New Opening

The impasse in the Middle East peace process has at least been broken by the meeting at Ifrane between Hassan II, King of Morocco, and Shimon Peres, prime minister of Israel. Whether it will facilitate a peace agreement will depend on the willingness of Arab and Israeli leaders to build on this new opportunity.

In the first comments from the Moroccan ruler and from Israeli officials, there were contrasts that will take time to clarify. Hassan said that he was disappointed that Peres again rejected the 1982 Arab peace proposals, agreed on by 20 nations gathered at Fez. Under that plan, the Arabs would recognize Israel in exchange for a return of all Arab territory taken in the 1967 war and the establishment of a Palestinian state. And the king expressed disappointment that Israel remains opposed to a meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Peres, according to their joint statement, set forth “conditions he deems necessary for the installation of peace.” If, as they declared, their meeting was “of a purely exploratory nature,” not for negotiations, nothing more could reasonably be expected.

There may nevertheless be substantially more to Hassan’s bold initiative. There is, for example, the possibility that the initiative may signal a new alignment in the region. Simcha Dinitz, formerly the Israeli ambassador to Washington, has spoken of “an emerging coalition of Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, with the acquiescence of Saudi Arabia.” There are, of course, absolute limitations on what the moderates can accomplish without at least tacit approval from the militants, led by Syria, and the Palestinians, now seemingly more divided than ever. Only an Arab summit, now demanded by the Palestinians, can test if an Arab consensus exists.

Israel is as divided as the Arabs are. The width of the political division is evident in Peres’ waning mandate that expires in October, when he is scheduled to turn over the premiership to Yitzhak Shamir. Peres and his Labor Party are committed to negotiating a settlement, including the return of some of the Arab lands taken in the 1967 war, while Shamir and the Likud group that he leads are generally committed to annexing to Israel the occupied territories. But in fact the Labor Party itself has reservations about any plan to give up control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights of Syria, and Gaza.

A long agenda awaits the peacemakers. There is the broad question of resolving the boundaries so radically transformed by the war in 1967. There is the complex question of finding an acceptable way to restore political rights to the Palestinians. There are the unresolved remnants of the 1979 Camp David agreements, including the question of autonomy in the occupation zones and the border dispute between Israel and Egypt at Taba on the Gulf of Eilat. And there are the unresolved problems created by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Israel’s continuing efforts to impose its own security controls in southern Lebanon.

The remaining obstacles may seem insurmountable. But, then, no one would have predicted, before Anwar Sadat’s mission to Jerusalem in 1977, that within two years there would be a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. If there is a silent majority committed to peace, the Hassan-Peres dialogue has now opened for them an opportunity to be heard and to act.