Grappling with the Tactics of Peace

"Getting down to the nitty gritty" was the way an Egyptian spokesman informally described it. Indeed, that was the level of talks last week as uniformed Egyptian and Israeli officers faced one another at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Only a week earlier Foreign Ministers of both countries, along with their colleagues from Jordan, the Soviet Union and the U.S., had opened the first formal Middle East peace talks since 1949. But after the top diplomats went home, it was the turn of the generals to grapple with the technicalities and tactics of disengagement. How successfully Major General Mordechai Gur of Israel and Brigadier General Taha El Mag-doub of Egypt dealt with those details would set the pace of negotiations.

Before the two generals and their aides could get down to specifics, however, they had to wait for the returns from the national election in Israel. The talks themselves were threatened by the powerful conservative Likud coalition, led by longtime Opposition Leader Menachem Begin (TIME, Jan. 7). Had Likud won the most seats in Israel's Knesset (Parliament), the country might have changed its position from one favoring talks with the Arabs to a hardline, no-negotiation policy. But after a record 83% of 2,040,000 eligible voters marked their ballots, the results showed that Premier Golda Meir's Labor Party had won again.

Still, the victory was by no means clear cut. Flying into Washington last week for discussions with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan brought along short-term good news and long-term bad news. The good news for Mrs. Meir's Labor Party was that the government, although it had lost six of its 57 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, would be able to form another coalition of perhaps as many as 69 members. It thus could continue the disengagement talks. The bad news was that its most essential coalition partner would probably be the National Religious Party, which in spite of a 10% drop in popular votes had kept its critical eleven Knesset seats. In return for siding with Labor, the N.R.P. was likely to make one firm foreign policy demand: that Israel not surrender those parts of its "ancestral home" around Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron that were captured in the 1967 war.

Winners in last week's voting, which allotted seats on the basis of party slate showings rather than to individual candidates, included Armored Force General Shlomo Lahat and outspoken Housewife Shulamit Aloni. Lahat campaigned for mayor of Tel Aviv as though he were waging a military campaign. "Give me a broom and I will sweep this city clean" was his slogan. In a country where sizable numbers of nonpracticing Jews apparently resent the religious laws that apply to everybody, Aloni appeared to have gained at least two seats in the Knesset for her small civil rights party, whose platform called for civil marriage and divorce in Israel. Jerusalem's widely known Mayor Teddy Kollek was also reelected, but a boycott by eligible Arab voters cut into his total.

Worst Loss. Nationally, the biggest force in the election was Likud, which increased its Knesset seats from 31 to 38. But Likud equivocated on the issue of continuing negotiations in Geneva, and this saved Labor. Even so, Labor's loss was its worst since the country was created. Yet the government quickly moved to continue talks in Geneva as though it had won a sizable victory. Said Foreign Minister Abba Eban: "This government's mandate to negotiate a disengagement has not been removed by the election. There is a peace mystique here much stronger than the election figures on the surface indicate."

Gur in Geneva and Dayan in Washington sketched the same Israeli proposal for disengagement. Under it, Israeli forces now spread across Sinai and onto the west bank of the Suez Canal would withdraw in stages to positions around the defensible Mitla and Giddi passes. In return, the Israelis expected Egypt to withdraw its Second and Third armies from Sinai along with armor, artillery and missiles and replace them with only "symbolic police forces." Between the two would be interposed United Nations forces similar to those now attempting to maintain the cease-fire around Suez City on the west bank. Such an arrangement would leave the Egyptians proudly in Sinai and at the same time provide the Israelis with the security necessary to defend their cities. More than that, the agreement would allow Egypt to dredge and reopen the Suez Canal as a working commercial waterway--the best security of all.

Disengagement is the sixth and ultimate point of Henry Kissinger's ceasefire agreement worked out in early November. The Egyptian position is that in accepting the earlier five points, including U.N. truce observers and an exchange of prisoners of war, Cairo gave more than it got. Thus the Egyptians maintain in public that the sixth point, disengagement, should be carried out unilaterally by the Israelis. Privately, both sides broadly hint that they expect a settlement on the issue this month.

Better Results. The reason for quickly arriving at an agreement is not difficult to fathom: President Anwar Sadat must soon be able to show not only his own people but also more intractable Arab leaders that his strategy of trusting Kissinger and going the negotiating route can produce better results than a resumption of fighting. For its part, Israel would prefer an agreement to end the rash of truce violations that have claimed 14 dead and 60 wounded since the ceasefire. In one incident last week, three Israeli soldiers were killed when Syrian mortar shells hit their trench. On the Suez front on election day, there were 72 incidents involving mortar fire, small arms and antitank missiles. Israeli leaders warn that without agreement on disengagement, the Geneva talks could collapse; some are putting the matter even more strongly. General Ariel Sharon, the Suez-front commander who won a Knesset seat on the Likud list and will leave the army to take it, says bluntly: "We will not accept a war of attrition." In a talk last week with TIME Chief of Correspondents Murray J. Gart and Jerusalem Bureau Chief William Marmon, Sharon threatened: "If the Egyptians don't stop violating the ceasefire, the war will start again. And in that case we will force them back to the west side of the canal very quickly."

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