Yitzhak Shamir

The government of Israel has entered into a pact with "terrorists and murderers" to maintain political power at any price, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said in Baltimore last night."

Washington. -- From the founding of Israel, that country's leaders have underestimated the difficulty of making peace with their Arab neighbors.Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, could not seriously conceive that Arab neighbors would refuse cooperation with the new state. As he wrote to the gifted leader Emir Feisal, Sherif of Mecca, later king of Iraq, ''Our movements complement one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. There is room for us both.''With science, technology and modern education, Israel could help the region.

Too bad we can't bottle this heat and bring it out next February.Syria made an offer even Yitzhak Shamir couldn't refuse.The conspiracy theory about the South African government backing the Inkatha movement against the ANC turns out to be true. So what else is new?

The government of Israel has entered into a pact with "terrorists and murderers" to maintain political power at any price, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said in Baltimore last night."

In the Mideast hope too often turns out to be a mirage and peace plans lay scattered in the sands like the remains of strayed people and defeated tanks. But the wish always is that maybe this time things will work out.This time got a big boost Thursday when Saudi Arabia told Secretary of State Baker it would not give any more money to the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO got into trouble with most Arab governments when it sided with Iraq during the gulf war. But both it and its leader somehow have managed to come back from defeat and miscalculation time and again.

If Hafez el Assad said yes because he thought Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir would say no, he may have been sadly mistaken. But the Syrian president probably made no such miscalculation. He does not normally outsmart himself.Wrestling with the question whether to comply with Secretary of State James A. Baker III's plan for Middle East negotiations, Mr. ,, Shamir is, on the surface, his old intransigent self. His political career is not, however, dedicated to saying no. It is dedicated to preserving for Israel all the land it now holds, and to winning eventual Arab acceptance by holding firm.

JERUSALEM -- For a moment, in the wee hours of yesterday, the fresh wound of defeat brought out the old underground fighter in Yitzhak Shamir.The cotton-mouth way of his usual speech disappeared. He stopped staring at his shoelaces. He shook as though with fever, and raised his fist in an angry cry."Our movement . . . has never been spoiled. Everything we have achieved, we have achieved with great effort and suffering," he said in a voice hoarse with emotion. "We have had to walk a path of thorns."

Long before his death Monday after a heart attack at 78, Menachem Begin was a spent force in Israel. In August 1983, he resigned and went into a seclusion from which he never emerged. What had happened? His wife of 43 years had died. Israel's invasion of Lebanon the year before, which he had ordered, accomplished none of its political goals, leaving the PLO intact as a force against Israel and Lebanon a shambles of anarchy.Yet two of his legacies endure. One is the peace with Egypt, responding to President Anwar Sadat's initiative and President Jimmy Carter's patience at Camp David in 1978.

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli police minister has backed off his threat to arrest members of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks, a move that could have paralyzed the negotiations.Police Minister Ronni Milo had announced Friday that he would immediately arrest top members of the delegation when they returned to Israel from a meeting in Amman, Jordan, with the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Such meetings violate Israeli law.But a spokeswoman for Mr. Milo said yesterday that the delegates would not be arrested but would be asked to come to a police station for questioning.

Conventional wisdom holds that it's a miracle that the international conference on the Middle East even opened at all, and that any resolution of the region's intractable problems is months or even years away.It is vital to understand that time is not on the side of peace, especially in light of the stated determination of the present Israeli government to continue to build settlements on the West Bank.Every American president since Lyndon Johnson has maintained that the settlements are either illegal or are obstacles to peace, for the simple reason that settlements amount to the incremental annexation of the West Bank into Israel proper.

JERUSALEM -- For a moment, in the wee hours of yesterday, the fresh wound of defeat brought out the old underground fighter in Yitzhak Shamir.The cotton-mouth way of his usual speech disappeared. He stopped staring at his shoelaces. He shook as though with fever, and raised his fist in an angry cry."Our movement . . . has never been spoiled. Everything we have achieved, we have achieved with great effort and suffering," he said in a voice hoarse with emotion. "We have had to walk a path of thorns."

