Will Peace Get a Seat at the Table? : Mideast: Israel’s acceptance of a conference with Arabs is encouraging, but no one should expect a quick and tidy outcome.

The international conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict, to be called by the United States and the Soviet Union in October, means only that Israel and its Arab neighbors will confront one another at the bargaining table rather than on the battlefield; tangible progress toward actual peace will be a long time coming. As Winston Churchill said after the early stages of World War II, it is not the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning. Many disappointments lie ahead, and it is far from clear that even a piece of peace will emerge.

Yet the conference can itself provide critical benefits. Its very convocation will score a point for the Arabs. It was they who floated the idea of an international conference in the late 1980s, when the Reagan Administration had essentially abandoned the peacemaking efforts of its predecessors. The theory was that bringing together the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council would put added pressure on both the United States and Israel by engaging states partial to the Arabs. Precisely for that reason, Israel refused even to consider a conference.

The world has moved on since then. The Soviet Union has changed from being a spoiler in Arab-Israeli peacemaking to being neutral, and now, as ratified at this week’s Moscow summit, to being an active supporter of U.S. peacemaking diplomacy. Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime has stopped open-ended Soviet support of Syria, unleashed a flood of emigrants to Israel, and is about to reestablish diplomatic relations severed during the 1967 Six-Day War. For similar reasons, Israel has less to fear from a U.N. role--which, in fact, has been reduced to that of observer.

No doubt, the October conference will be marked by interminable wrangling over what, to the lay person, will seem to be trivialities, calling to mind the U.S.-North Vietnamese standoff over “the shape of the table” at the Paris peace talks in the 1960s. When longstanding enemies get together to try something different, however, small procedural matters are important. Some will determine substance. The dispute over which Palestinians will be permitted to attend the conference, for instance, has implications for the status of East Jerusalem and the future role of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But much of the procedural squabbling will also be important to buy time, not just for each party to jockey for position, but also to adjust to new realities. For the conference has two functions. The more obvious is to set terms and conditions for a series of bilateral negotiations between Israel and its neighbors on individual issues--the meat of the bargaining process. But the more important function is for all parties to undergo a political and psychological metamorphosis.

The convening of the conference will give Palestinians a legitimacy they have never had before, even though their delegation will be highly constrained by Israel. And Israel will gain both formal and symbolic acceptance by all the contiguous states--especially the most obdurate, Syria--even if Saudi Arabia is only represented indirectly through a Gulf Cooperation Council delegation. When this happens, the message will go out to all corners of the Arab world: Like it or not, the Jewish state is here to stay.

The analogy is with Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Few people remember that the Egyptian president’s speech to the Knesset was a standard Arab indictment of Israeli position and practice. But as one Knesset member said: “The fact that Sadat was standing here spoke so loudly, I couldn’t hear what he was saying.”

Today, no one can say precisely what will be the psychological impact on the different parties, only that both regional and internal politics will never again be the same. Indeed, the conference is important to change not just the politics of Arab-Israeli relations, but also the domestic politics of each party, most notably the Palestinians and Israelis. As a genuine peace process gets under way, the Palestinians will have to begin deciding their bottom line: What are their minimum requirements for abandoning a struggle that has occupied most of this century, and who among them can legitimately strike a bargain?

Even more important will be changes within Israel. Today’s politics, with its built-in resistance to risk-taking, is a product of times when little seemed possible to transform Israel’s situation as an enclave in a largely hostile Arab world. But with technical acceptance by Arab states and a peace process that might bear fruit, Israel for the first time can begin contemplating its future, including possibilities that have never before existed. No nation’s domestic politics could stay the same in the face of such a radical change of circumstance.

With the convening of the peace conference, the U.S. role must intensify, not diminish. By past form, a year from now Washington will hear from the region more voices of disillusion than of hope, as issues of deep moment continue to resist resolution. The Administration will have to continue showing the patience and persistence that produced this small but significant breakthrough.

Pressing to turn today’s symbolism of peace into tomorrow’s reality will be as good a test as any of what President Bush calls America’s commitment to a “new world order.”