyage, called el awda (the return), was supposed to recall the experience of Jewish Holocaust survivors who sought to enter the port of Haifa in British-controlled Palestine aboard the refugee ship Exodus in 1947. The P.L.O. effort, several weeks in the planning, was basically a theatrical gesture. But it promised to be an effective public relations ploy and infuriated the Israelis, who vowed to prevent the ship's arrival in Haifa. About 18 hours after the killing of the Fatah trio, a magnetic mine attached below the waterline of the Sol Phryne exploded, causing no injuries but leaving a 3 1/2-ft. by 1 1/2-ft. gash that disabled the vessel and prompted the P.L.O. to postpone el awda indefinitely. Israel officially denied complicity in the car bombing but hardly bothered to conceal its role in disabling the ferry.

The fate of another voyage, Shultz's latest round of peace negotiations, remained almost as problematic. Though it has always been taken for granted that the U.S. would participate in the Arab-Israeli peace process when it resumed, Washington has spent years largely on the sidelines and will be playing catch-up ball for a time. As Shultz last week set out for Moscow, where he was to meet with Soviet officials before moving on to the Middle East, the Secretary professed to be unperturbed by Shamir's lack of enthusiasm or any other unfavorable Middle East portent. Said Shultz: "The thing is to get going at it."

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and Robert Slater/Jerusalem