Raging Against Peace

By Bruce W. Nelan

It could have been 1987, the early days of the Palestinian intifadeh, all over again. In the dusty, barricaded streets of the Gaza Strip, steel-helmeted Israeli troops played deadly hide-and-seek with bands of rock-throwing Palestinian youths. Three knife-wielding men set upon Israeli settlers, who shot two of the attackers, one fatally. Riots swept through occupied West Bank towns; soldiers fired tear gas and bullets that killed eight Arabs and wounded dozens. The hard-line Islamic movement Hamas called on Arabs to take revenge on Israelis for the massacre of at least 30 Palestinians in Hebron two weeks ago. The Israeli government poured in troops to enforce a 24-hour curfew and sealed off the occupied territories with roadblocks, effectively confining most Palestinians to their homes. "The purpose of the curfews," said Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, "is to prevent a total uprising."

Israeli soldiers inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs were scrubbing away the pools of blood, but it will not be so easy to clean up the political wreckage of the Hebron massacre. Talk of peace has been thrust aside by something close to urban warfare in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians are demanding the disarmament and dismantling of the Jewish settlements before they return to the negotiations. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, no lover of the settlements, is under deeply conflicting political pressures about how to respond, and many feel he has failed to do enough. Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat will be damned by his own people if he does resume talks, and damned by history if he does not. When Dr. Baruch Goldstein walked into the Hebron shrine and opened fire on rows of kneeling worshippers, his intention was not just to kill Arabs but also to destroy the peace process that promised to end decades of bloody struggle over the occupied territories. If a way cannot be found to allow both sides to fulfill the pledge they made on the White House lawn last September, Goldstein will have succeeded.

Only 48 hours before the Kiryat Arba settler pulled the trigger on his Galil assault rifle, P.L.O. negotiator Nabil Shaath and Israeli Major General Amnon Shahak had reached agreement in Cairo on specific steps to carry out the scheduled withdrawal of Israel's military forces from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho. On March 11, according to their plan, Israel would release 3,000 Palestinian prisoners. On March 17, troops would begin to pull out of the Gaza Strip and Jericho. By April 12, one day before the original deadline set last September, the Israeli withdrawal from those first test-case areas for Palestinian self-rule would be completed.

The 111 bullets Goldstein fired left the peace process badly wounded. The rage that fueled the intifadeh had been tamped down by the Oslo accord last summer. Now it has exploded once more. And, said a Western diplomat in Cairo, "anybody who thinks this is as bad as it can get doesn't have much imagination." There was no sign that Palestinian anger was cooling. Tough restrictions on the Jewish settlers might have made an impression, but Rabin's steps so far have not. "The scale of the ((Israeli)) concessions humiliates us," said Zakaria al-Qaq, a political analyst in Jerusalem. "Our blood means nothing." The West Bank and Gaza Strip branch of Fatah, the main faction of the P.L.O., last week revoked its September pledge to refrain from violence, saying it is no longer committed "to any agreement to stop confrontation and struggle."

The renewed violence puts Arafat in a particularly dangerous position. His control of the P.L.O. was weakening even before the mosque massacre because he was perceived to be giving in to too many Israeli provisos, and people in the territories were coming to doubt they would ever get a taste of self-rule. He may now be in peril of losing his position altogether if he goes back to the peace talks without extracting some major new concessions from the Israelis. Bill Clinton has tried to rescue the process by inviting the negotiators to Washington. The Israelis have agreed, but the P.L.O. has not, even though Palestinian leaders concede privately that if talks break off at this stage, they may be over for good.

Arafat, who desperately wants the peace initiative to succeed, knows that he must try to exact a heavy price from Israel. In a letter to Rabin last week, he demanded that the Israeli government disarm Jewish settlers, who carry rifles issued by the Israeli army and often their own pistols as well. In addition, he called for some form of international monitoring in the territories, and for closing down hard-line ultranationalist Jewish settlements such as Kiryat Arba.

Rabin, who heads a minority government, to date has shown little willingness to take drastic measures to save the peace talks. In a bid to ease some of the tension, the Israelis released about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. That move scored almost no points for Rabin's government. P.L.O. spokesmen dismissed it as "cosmetic" and pointed out that the aborted Cairo agreement would have freed 3,000 prisoners this week. The Israeli right wing, meanwhile, denounced the government for releasing "terrorists" into the already seething territories.

