Breaking the Code

THERE ARE THOSE nations which, by the very nature of their regimes, seem to be grist for self-styled international code decipherers. Kremlinology, the effort to analyze the internal power structure of the Soviet Union by use of various symbols, such as who was standing next to whom in what photograph, who received a favorable review in this or that Soviet academic journal, or who accompanied Brezhnev on his Eastern European tour, is not by any means an exact science. But it is a legitimate science, in that the American media recognizes such speculation as worthwhile, and newspapers and the networks allow commentators to ramble on at great length about, what signs they are reading from Moscow. To varying degrees, depending on their importance to the United States during a given period, a large number of nations have been accorded status as enigmas. This means that code deciphering in their cases is legitimate, and that public statements of policy which may seem innocuous or ordinary must be surveyed closely, so that is it possible to interpret what is being said between the lines. The operating principle here is that something is always being said between the lines.

As a case in point, one might take Yassar Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Every month some newspaper or semi-intellectual magazine will publish an article which purports to demonstrate, by close textual analysis, and by supplying what is left out but supposedly implicit, that the PLO has decided to recognize Israel's right to exist. This method of studying international developments is not entirely without validity, and in the case of the PLO is even necessary, since it is not particularly likely that Arafat will, in the near future, issue a point-by-point peace proposal. But code deciphering has clearly gotten out of hand. It is possible to go to Middle East seminars and encounter groups of people who consider the Israel recognition question a false issue, having long ago been settled, and raised now only as a lame justification for Israeli intransigence. And the citation of the PLO's formal recognition of Israel will simply be an obscure interview with some PLO representative in Western Europe, published in a less-than-internationally-known journal, in which the Palestinian, probably inadvertently, left out certain standard rhetorical phrases.

ISRAEL HAS NEVER really been accorded this enigma status. On rare occasions a speech or an internal political shuffle will be examined closely in an effort to determine whether the event signifies a key change in governmental policy. But by and large, policy statements from Israel are taken at face value, as they probably should be, and little code-reading goes on. That Israel has not been treated as a political mystery-land is in a way unfortunate for the Rabin government, since within the last month an internal personnel change has taken place which might be a signal for a major change in policy. Shlomo Avineri, a noted scholar of Marx and Hegel who served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was appointed Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, Israel's second ranking foreign affairs post. Avineri is extremely dovish by Israeli standards--in a recent issue of Foreign Policy he expressed support for return of the occupied territories and for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state as part of a general peace agreement. The fact that someone articulating views so radically different from the policy of the government has been moved into a key position of responsibility might have caused at least some degree of international confusion. Although as Director-General, Avineri will not sit in the cabinet, the power of the position combined with his established reputation as a scholar should make his influence keen.

The Avineri appointment does not point however, to a substantive change in Israel's position on negotiations with the Arabs. It is probably no more than an indication of the desire of the Rabin government--a government headed by a former professional soldier and composed in large part of men who have made their careers in politics--to develop a better working relationship with the academic community. It is possible that Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, who apparently was the moving force behind the Avineri appointment, is seeking to establish the Foreign Ministry as the conciliatory, doveish wing of the government, in contrast to Shimon Peres' hard-line Ministry of Defense. Allon has on occasion indicated, and here I too become a code decipherer, that his views on peace negotiations and a final settlement are considerably more flexible than those of his prominent collegues in the cabinet. But it is far more likely that the emergence of Avineri is without major significance in terms of policy.

Nonetheless, from a public relations standpoint, Israel would have done well to use the appointment to set critics of Israeli policy slightly off balance--the speculation about whether a new set of peace proposals was in the offing could have given Rabin and his government a brief respite from condemnation and rhetorical attack by most of the world, including Israel's former allies in Western Europe. Unfortunately, no such public relations opportunity is available, since Israel has never been a code decipherer's paradise, and the Avineri appointment remained no more than an Associated Press dispatch.