Put It Back In The Drawer

Eight years ago on the White House lawn, the P.L.O. signed the Oslo accords, pledging peace, nonviolence and a negotiated settlement of differences with Israel. Seventeen months ago, the Palestinians tore up Oslo and began the savage guerrilla war now convulsing the Middle East.

Not to worry. Yet another pledge of peace is being dangled. This time it is the Saudi "peace plan." Crown Prince Abdullah tells the New York Times that he has a speech in his desk drawer promising normalization with Israel if it returns to its 1967 borders. He would love to give the speech, he avers, but he cannot because of the beastly actions of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

It is Lucy and the football all over again.

On the face of it, the plan is empty. It restates maximal Palestinian demands and then says if Israel makes peace with the Palestinians, the Saudis will too. This is news? What would the Saudis propose otherwise--that after the Palestinians, the aggrieved party, make their peace with Israel, Saudi Arabia will continue the enmity?

Moreover, the plan is designed to be utterly unacceptable to Israel. It offers the most radical misinterpretation of what Israel is required to do under international law: surrender every inch of territory taken in the Six-Day War. There is nothing in international law that compels that. The governing U.N. Security Council resolution (Res. 242 of 1967) requires "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Not "all the territories." Not even "the territories." Just "territories." As the U.S. ambassador who helped draft the resolution explained, the definite article was deliberately omitted. Why? To permit Israel to withdraw to defensible borders. The 1967 lines are inherently indefensible. They would make central Israel eight miles wide. Eight miles between, say, the massed tank armies of Iraq and Syria to Israel's front and the Mediterranean Sea to its back. This is suicide. Nor, contrary to Abdullah's formula, is Israel going to give up Judaism's holiest shrine (the Western Wall) and Old Jerusalem, continuously inhabited by Jews for centuries until expelled by the Jordanians in 1948.

My favorite part of the Saudi plan, however, is the bit about the desk drawer. The Saudis, you see, have been very eager to make peace, but, alas, the wish has had to lie dormant because of that terrible Israeli leader Sharon.

I have news for Abdullah. Sharon has been in office for exactly one year. Israel has been around for 54 years. Where was Abdullah's peace plan for the first 53?

The Oslo peace process began eight years ago. Where was Abdullah during the prime ministerships of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres? And, most crucially, where was Abdullah just 19 months ago, when the most dovish leader in Israel's history, Ehud Barak, offered an astonishingly generous peace at Camp David, and the Saudis, begged by President Clinton to weigh in with Arafat on the side of peace, did nothing of the sort?

Sticky drawer?