It is hard to exaggerate the risks involved in the Middle East summit that began this week at the Camp David presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. The main players — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and U.S. President Bill Clinton — are gambling that the stakes will force each other to make a deal that has been long-delayed, and deliberately so. There is no guarantee that any agreement can be reached, or that once done, it will stick. As Mr. Clinton noted before the talks began, "If this were easy, it would have been done a long time ago." But it was not done, and in the 22 years since the first Camp David accord was struck, the positions seemed to have sharpened and the gaps have not been closed.
History weighs heavily on Mr. Clinton. He desperately wants a secure peace in the Middle East to be part of his legacy. He sees inspiration in the deal brokered by his predecessor, Mr. Jimmy Carter, who brought then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Camp David and produced the unthinkable: a peace deal between their two countries. This week, the two teams will be locked in for "as long as it takes" to reach a peace deal. The summit is scheduled to go for at least one week, but could go on for two. It forced U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to withdraw from this week's meeting of G8 foreign ministers; Mr. Clinton has hinted that he is ready to skip the G8 leaders' summit next week if so required.
The first Camp David agreement will be hanging over all these sessions, as Mr. David Hirst explains in his article on this page. That accord left key issues for the future. They include: the fate of the 170,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the 3.6 million U.N.-registered Palestinian refugees who want to return to their homeland, the final status of Jerusalem, claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians as their capital, and the final shape of any Palestinian state. Twenty-two years ago, the chief negotiators assumed that fleshing out the Camp David framework would build confidence between Middle Easterners. That was not happened.