Recognizing reality

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In a remarkable shift for formal American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and morass, an American president has actually recognized reality. Out loud.

George W. Bush has acknowledged the Israelis can't be expected to retreat to the vulnerable armistice lines of 1949, the old borders that invited one war after another in the years since. All the invaders had to do was cut a wasp-waisted Israel in two, then roll up each half. Not for nothing did the late Abba Eban refer to the old borders as "the Auschwitz lines."

For decades now, American presidents have gone along with the diplomatic fiction that Israelis living on the other side of what's called the Green Line (the vegetation tends to end where the Arabs begin) were, to use the State Department's phrase, "obstacles to peace." As if the real obstacle to peace wasn't the refusal of one demagogic leader of Arab Palestine after another -- from the Grand Mufti in the '30s to Yasser Arafat in the '90s -- to make peace with the Jewish state on any terms but its eventual extinction.

If there is ever to be peace in that eternally troubled part of the world, each side must give up the idea of swallowing the other. And that includes the idea of swamping Israel with millions of Arab refugees, who until now have been kept isolated and exploited by their Arab "brethren" -- resulting in a rich seedbed for terrorism.

By all means, said the president, those refugees and their progeny should be allowed to return, but to an Arab state of Palestine. That seems to horrify the Palestinians in Gaza or on the West Bank. They tend to think of the refugees as a political and military weapon, not as kinsmen to be welcomed to their coming state the way Israelis have welcomed Jewish refugees from every hellhole in the world as brothers and sisters.

The president's new ideas are bound to infuriate the fanatics on both sides, including those exponents of a Greater Israel now balking at Ariel Sharon's plan to abandon Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip even while holding on to older, larger and more history-laden ones in the Galilee and Samaria, now known as the West Bank.

It won't only be both sides' fanatics who will balk at this latest initiative. We'll also hear from all who long have believed Middle East peace, despite all the last century's evidence, can be reached by appeasing Arab demands. The same shaky old Middle East hands who have criticized the Bush administration for being insufficiently active in Middle East diplomacy now are sure to rail against it for being entirely too active.

The same Palestinian leaders who have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity have already been heard from. Listen to Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinians' irrelevant prime minister so long as Yasser Arafat and Hamas call the shots, literally. His reaction to this peace plan? "We cannot accept that. We reject it and we refuse it."

Mr. Qureia added this meant "the complete end of the peace process," which of course became a war process as soon as Yasser Arafat walked out of Camp David in 2000 and launched still another intifada.

Given the realities of the Middle East, this president's initiative is unlikely to go anywhere either, but it does recognize those realities. That is a welcome break from American diplomacy's delusional past in the region.

At least this new tack doesn't drum up still more futile and dangerous illusions that are bound to explode in the dreamers' faces -- as Israel's Ehud Barak and a well-intentioned Bill Clinton discovered at Camp David. Maybe everything really did change September 11, 2001. Maybe even American presidents have awakened to the realities. Maybe, when it comes to terrorism, we are all Israelis now.

What is there now for the Palestinians? How can they ever achieve a peaceful, prosperous and self-respecting state of their own -- in place of the sordid little police state that has been foisted upon them? How can they cut Israel down to size, assert their claim not just to Gaza and most of the West Bank but to part of Jerusalem itself? How can they finally serve their own interests instead of some hateful demagogue's?

It's simple: All they need do is what they didn't in 2000 at Camp David, or in 1967 after the Six-Day War, or in 1948 after Israel's war of independence, or in 1937 when Britain's Peel Commission first proposed compromise. All they need do is make peace. At last.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.