Risking Peace

By JAMES WALSH

The past few years have been an age of miracles. Unimaginable events, consummations devoutly wished for but never really expected, have succeeded one another as if the Creator had whistled up a new world. The Berlin Wall tumbles. The Soviet empire melts away. Nelson Mandela, free at last, begins to bring democracy to black South Africans. Now comes what must be considered one of the greatest miracles of all: the first acknowledgment by Israelis and Palestinians that they can share the land both call home.

On paper, what a handful of bargainers have written looks rather small, a narrow agreement on limited self-rule for the 770,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and 1 million more in the West Bank, starting in the oasis of Jericho. Yet the psychological breakthrough in recognizing each other's humanity is huge, the step neither Israelis nor Palestinians would take before. Making it work will take years to realize, but only a failure of the test they have set themselves can undo what has been done. The nagging question is whether these two can live with a victory for peace rather than for Israel or Palestine.

That leaders of these sworn enemies should have made such a leap of faith into the unknown proves that history, of which the Holy Land has a surfeit, at long last is losing its death grip on them. For nearly 100 years, Jews and Arabs have been like Jacob and Esau, battling in the womb for the rights of the firstborn in their ancient motherland. The accommodation they announced last week, though still very rough and capable of igniting bonfires of violence among opponents of compromise, had one transcendent merit. A deal negotiated in secret by foes who had chosen to meet face to face signaled that they could lay aside their perpetual sense of victimhood.

Miracle in this case really means a kind of freedom: the two are emerging from the clutches of history to find that strength lies in looking ahead, creating their own choices. That does not mean that today's choice is easy. Answered prayers can be cruel in their own right, proved by the disillusionments that have followed other recent breakthroughs -- the hardships of unified Germany, Russia's dismal paralysis. But Israel and the P.L.O. have seized the moment to clear a vast mental hurdle. With enough good faith on both sides, along with crucial U.S.diplomacy and aid from other countries, the two could build their promised lands.

It will call on the best they have. Yitzhak Rabin has said time and again that Israel must rise above its complexes and trust the world. Palestinians will have to mature politically and start taking care of business. Both partners will have to rein in their fanatics, when zealotry threatens not just their own but the other side.

Inertia has been the curse of Arab-Jewish relations for too long. Each people came to nurse profound grievances against the other based on mutually exclusive interpretations of history. Jews knew that they had been dispossessed by Caesar, dispersed into exile and repeatedly persecuted, in fact nearly destroyed; returning to the home God promised to Abraham, they saw themselves in mortal danger again. Arabs viewed modern Israel as colonialism by a new name, one more indignity visited on them in a 1,000-year-old struggle between the West and Islam.

What began with small-scale skirmishes, like a dispute over access to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, escalated over time into a millennial blood feud involving the entire Middle East and turning the region into a pivot of superpower conflict. In light of that record, one of Rabin's statements last week was extraordinary. Explaining the peace formula to his government partners, Israel's Prime Minister declared, "The past no longer matters." To a nation founded on the premise that the past must be remembered so as not to be repeated, the remark verged on blasphemy. But Rabin did not forget the Holocaust; he had contrived to show that generosity can -- must -- triumph over it.

Of course, he has reason to be cautious. So does the P.L.O. In subscribing to a deal that for now offers only limited gains, Yasser Arafat has incurred assassination threats from Palestinian hard-liners in exile. Conflict for these warriors has become a way of life, rejection their religion. It will take all Arafat's reputed wizardry to keep them in check.

His tougher challenge lies among Palestinians inside the occupied territories. Fed up with the P.L.O.'s failures, young Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank have been radicalized, many of them embracing militant fundamentalist Islam. Conversely, Arafat was compelled toward moderation after the Soviet Union's demise deprived him of a superpower patron, and even more when his mistaken allegiance to Iraq over Kuwait cost him his bankroll from the gulf states. Without money, without visible progress in the two-year-old peace talks he had endorsed, fundamentalism's rise threatened to make him irrelevant.

So the man seen by most Israelis as a symbol of terrorism surprised his rivals by accepting a little instead of all-or-nothing: home rule in the squalid Gaza Strip, a hotbed of extremism, before any full autonomy for the West Bank outside of Jericho. The Gaza Strip had been the orphan no one wanted; certainly not Israelis, whose policing of the turbulent slums has become a shame and burden to them. So many protesters have been killed, wounded and thrown into jail that Jews had come to see the suppression as a moral cancer they had to excise. To save himself, Arafat is gambling with his life that the departure of Israeli soldiers, combined with infusions of outside aid, will win back power from the fundamentalists.

Violence from both sides is an obvious pitfall. If negotiators do not hurry along specifics for enacting the deal, naysayers could niggle it to death. The P.L.O. must transform its loose structure, unruly factions and preference for ambiguity into practical governance. Arab states, which have always sought to keep the Palestinian issue under their thumb, will need to be mollified into cooperation. But since the Palestinian millstone has prevented them from bringing prosperity to their own societies, they appear ready to go along.

The biggest decisions still lie ahead: what happens ultimately to Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, what happens to Jerusalem, can Palestinians be trusted with a truly independent state? Offsetting these perils has been the Israeli government's remarkable change of heart in reaching out to the P.L.O., and Arafat's unexpected change of mind in starting with less than everything. For too long both sides have assumed they operated in a matrix of power they could not control: the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, the cold war. They are now free to live with each other, separate but equal. Ben-Gurion's definition of realism, like Joshua's trumpets, is blowing down the walls of Jericho.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: HALF A CENTURY OF HATE

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington