Albright Is Right to Go Through With Mideast Visit

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will go through with her scheduled visit to the Middle East next week despite Thursday’s terrorist outrage in a Jerusalem mall that killed seven people--including three Hamas suicide bombers--and wounded about 190. The decision to proceed in hopes of reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the right one, not because Albright’s venture holds any great prospects of success but because to have canceled it would have been to acknowledge that terrorism had once again achieved tactical success.

However, to do the right thing by directly involving the prestige of the secretary of State in a deeply troubled negotiating process does not assure an effective outcome. Albright’s trip, her first to the Mideast as secretary, is taking place precisely because President Clinton and his advisors have concluded that peace talks were perilously close to irretrievable breakdown, as much the victim of the bitter internal politics that rend the Israeli and Palestinian political leadership as of deliberate provocations like the Hamas attack.

The minimum level of mutual trust required for all good-faith negotiations has eroded virtually to the vanishing point in the wake of Palestinian terrorist attacks that have claimed more Israeli lives in the four years since the peace effort began than in all the previous years of Israel’s existence. Tensions were exacerbated Friday with the reported deaths of a number of Israeli soldiers in a raid in Lebanon.

Albright is a diplomat, not a magician. She cannot make trust reappear overnight, any more than she can stiffen the resolve of leaders whose apparent lack of commitment to reaching a settlement based on compromises leaves them vulnerable to the extremists in their camps. All she can do is try to cut through the emotions of the moment to remind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of the terrible and enduring costs their people are destined to pay if serious negotiations are not soon resumed.

Certainly Arafat can get tougher with Palestinian anti-peace elements. But to insist, as Israeli officials do, that he is ultimately responsible for all terrorist acts is absurd. The terrorists have their agenda; it is to murder peace hopes. Netanyahu and Arafat must not let that agenda be forced on them. That should be the essence of Albright’s message.