MIDEAST MUDDLE.

• Author: VILBIG, PETER
• Position: Likelihood of peace between Israel and Palestinians looks dim - Brief Article

THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE REACHED A FINAL PEACE AGREEMENT BY NOW. INSTEAD, ALL BETS ARE OFF.

When a group of Palestinian children released 12 doves as a symbol of peace during a celebration of the new millennium in Bethlehem last December, several of the birds crashed to the ground. At the time, hopes for Middle East peace were riding high, and the rough landings seemed a minor glitch. But by February, Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority had broken off peace negotiations with Israel. Separate peace talks with Syria had ground to a halt the month before. And after Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon attacked Israel's northern border, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered jets to strike back at guerrilla strongholds.

Today, the doves' failure to take wing looks like a bad omen.

The fragile Middle East peace process is in trouble--again, But this time, all sides agree, a missed chance runs the risk of spinning the region back into uncontrollable violence. "And then," Barak says sadly, "we will bury our victims, and they will bury their victims, and a generation later, we will sit down once more to the same geography, the same demography, the same problems."

Rooted deeply in the region's troubled history, today's conflict dates to the arrival of tens of thousands of Jews in a little patch of desert, then known as Palestine, after World War II. Many were survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, which claimed 6 million Jewish lives. The United Nations tried dividing the region between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinian Arabs already living there, but the day after Israel declared its independence in 1948, six neighboring Arab states attacked. Israel won that war, and then won another in 1967, capturing territory that included the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million Palestinian refugees had fled, as well as a part of Syria called the Golan Heights.

SECRET NEGOTIATIONS

Arafat responded by forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and vowing to destroy Israel through a terrorist campaign. After years of attack and counterattack, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin began secret negotiations with the PLO in Oslo, Norway, in 1992 that led to a framework for peace. Israel agreed to turn over the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank to Palestinian control. The PLO agreed to clamp down...