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Lebanon Fighting
Makes Peace Elusive

Despite heightened tensions, Secretary of State
Christopher is set to return to the Middle East this
weekend. But achieving progress will be tough.

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I

n the midst of the dead-
locked peace process,
Israel and the Hezbollah
have taken time out for a
little war.
The terrible irony of the
flare-up in south Lebanon is
that Secretary of State
Warren Christopher had
planned to focus his Middle
East visit on jump-starting
the peace talks between
Israel and Syria. Now, he's
far more likely to find him-
self addressing the problem
of the mini-war instead.
It must be said that even
before the outbreak of vio-
lence along Israel's northern
border, Mr. Christopher had
been careful to play down
the expectations of his sec-
ond Middle Eastern tour.
Certainly no suggestion
came out of Washington
that he would even attempt
to get the crucial Israeli-
Palestinian talks back on
track. On the contrary,
while all kinds of alterna-
tive ideas were being floated
to replace or supplement the
stalled negotiations, the
most the State Department
was prepared to offer —
after the Americans had
failed to obtain both sides'
approval of two earlier
drafts — was yet another
version of an Israeli-
Palestinian declaration of
principles.
The secret formula of this
latest paper was reported to
be side-stepping the chief
obstacle to agreement,
namely, defining the geo-
graphical jurisdiction of the
Palestinian self-governing
authority, including the sta-
tus of east Jerusalem.
But solution by evasion
was not what the
Palestinians had in mind,
and they've announced their
rejection of such a paper
even before laying eyes on
it.
The chances of advancing
the talks between Israel and
Syria looked far more
promising to Dennis Ross
and his peace team after
their visit with President
Hafez Assad.
Now, however, after the
outbreak of violence in
Lebanon (which has already

cost the lives of Syrian sol-
diers), the mischief-making
of the Hezbollah has compli-
cated the odds of making of i=\/
progress on this front, as
well.
Hence the expectations of
the Christopher visit have
sunk even further. In fact,
after all the talk of the U.S.
being a "full partner" to the
Middle East peace efforts, it
appears to a number of
observers that Washington
is withdrawing further and
further into the background.

Christopher's plan
was to push
the Syrian and
Israeli talks.
The fighting in
Lebanon will
now take
precedence.

"Doubts about the Clinton
Administration's willing-
ness to wade into the mess
of the peace process were
already aroused during the
tour of Dennis Ross' group,"
wrote Akiva Eldar, the
diplomatic correspondent of
Ha'aretz. "During one of the
meetings, a [Ross] aide let it
slip that the Administration
doesn't regard the Middle
East as an emergency. Now
it's absolutely clear that the
natural disaster caused by
the Mississippi is far more
of a burning [issue] for it."
One response to the chok-
ing sense of impasse that
has settled over the region
is an outbreak of alterna-
tives to the seemingly failed
formula of low-level bilater-
al talks — at least in terms
of the Israeli-Palestinian
dialogue. Suddenly "creativ-
ity" has become the watch-
word in Israeli diplomatic
circles.
So many ideas have been
mooted in the past few
weeks that they seemed to
signal desperation about the
Madrid framework. Virt-
ually none of the proposed