A grim game of diplomatic chess

In the first few hours after last week's Israeli helicopter collision, politician after politician appeared on Israeli television to express grief, to highlight the sense that the whole country was united in mourning, to send messages of condolence to 73 newly bereaved families.

Only one man departed from the consensual generalities, the former prime minister, now Labour opposition leader, Shimon Peres.

Mr Peres was out of the country at the time. State TV tracked him down in Geneva. And perhaps that dislocation from the sombre national mood prompted him to express some of the hard truths his Knesset colleagues preferred to postpone to less painful times. Or perhaps Mr Peres, at 73 now nearing the end of his political career, was just prepared to be more outspoken.

But he alone it was who urged his grieving countryfolk not to delude themselves about what was happening on the Israeli Lebanese border. He alone who alluded to the grim game of diplomatic chess being played out between Israel and Lebanon's real rulers, the Syrians, and the inevitability of much more loss of Israeli life, in accidents like last week's or in clashes with the increasingly daring and well equipped pro Iranian Hizbullah gunmen of south Lebanon, unless an Israeli Syrian Lebanese peace treaty was quickly achieved.

It was long overdue, said Mr Peres, for Israel to acknowledge that it had to pay "the price of peace" with Syria and Lebanon, to relinquish the Golan Heights mountain ridge that it captured from Syria in the Six Day War 30 years ago. "The tragedy in Lebanon has to be ended," he said. "I don't believe it can be ended without Syria."

Mr Peres's plain speaking caused an immediate flurry of indignation. Government ministers expressed their dismay that the opposition leader could engage in partisan politics at such a moment of tragedy.

The man set to replace him as Labour Party leader later this year, Ehud Barak, hurried to assure the mourning public that "at this time, there is no left and no right, no coalition and no opposition, we are all one in our sorrow." And when, later that evening, Mr Peres gave a second interview to another TV channel, he chose not to repeat his earlier remarks.

Unpalatable though it might have been at the height of Israel's anguish over the 73 deaths, the prospect of many more deaths in the coming months across the Israeli Lebanese border does indeed seem inevitable unless a negotiating breakthrough is achieved.

The soldiers aboard the two ill fated Sikorsky transport helicopters were bound for positions Israel has occupied for 12 years now in its self declared "security zone" in south Lebanon. This narrow strip of Israeli held territory, stretching across the international border inside southern Lebanon, is intended by Israel to serve as a buffer zone, to prevent Hizbullah and other militias infiltrating across the border and targeting Israeli civilians.

But, as Israel's own internal security minister, Avigdor Kahalani, acknowledged recently, the Israeli troops in the zone have become "sitting ducks", easy targets for Hizbullah attack. Some 200 Israeli soldiers have been killed there since the zone was established. And many times that number of Lebanese, serving in the Israeli funded South Lebanon Army militia, have also lost their lives.

BEFORE the helicopter collision, Mr Kahalani had horrified his cabinet colleagues by demanding that Israel relinquish the security zone, prepare to pull back unilaterally to the border, and ask the US to establish a multinational force to keep the peace.

But, as Mr Peres indicated, a more straightforward approach would be to negotiate directly with Syria, which maintains a force of some 35,000 men inside Lebanon, and which could, if it wanted to, halt the arms supplies to Hizbullah that come through Damascus airport, and prevent most, if not all, of the attacks on the Israelis:

The bottom line, of course, is the price. And the equation is simple. Syria has claimed repeatedly that it would make peace with Israel, and stop the Hizbullah attacks, if Israel would give back the Golan. The late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was trying to achieve a deal along these lines when he was assassinated in November 1995. Mr Peres was heading that way, too, until he lost last May's elections to Benjamin Netanyahu.

The written guidelines of Mr Netanyahu's Likud led coalition appear to rule out a land for peace deal on the Golan. But in recent weeks Mr Netanyahu has been making definite overtures to Damascus. And once the last of Israel's 73 Lebanese bound helicopter crash victims have been laid to rest this week, politicians other than Mr Peres will doubtless return to the issue of how to achieve calm on Israel's last war front.

Fresh from its success in mediating last month's Israeli Palestinian deal on Hebron, the Clinton administration would be doing the region a service if it now turned its attention to Israel's northern frontier.

Not, as Mr Kahalani suggested, by bypassing Syria and attempting to build a multinational peacekeeping force for the Israeli Lebanese border, but by seeking to mediate an Israeli Syrian peace accord, an effort that would put Syrian President Hafez Assad's peace making claims to the test, along with Mr Netanyahu's apparent new pragmatism.