A three-sided peace.

Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) form a triangle for Mideast peace. But with increased terrorism in Israel and the West Bank, a challenged and indecisive PLO, and a growing antipeace-process mood in Israel, will the triangle hold?

The breakdown of the peace process would be tragic, considering the distance already traveled by the peacemakers. The 1993 decision of Israel's Labor government to negotiate with the PLO represented a courageous reversal of policy. It was undertaken because party leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres recognized that continued military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was hurting Israel more than helping her.

The Palestinian intifada ("uprising"), begun in December 1987, forced a major deployment of Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza. Stones were answered with bullets, kids were chased, weeping mothers were filmed for the world news--the worst press for Israel since the Lebanon war in 1981. The Israeli occupation had lasted more than twenty-five years, going back to the 1967 war. Rabin and Peres decided to end it and to redirect the army to safeguard Israel's borders.

Since the Israeli-Palestinian agreement in November 1993, the PLO has had to make the difficult transition from revolution to governing. PLO chief Yasir Arafat is "all things to all men": revolutionary, politician, organizer, loner; he is a cautious man who survives by deals, an autocrat who signs all the checks and who alone knows where all the PLO money is--which leads to questions of financial accountability.

Is Arafat failing the challenge of governing? Since the PLO began administering Gaza, there has been a rising mountain of garbage, no new housing, schools, medical facilities, or jobs. Few ordinary Palestinians feel that the PLO agreement with Israel has inaugurated a new era of hope for them.

The PLO's ineffectiveness is underscored by the successes of its new archrival, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. Hamas has effectively provided badly needed technical, medical, and educational services to Gazans. It has given money to families whose male provider has been denied work in Israel. To Hamas, the PLO-Israeli agreement is a sellout to the Zionists, deserving of God's punishment, as graffiti attest on the walls of Arab towns and villages throughout the country. Despite its failures, however, the PLO remains the choice of most Palestinians who are not yet ready to support the radical aims of Hamas and throw out all hope for peace with Israel.

The signing of the Israeli-PLO agreement drew Jordan into the peace process, formalizing a de facto thirty-year peace between King Hussein and Israel. Israeli leaders had regularly warned the king of assassination plots and made it clear to Syria and other Arab states that any attack on Jordan would be treated as an attack on Israel herself. Hussein, for his part, prevented terrorists from crossing his borders into Israel.

Should the continuing peace process lead to the establishment of an Arab state in Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli leaders believe that for the sake of stability and security it should take the form of a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation. Not without reason. Jordan is today more than 60 percent Palestinian, and the thought of a totally independent Arab Palestine between Israel and Jordan causes as much fear in Amman as it does in Jerusalem. The alternative for Hussein and for the Israelis is one Palestinian-Jordanian confederal state, in which the Palestinians will have political self-expression but the Hashemite monarchy and its Bedouin Legion can control extremism and terrorism.

The bind in which the PLO finds itself is that to remain a politically effective organization it must negotiate with Israel to achieve self-determination for the Palestinians. But in negotiating with Israel, it is vulnerable to the charge made by Hamas and other rejectionists that it has abandoned its revolutionary zeal and, under the camouflage of peace, signed away Arab Palestine to Jewish settlers. Further, by continuing West Bank Jewish housing construction and threatening the expropriation of Arab land in and around Jerusalem, the Israeli government has handed Hamas a club with which to beat the PLO.

To placate the revolutionaries, Arafat and his advisors have deliberately declined to amend the Palestinian National Convention, which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. In so doing, they alarm Israelis about the ultimate territorial intentions of the Palestinians, and hand the hawkish Likud party a club with which to beat dovish Labor. To make matters worse, Likud has mischievously sought to scuttle the peace process over the issue of Jerusalem. And in Washington, Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.) and other prominent politicians have called for the immediate relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

But the PLO bind extends further. Increased Arab terrorism sours more Israelis on peace and causes them to ask: If Arafat will not or cannot stop Arab terrorism, how can he be trusted to keep the peace once he heads a state alongside Israel? Yet a PLO strike against Hamas could ignite a Palestinian civil war. To keep peace in his seriously divided house, Arafat rhetorically condemns terrorism but actually does little to discourage it. Meanwhile, as Hamas weakens the PLO and the Israelis recoil from terrorism, time is running out for both Arafat and Rabin.

Conversations with Israelis and Palestinians convince me that if the triangle for peace breaks apart, killing will resume at a level greater than what we have seen from terrorism. A failed peace will trigger more intifada, more military occupation, more Jewish housing construction, and a shattering of the Palestinian dream of self-determination. A failed peace will mean a victory for terrorism, for the peace rejectionists in Hamas and Likud, and would be a severe blow to American peace initiatives.

Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress, has argued that the slowness of the peace process invites terrorism (New York Times, January 26, 1995). He believes that lasting peace hinges on the prospect of Palestinian statehood, and urges Israeli leaders to declare their intention to support a limited Palestinian state. "By setting the limits of statehood now, Israel can disabuse those who entertain the false notion that a full return to the pre-1967 borders is possible."

Will Prime Minister Rabin muster the courage to declare Palestinian statehood as the goal of the peace process? Will he urge King Hussein to work for a federal solution to the question of Palestinian independence? Will he discontinue Jewish settlements in Arab territory and begin to dismantle them? And will Yasir Arafat have the courage to convince by deeds, and not only words, that he intends to lead the Palestinians to statehood in peace with Israel?

The coming months hold the answers to these questions. But one thing is certain: If the peace triangle breaks down, it will be harder for Washington to justify sending billions of dollars annually to bring security, peace, and prosperity to the peoples of that timeless and troubled land.