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli police minister has backed off his threat to arrest members of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks, a move that could have paralyzed the negotiations.Police Minister Ronni Milo had announced Friday that he would immediately arrest top members of the delegation when they returned to Israel from a meeting in Amman, Jordan, with the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Such meetings violate Israeli law.But a spokeswoman for Mr. Milo said yesterday that the delegates would not be arrested but would be asked to come to a police station for questioning.

Long before his death Monday after a heart attack at 78, Menachem Begin was a spent force in Israel. In August 1983, he resigned and went into a seclusion from which he never emerged. What had happened? His wife of 43 years had died. Israel's invasion of Lebanon the year before, which he had ordered, accomplished none of its political goals, leaving the PLO intact as a force against Israel and Lebanon a shambles of anarchy.Yet two of his legacies endure. One is the peace with Egypt, responding to President Anwar Sadat's initiative and President Jimmy Carter's patience at Camp David in 1978.

MADRID, Spain -- The reigning king of Spain might have twitched for a moment last week when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel said Israelis "are the only people, except for a short Crusader kingdom, who have had an independent sovereignty" in the Holy Land.One of the relics King Juan Carlos carries around is the title King of Jerusalem, handed down from a Crusader ancestor who lost the place to the more memorable Muslim warrior Saladin.It might also have been observed that after Saladin's victory, the Muslims held sway over Jerusalem for more than seven centuries.

Conventional wisdom holds that it's a miracle that the international conference on the Middle East even opened at all, and that any resolution of the region's intractable problems is months or even years away.It is vital to understand that time is not on the side of peace, especially in light of the stated determination of the present Israeli government to continue to build settlements on the West Bank.Every American president since Lyndon Johnson has maintained that the settlements are either illegal or are obstacles to peace, for the simple reason that settlements amount to the incremental annexation of the West Bank into Israel proper.

Even the most cursory look at a map of the Middle East suggests that by all reason the West Bank of the Jordan River should be a part of the state of Israel. The territory just sits there, like a kidney in the side of a state whose top and bottom are nearly separated.But as we know from bitter history, reason does not rule in the Middle East, and the West Bank issue is no more going to disappear than the 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs who inhabit that disputed territory are going to disappear.

INSIDE Israel's Cabinet, some of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's most important ministers are talking to him about trying a kind of do-it-yourself distancing plan for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.They suggest that what the Israelis could do themselves is to pull out their troops from several key towns in the West Bank to the outskirts -- perhaps Nablus, Hebron and Jericho. It would not be a withdrawal or surrender of territory.But it would be a step toward ending killings of Arabs and Jews by putting room between the Israeli Army and the Palestinians, giving both more breathing space.

Even the most cursory look at a map of the Middle East suggests that by all reason the West Bank of the Jordan River should be a part of the state of Israel. The territory just sits there, like a kidney in the side of a state whose top and bottom are nearly separated.But as we know from bitter history, reason does not rule in the Middle East, and the West Bank issue is no more going to disappear than the 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs who inhabit that disputed territory are going to disappear.

If Hafez el Assad said yes because he thought Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir would say no, he may have been sadly mistaken. But the Syrian president probably made no such miscalculation. He does not normally outsmart himself.Wrestling with the question whether to comply with Secretary of State James A. Baker III's plan for Middle East negotiations, Mr. ,, Shamir is, on the surface, his old intransigent self. His political career is not, however, dedicated to saying no. It is dedicated to preserving for Israel all the land it now holds, and to winning eventual Arab acceptance by holding firm.

Too bad we can't bottle this heat and bring it out next February.Syria made an offer even Yitzhak Shamir couldn't refuse.The conspiracy theory about the South African government backing the Inkatha movement against the ANC turns out to be true. So what else is new?