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killed and the killers are undergoing the indefinability that attaches
to the long ago. Seventeen Athenians were killed on Wednesday and
eleven Spartans. Nine Algerians were trapped, 8 French ambushed.
Twelve South Vietnamese, 20 Vietcong. XYZ Raids Kill 17 ABCs. In
Tel Aviv, 3 Die in a Shooting. We do know that, however shrouded
by the mists, in history we nevertheless did have ultimate winners
and ultimate losers. Ask any Carthaginian. Can we assume that in
today's situation in the Mideast a historical outcome is foreseeable?
Perhaps not a final outcome. But some factors of the struggle limn
into reality.
— General Sharon cannot keep it up. He is the head of a democratic
government, and cannot sustain majority support in a situation in
which the daily returns of his leadership are pockmarks of dead
Israelis. To the question: What do you say, General Sharon, about
your promise to bring an end to the tribulation of your country?
He has no answer.
— As for his counterpart, whatever was once thought about the
powers of Arafat, now it is clear that he cannot exercise control
over the Palestinian world. A British observer on the BBC reported
last week that the one thing we have absolutely learned in the past
bloody month is that there is "no single authority over Palestinian
terrorism."
The perspective
takes us nonstop to Vietnam in the 1960s. The Vietcong needed the
sustenance that the North Vietnamese ferried down the Ho Chi Minh
trail — bombs and other explosive materials. But the Vietnamese
did not need megatonnage to slice the throats of South Vietnamese
village leaders. Single bullets and sharp razors would do it.
— Inasmuch as there is no regnant authority over Palestinian
impulses, the Israelis need to devise the means to affect the national
resolution of a whole people. In the case of the Vietcong, the answer
was: victory. In the existing travail, it has got to be less than
that because the Israelis are not going to give up. The South Vietnamese
had to do this, lacking the arms and the cohesion to prevail.
Attention is given, then, to initiatives that hold out hope for
substantive diversion of purpose: something that might mitigate
Palestinian rage, and affect hegemonic Israeli defiance.
Mr. Mubarak suggests a meeting between Arafat and Sharon. It is
difficult to imagine that such a meeting would do anything less
than inspire new levels of antagonism. Sharon hates Arafat and has
reason to do so. Arafat hates Sharon and has reason to do so. To
set up a meeting at which the soreness of mutual hatred could only
be enhanced is not productive statesmanship.
We have Prince Abdullah's proposal. It has the virtue of what they
call in the business world a "novation." To suggest that
Israel recall its settlements, withdraw every Israeli pup tent to
behind the 1967 borders and move to co-government of Jerusalem is
certainly visionary. But not so much so as not to have been thought
acceptable by the Barak government as recently as two years ago.
But the notion is certainly revolutionary that the Arab states should
transform themselves to docile neighbors of an independent Israel.
Immediate objections have been raised by two troublemakers, one
of them a mostly symbolic disrupter, the other, an active belligerent.
Libya's Qaddafi has said he would withdraw from the Arab consortium.
Syria's Assad has said that no progress can be made until the Golan
Heights are returned.
But the Golan Heights are necessary to the safety of Israel if war
threatened that safety. If the Abdullah initiative were to flower,
the fear of war would recede. Is it conceivable that the Abdullah
covenant would actually eliminate the 50-year-old fear the Israelis
have for their mere existence?
Here of course is the crux of any proposal that might cut through
it all, and this is the factor of the guarantee of Israel's security.
A credible force operating under the new covenant would need participation
by states willing to patrol a peace that would take time to engender
genuine changes in attitude. And the United States would need to
be one of these guarantors.
It is a vision, the idea of a settled Mideast community, with teenagers
no longer lining up to act as bomb carriers against Israeli women
and children. Most visionary nostrums are to be rejected for the
same reason we reject Utopia. But the alternative is another headline
tomorrow: XYZ Raids Kill 17 ABCs.
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