Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 8, 1991                   TAG: 9103080325
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: JERUSALEM                                LENGTH: Medium

CRITICAL MOMENT: ISRAEL HAD BETTER ACT NOW FOR PEACE

Never has there been a more opportune time for Israel to make peace with its Arab neighbors.

If progress is to be made, the nation must act fast.

When U.S. Secretary of State James Baker comes calling next week, the government will have no new peace proposals to offer, and few if any original ideas.

So if progress is to made at this critical moment, it will have to be a result of someone else's initiative, Arab or American.

As Justice Minister Dan Meridor put it, seeming to express the view of almost everyone in Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's right-wing government: "America can tell the Arab states to come and talk with Israel. If they do this, the whole psychological arena will change."

(Baker said Thursday that he would be prepared to meet with Palestinians while in Israel next week.

(He also indicated that he would be exploring with Arab allies whether new leadership might emerge in the Palestine Liberation Organization.)

President Bush told Congress on Wednesday night that the United States was committed to working toward a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But in a warning to both sides he also said: "By now, it should be plain to all parties that peacemaking in the Middle East requires compromise."

Bush also repeated that any agreements should be based on Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, which in effect calls on Israel to return most, if not all, the lands occupied in the 1967 war for having its borders recognized by Arab nations.

Israeli officials, although saying they agree the time is ripe for movement, said they had no compromises to offer Syria or Jordan or the Palestinians, who clamor for their own homeland on the West Bank.

The Israelis, indeed, have found it very hard because of the intricacies of coalition politics, to come up with peace initiatives. To stay in power, the Likud party has made alliances with parties even less interested in making any concessions.

"It's the electoral system that creates these impossible coalitions," Shimon Peres, leader of the Labor Party, said when asked why Israel cannot seem to carry out any plans for peace.

Shamir says that his government stands by its May 1989 initiative, which had as its central tenet elections in the occupied territories for Palestinians.

That idea got nowhere at the time because the Israelis wanted to bar the Palestine Liberation Organization from taking part.

Now that the PLO is weakened politically because of its support for Iraq, senior Israeli officials indicate that the government is not really committed to the idea of elections any longer - partly because several far-right-wing ministers, who, together, have the power to bring the government down, have made it clear they oppose it.

Politics aside, officials of every political persuasion agree that now is the moment to act. With Iraq's military destroyed, the army's assessment is that the threat of serious attack from the east has been virtually eliminated.

"I'm not overly optimistic about this," said Amnon Rubenstein, leader of the center-left Shinui party. "I know a lot of people say there has never been a better moment. But things don't work that way."

Even as the war has created a favorable political moment for Israel, the missile attacks have also left its people dazed and afraid.

For the political right, the insistence that Israel should never give up an inch is born not just of ideological dogma but also of fear - fear of Arab attack from abroad, fear of political carnage at home.

Even Bush's predictable reference in his speech Wednesday to Resolution 242 - the centerpiece of the Israeli government's own peace initiative - sent officials here into turmoil.

Out of all that comes the clear view, from the left and the right, that to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict America will first have to persuade the Arab nations to negotiate with Israel.

"If you had someone who would come forward from the Arab world and said there would be no more war, that would do it," Rubenstein said.