Land For Peace

IF THE PEACE PROCESS in the Middle East stops, the terrorists wion. If Israel and Syria never swap land for peace, the terrorists win. If Palestinian autonomy is frozen as is, the terrorists win.If failure of the PLO to progress toward statehood brings its downfall, the terrorists win. If Israelis are provoked to vote in on May 29 a government that will end the peace process, the terrorists win.At first blush, it may be tempting to blame the nine-day rampage...

Israel's voters went beyond predictions in throwing out the Likud government and putting Labor in charge. In fact, with some 35 percent of the vote and 45 of the 120 Knesset seats, Yitzhak Rabin's Labor Party cannot have everything its own way. It must make a coalition, first with the Meretz bloc which is more dovish than Labor, then with at least one other small party. But the purpose of the voters is clear: to negotiate more flexibly and earnestly for peace with the Palestinians and Arab states than outgoing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was willing to do.General Rabin is no pushover.

The third round of Arab-Israeli peace talks ended in Washington with little to show. Israel and Jordan agreed on the shape of a table. Israel and Syria went nowhere. The Palestinians presented a plan for their independence in occupied territories, which Israel agreed was a bargaining position, and rejected. Israel did not present its own plan, owing to confusion at home.Few would think that Israel's government was giving away the store. But two tiny political parties in Israel thought just that.

The tragedy on Jerusalem's Temple Mount is no reason to link Iraqi evacuation from Kuwait to Israeli evacuation of the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. That is what Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein demanded, to cloud the issue of his total aggression against a friendly, fellow Arab, Islamic state that had been subsidizing him. The linkage is specious and fraudulent. It is a false distraction.Kuwait is not a quid pro quo for the West Bank and Gaza. Kuwait was not a sympathizer of Israel but a supporter of the Palestinians.

AS ISRAEL EMERGES from a week of mourning the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, its political climate remains charged with the bitter intra-Jewish recriminations that formed the background to the assassination. The prime minister's widow, Leah Rabin, has accused Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud opposition, of having incited violence -- a charge he has repudiated as a form of guilt by association and "McCarthyism." The vision of a nation united in sorrow is fading dramatically.The political calendar is force-feeding a style of heated debate that Israelis once assumed could be tolerated as a part of their cultural traditions.

THE 21 ARAB STATE leaders who met in Cairo over the weekend were remarkable in their unanimity and their quiet tone in responding to the new government of Israel. Some of these governments recognize Israel; most do not. Most have in some way approved the peace process; some have not. Past Arab summits were strident and demanding. That rhetoric was absent.Nonetheless, what they delivered was an ultimatum, triggered by the democratic choice of the Israeli electorate. They said that any Israeli backtracking or procrastination in implementing commitments would "lead to a setback in the peace process, with all the dangers and repercussions that this implies, taking the region back to the cycle of tension . . ."

ORKNEY SPRINGS, Va. - I write as a liberal, dovish, land-for-peace American Jew to express my dismay at the coverage by the American news media - especially the more liberal media - of the past nearly 18 months of violence between the Palestinians and Israelis. These media look at the surface of day-to-day events and consistently miss the larger context that reveals what it all signifies. The mainstream media are blind because they have no memory. Like the protagonist of the film Memento, our news people meet the actors in this Middle East conflict every day for the first time.

Washington -- The cringing ethnic is a pathetic specimen in American culture, whether it is Uncle Tom meekly defending his Master for selling him down the river (''It goes agin me to hear one word agin Mas'r . . . He couldn't be spected to think so much of poor Tom'') or Walter Lippmann oleaginously agreeing with Harvard's WASP president, A. Lawrence Lowell, that the university ought to have fewer Jews (''bad for the immigrant Jews as well as for Harvard if there were too great a concentration'')

JERUSALEM -- Although many people have begun to think otherwise, there is a solution to the Middle East crisis. What is the fundamental issue trapping Israelis and Palestinians within a horrific cycle of violence? The answer to this could also guide retired Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, as he tries to bring calm to the region. History, as always, is a good teacher. For seven years after the September 1993 signing of the Oslo accords, there was relative quiet in the region.

OFRA, West Bank -- The fruit of Benjamin Netanyahu's election victory will appear in a field now thick with only brambles and weeds, the Jewish settlers believe.They envision 35 duplex homes arising from the field -- already sown with underground water and power lines -- to house new settlers coming to Ofra.The Labor Party's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin blocked the construction plans to expand the settlement when he won election in 1992, and his successor, Shimon Peres, did the same. The settlers expect Netanyahu to give the go-ahead.