The Middle East: No More Treaties

BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR

It has been a remarkable five years in the Middle East. Beginning in October 1991, when Arabs and Israelis first met face to face in Madrid, it went on to include two Israeli-PLO accords, an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, two grand regional economic conferences, the repeal by the U.N. General Assembly of the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, serious peace negotiations between Israel and Syria, and decisions by several Arab states and many other governments around the world to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. For the first time in modern history, it did not sound foolish to speak of solving the Middle East problem.

That era, if five years can be said to qualify as an era, is over. Several factors account for this abrupt end, not just the June 1996 election of a more conservative Israeli government. Indeed, the era of treaties in the Middle East might well have come to an end even if the Labor government of Shimon Peres had triumphed at the polls. The inability to conclude new treaties will have profound consequences for both the peace process and peace itself. But the end of the era of treaties does not have to lead to the demise of either peace or the peace process if the parties and diplomats involved do not act as if nothing has changed or everything is lost. What is called for is a new approach to diplomacy, one more modest in what it attempts but no less demanding in what it will require.

FROM MADRID TO OSLO

What made the era of treaties and other agreements possible, above all, was the end of the Cold War and the trauma of the Persian Gulf War. Arab governments lost their Soviet benefactor, and Iraq, the center of secular Arab radicalism, was thrashed on the battlefield. Meanwhile, most Arab governments came to accept Israel as a permanent, if not welcome, reality. Palestinians faced two additional problems: the PLO lost its Arab financial backers in the Persian Gulf region when it made the mistake of backing Saddam Hussein in his bid to conquer Kuwait, and the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, was losing steam.