For Shultz, a Door Too Big to Slam

There is a memorable little scene from the early history of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky is inexorably losing in a power struggle with Josef Stalin. In his anger and frustration the old revolutionary rises to make a dramatic exit from a meeting of the Politburo. Striding out of the chamber, he tries to slam the door behind him. But the great Kremlin door is too large, too heavy. For a mortifying moment Trotsky is left there struggling to pull it shut, the man--and his political point--symbolically and literally dwarfed.

Trotsky and his exit came to mind as Secretary of State George P. Shultz, in his own parting flourish, refused a visa to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat so that he could address the United Nations. In both cases great and proud men have found the door too big for slamming.

It is not only that one of Shultz’s predecessors, Henry A. Kissinger--hardly a softy on the Palestine Liberation Organization--let Arafat come to the United Nations in 1974 or that somewhere in the combination-locked bowels of the State Department is a legal adviser’s opinion that issuing Arafat a visa would be quite proper--the very opposite of Shultz’s finding.

It is not only that this may well be a historic moment to nurture international dialogue on the Middle East, especially after the Palestine National Council approved for the first time U.N. resolutions that implicitly recognize Israel’s right to a secure existence.

Nor is it even the moral ambiguity if not hypocrisy that hangs about Shultz’s indignant refusal. Arafat, he claims, “knows of, condones and lends support to” acts of terrorism. The point seems rather fine for a secretary of state who for the last six years has been reading approvingly in his morning briefing about the morally mixed exploits of the Contras or the Afghan guerrillas, about U.S.-financed Israeli strikes on refugee camps or about the latest friendly tyrant having his passport stamped to come to New York to exhort the U.N. General Assembly.

One man’s terrorist, of course, is another man’s freedom fighter. That is why so many of even our closest European allies, who tend to see history and politics with more breadth and complexity than Shultz does, find his act so dismaying, his pretense to the moral high ground so transparent.

But the deeper disservice here is to the new realities of power in the Middle East, and thus to the national interests of both Israel and the United States.

For four decades the Arabs and the Israelis have been ensnared in their own crypt-like dilemma--no genuine negotiations without acceptance of Israel, no acceptance without genuine negotiations on the dispossession of the Palestinians. Now at Algiers the PLO has inched forward from that Catch-22. Yet the real change lies not with Arafat and his angry colleagues, or with Israeli parties vying in belligerence in their recent election.

History has been nudged instead over the past several months by the relentless young men and boys of the West Bank and Gaza. It is the intifada , the popular uprising in the Israeli-conquered territories, that has shown--more than any diplomatic or political posturing--the root futility of the Israeli occupation and the inevitability of a Palestinian state. Disciplined, so largely non-terrorist, the revolt has been the most vivid reminder yet of the unspoken underlying political reality of this conflict--that a Palestinian successor state will be ruled in the end not by the long-exiled, long-expatriated soldiers of the PLO but by the stolid burghers and village elders there on the far side of the River Jordan, less violent but politically more formidable neighbors in a new Arab and Jewish Middle East.

Israel’s aging and weary politicians, yesterday’s men of a cruel and terrifying history, might be expected to resist those realities. But the United States ought to be able to see further and clearer. Shultz’s bitter exit raises gnawing questions: Do we really seek an end to the bloodshed and outlawry that we deplore, or merely the satisfaction of denouncing it? Do we really expect the Palestinians to give up every bargaining chip before they even get to the table?

Despite the Shultz action, George Bush and his secretary of state-designate, James A. Baker III, face extraordinary opportunity. The Middle East is coming at last to the juncture where our friendship and support for Israel, a just settlement for the Palestinians, stability in the region and an authentic healing of the terrorist plague all coincide. There is even a bonus for the budget-conscious Bush in the saving of billions of dollars of U.S. aid that must now go to prop up the Israelis in their misguided manifest destiny.

Washington, of course, has not been and will not be a true honest broker between the two sides. Yet our lone and indispensable financial support for Israel makes us crucial to the realization of peace. The ultimate irony of the visa refusal may be to mislead the Israelis on just how rapidly a more pragmatic new Bush Administration recognizes all that, and moves to end this old war to get on with its own crowded agenda.

For the moment, Shultz has left the table and tried to slam the door. Like Trotsky’s, it was a vain, sad gesture.