Farewell to The Thrills of Revenge?

By Charles Krauthammer

Abba Eban, Israel's former Foreign Minister and chief dove, once observed in wonderment that when it comes to peace, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. In 1947, when the U.N. offered them a state side by side with Israel, they rejected the plan and joined the Arab war to destroy the nascent Jewish state in order to take all of Palestine for themselves. They lost.

Three decades later, they missed their next great opportunity when the Camp David accords offered them an end to Israeli occupation, autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, and negotiations that might even have produced a state of their own. The Palestinians rejected that too.

It is 15 years later, and the Palestinians may finally have proved Abba Eban wrong. The stunning agreement between Israel and the P.L.O. on the so-called Gaza-Jericho First plan is in spirit and even in some detail and language a resurrection of the Camp David plan that they once so bitterly scorned.

Why reach for this opportunity? One possible explanation is, well, simple opportunism. The P.L.O. -- bereft of its superpower patron, cut off from its gulf Arab paymasters, faced with rising Islamic opposition in the occupied territories -- was in a state of terminal decline. Yasser Arafat decided that if the P.L.O. did not accept this offer, there would soon be no P.L.O. to accept any offer.

Seeing his mandate from heaven passing, Arafat may have decided to make the appropriate peace gestures toward Israel -- for now -- in order to gain a foothold in the occupied territories, new funding (this time from the West) and a new chance to continue his 40-year war against Israel.

If so -- if the Israel-P.L.O. peace accord is merely a tactical retreat by a P.L.O. that retains the maximalist goal of destroying Israel -- then the accord will fail. As soon as the veil is dropped, the war resumes.

That is what the Israeli opposition claims, and given Arafat's history, it is hardly an implausible claim. In the eyes of Likud, a P.L.O. entity in the West Bank and Gaza would be a kind of mini-Syria in its midst, an implacable enemy building a deadly new platform for the final showdown with the Jews.

Others foresee in the West Bank and Gaza not a mini-Syria but a mini- Lebanon: a hopelessly fractured and heavily armed society riven by civil war (here between the secularist P.L.O. and Islamic fundamentalists) simply dissolving into anarchy and chaos. Some are even predicting that Arafat may not live very long if he returns to Gaza, stronghold of the Islamic Hamas militants who revile him and reject any hint of coexistence with Israel.

Then there is the third alternative, the only one that promises peace. In that view, the view of the Israeli government, the Palestinians are not like the Lebanese -- they have reached a broad national consensus about their destiny. And they are not like the Syrians -- they have truly changed their minds about Israel. They have finally decided, after a hundred years of war with Zionism, to settle for the half-loaf: self-government in their own homeland in coexistence with Israel.

In this vision, the dream vision, the Palestine living next door to Israel is not Syria, not Lebanon, but Belgium: moderate, modern, tolerant, rational, accommodating. And reconciled to the relatively humble plot of land it has been assigned by the lottery of history. In this Palestine the people have chosen the satisfactions of ordinary bourgeois life -- the pursuit of happiness, as we Americans say -- over the thrills of revenge and revolution.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the man who negotiated the deal with the P.L.O., waxes poetic on this score: "Once we shall be over the disputes of the past, all of us will join forces to build a new Middle East like the United States or like United Europe: a continent or region of great tolerance, of real freedom, of science, of education, of understanding."

Hence the great emphasis in the Israel- P.L.O. peace accord on economic cooperation and regional development. (It takes up nearly a quarter of the text.) The peace plan hinges on the assumption that once the Palestinians are given the opportunity to build their own homeland, they will find enough satisfaction in building to give up fighting. Which explains all the clauses devoted to transportation links and development banks, canal digging and grid linking -- mundane schemes of all kinds between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territory that conjure up a vision of nothing less than Benelux- on-the-Jordan.

Benelux, that picture-postcard association of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, sets the world standard for cooperative neighborliness. Unfortunately, however, the Arab Middle East does not look very much like Benelux. Eighteen states, and not a single functioning democracy. Among them, such spectacular failures in ordinary civil decency, let alone "great tolerance" and "real freedom," as Lebanon and Iraq.

Can Peres the dreamer be vindicated? With the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of the world has rushed to embrace the Western model of modernity: open, free, stable, boring. It is not impossible that the Palestinians may be joining the rush. In dispersion and under occupation, they have undergone a dramatic encounter with the West. It could not have helped having a sobering modernizing effect.

Modern enough to settle for a Belgium on sand? Let us hope. Because only in this case, only if the vision of Israelis and Palestinians building fiber- optic cables together is no fantasy, does this peace have a chance.