Mideast peace remains elusive, but every president must try

Forty years ago today an Asso- ciated Press story reported that, “U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright proposed that a Middle East peace settlement be shaped and guaranteed by the United Nation, buttressed by a separate U.S. treaty committed to the security of Israel.” That sentence, pulled from the Aug. 23, 1970, Vindicator is as good a snapshot as any of the long, imaginative, earnest — and largely futile — attempts to bring some semblance of peace to the Middle East.

Fulbright made his proposal after a cease fire had been reached between Egypt and Israel in what was known as the War of Attrition, three years of skirmishes that followed the Six Day War of June 1967.

And even though the death of Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser a month later would lead to the presidency of Anwar El Sadat, who would eventually pay with his life for pursing peace with Israel, Fulbright’s proposal fell flat. There have been three more wars between Israel and its neighbors since 1970, two Intefadahs pursued by Palestinians in the occupied territories and Israel and on-going violence between Israel and Gaza.

It’s time again

Against that history and much more, President Barack Obama and his envoys, chiefly Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, have prevailed on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to open face-to-face talks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are coming to Washington, D.C., for negotiations that will open Sept. 2.

Some would say that there is nothing to negotiate. But that could have been said about any of the talks between Israel and its neighbors for the last half century.

There have always been seemingly unscalable walls between the parties in the Middle East, based on centuries of distrust, territorial claims and, yes, hatred. The extremes on all those issues can be found among Palestinians who believe Israelis must be driven into the sea and fundamentalists on the other side who espouse a scripturally based vision of a Greater Israel.

It is the job of negotiators on both sides of the table to put their intractable constituents behind them and to seek ground on which peace can become possible.

Every administration since that of President Harry S. Truman has tried to broker a peace, with varying degrees of commitment and commensurate levels of success and failure.

Obama begins his turn now. And while it is historically appropriate to be skeptical, none of us should be hoping for anything other than some level of success.