An Israeli detour

THE CLOSER Israelis and Palestinians come to negotiations for a final-status resolution of their conflict, the more important symbols become. Just as Israelis need to see that the post-Arafat leadership of the Palestinians is willing to stop terrorism, Palestinians need evidence that Israel will not go on indefinitely creating ''facts on the ground" -- taking land and enlarging settlements on the West Bank.

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For this reason, the road map sponsored by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia calls for the Palestinians to dismantle terrorist networks and for Israel to freeze settlement expansion. This is the core of the road map's initial phase, and it is based on the proposition that symbolism matters; that without persuading each people that the future need not forever repeat the past, the leaders in both camps will be unable to make the concessions needed for a just and durable peace.

Viewed against this background, the psychological connotations and the timing of Israel's recent approval for construction of 3,500 new housing units in Maaleh Adunim, could hardly have been more jarring. For Palestinians, as for members of the Israeli peace camp, the implicit message of this thickening of an existing town outside Israel's 1967 frontier is that -- regardless of what the Palestinians are doing to end terrorism -- the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will unilaterally decide how many more Israelis are to live across what is known as the Green Line.

A calendar of events leading to political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas may proceed if extremists do not succeed in disrupting the current improvement in relations. This summer Sharon is to carry out his promised disengagement from Gaza. If this precedent-setting withdrawal from Israeli settlements on Palestinian land can be realized not as a unilateral Israeli move but in coordination with the Palestinians, the die will be cast for the more encompassing negotiations that must take place if there is to be an overall peace agreement.

Those negotiations should not be impeded by the planned increase of housing units in Maaleh Adumim. In the Israeli-Palestinian talks that were held at Taba in January 2001, there was agreement that Maaleh Adumim, which is on the outskirts of Jerusalem, would be absorbed into Israel. Pragmatists in both camps recognize that a couple of the large settlements next to Israeli proper will have to be ceded to Israel in a two-state accord and that the Palestinian state will have to receive comparable territory elsewhere in compensation. The sooner final-status negotiations begin, the easier it will be to undo the damage done by the wrong symbolic gestures.