Can It Be? Progress in Mideast Talks?

Journalists have long joked that the headline MIDEAST PEACE HOPES DIM could run over a story written today, next year or, probably, in A.D. 2030. That may no longer be the case. As the intermittent Israeli-Arab talks that began in Madrid 10 months ago resumed in Washington, Palestinians and representatives of Israel's new Labor-led government got down to serious discussions over a substantive matter: how a proposed elected council might be empowered to bring a measure of self-government to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Eager to tone down animosity, Jerusalem's negotiators have stopped referring to the West Bank by the biblical names Judea and Samaria.

There was even a sign of possible progress on what has been one of the most intractable of all Middle East issues: the Golan Heights. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had insisted that the area was so vital to Israel's security that Jerusalem could never give the tiniest bit back to Syria. But his successor, Yitzhak Rabin, says the principle of trading land for peace applies to the area, and Israel need not "cling to every single centimeter."

None of which signals the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Israel is nowhere near meeting Syria's demand that it get all of the Golan back. On the issue of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there is a wide gap between the Israeli proposal for an "administrative" council and Palestinian demands for a "legislative" body, an embryo parliament for a Palestinian state. But gone are the days when, as Palestinian delegate Ghassan Khatib puts it, "proposals were prepared for confrontation, not agreement." Propaganda ideas are yielding to suggestions that might be negotiable. Someday. Maybe.