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Sadly enough, the Camp David talks on Palestinian autonomy have all but ground to a halt, at least for the moment. Egyptian and Israeli negotiators met in Washington last week with President Carter's special Middle East envoy, Sol Linowitz. U.S. officials were pleased when the Israelis for the first time proposed that Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip play a role in deciding questions of land use. But on the major sticking points, like the nature of a Palestinian governing authority for the West Bank and its relationship to Israeli security forces, none of the parties are expecting progress until the expected summit involving Carter, Begin and Sadat, and that will not take place until January at the earliest.
Thus the U.S. may find itself squeezed once again by the linkage between the issues of the Arab-Israeli dispute and gulf security. For all the evanescence of past alignments and realignments in the Middle East, the region has also been cursed with one geopolitical constant: more than 30 years of hostility between Arabs and Israelis. If the Iraq-Iran war, which pits Arabs against Persians and Arabs against Arabs, should continue to flare, then the area will have not one but two intracable, explosive conflicts. That is two more than the Middle East, or the world, can afford.
—By Strobe Talbott. Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington and Wilton Wynn/Beirut