Despite words of contrition, the government has taken only a feeble swipe at the extremist settlers. Rabin said he could agree to international observers in Gaza and Jericho -- something provided for in the Oslo agreement -- but not to an armed force of peacekeepers. He was adamant that negotiations on the fate of the Jewish settlements had to wait for two more years, as originally agreed in Oslo. The Prime Minister did, however, make clear his loathing for the Arab-hating militants of the extremist Kahane movement, to which Goldstein belonged. In effect he excommunicated them, telling them from the Knesset, "You are not part of the congregation of Israel. Rational Judaism spits you out."

In modest moves against the extremist settlers, the government ordered three-month detentions for five of them, but three managed to evade arrest. According to Police Minister Moshe Shahal, the two branches of Kahane's followers in Israel, Kach and Kahane Chai, have fewer than 100 active members each. "We know fairly well who belongs to these organizations," he said. But few of the wanted were cowed. In an interview on Israeli television, Baruch Marzel, one of the fugitive leaders of Kach, brazenly thumbed his nose at the government. "All the wanted are in contact with each other," he chortled. "This is a holiday."

Eighteen more militants have had their gun licenses revoked and their movements restricted. Even if the army succeeds in disarming them, they are not likely to go long without weapons, since all the Jewish settlements have well-stocked arsenals. Politically, Rabin finds it difficult to take guns away from many settlers in the face of Palestinian threats of revenge. If he did so and even one Israeli were to be killed as a result, Rabin's government could fall.

The response from the hard-line settlers has been defiance. Goldstein's burial site at Kiryat Arba is turning into a shrine, a destination for Jewish pilgrims. "Everyone who comes to visit wants to see the grave of Dr. Goldstein," said Zvi Katzover, the mayor of the settlement. "People appreciate what he has done." Goldstein's mother Miriam told interviewers that her son was a hero who had acted to head off an Arab attack. "He saved Jews," she said. "Look what responsibility he took on himself. For generations."

A preliminary investigation by Israeli security officials indicates that sloppy military procedures and negligence made it easier for Goldstein to carry out his atrocity. Only four soldiers and one officer were on guard at the mosque on Feb. 25, and though Goldstein was known as a man who had publicly threatened violence against Arabs, none of the sentries asked him why he was entering the building with a rifle. In a letter sent to Rabin last October, Islamic leaders complained that Goldstein had attacked the muezzin at the mosque and had poured "flammable materials" on its carpet.

When Goldstein entered the mosque and began firing, the troops outside did try to intervene, Israeli officials said, but they were blocked by worshippers who were either fleeing or trying to keep the soldiers out for fear they might intend to join the attack. The firing probably went on for two to three minutes. Investigators also determined that all the empty cartridges found inside matched Goldstein's rifle.

Not surprisingly, P.L.O. leaders dismissed Rabin's steps against the settlers as far too little, and some Israelis agreed. "If this week's decisions are a beginning," said Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, "they are a good move. But if it is going to be only one strike, it's totally unsatisfactory." At his headquarters in Tunis, Arafat insisted, "We are not asking for the moon."

Clinton had telephoned Arafat after the massacre and expressed optimism about the talks. "I think they want to come back" to the negotiating table, the President said. But even that seeming promise from Arafat angered some of his top lieutenants. Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the P.L.O. executive committee, denied there was any such agreement in principle and demanded, to start with, a U.N. Security Council guarantee of international protection for Palestinians in the occupied territories.

As they always do, the Palestinians hope Washington will push Israel into more concessions. They may have been encouraged by a comment from Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Robert Pelletreau, who said "more than tokenism" was required from Israel. To sound out Washington's intentions, Arafat dispatched Shaath to Washington last week for talks with + Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other U.S. officials. Shaath said the peace process was "the only guarantee that we will have real security in the long run" but that the Hebron massacre had shown the need for interim measures. "We really have to protect Palestinians from settlers," he said, "and not just the other way around."

Shaath's first priority is to try to wring a pledge from the Clinton Administration that it will play an active role in the negotiations from now on. To the P.L.O., that translates as U.S. willingness to put pressure on Israel. If the talks are to resume, Palestinian officials say, Israel must provide better security -- and beyond that must be willing to begin talking soon about the ultimate fate of the Jewish settlements. "Israel," says Said Kamel, the P.L.O. ambassador to Egypt, "has to accept disarming the settlers and liquidating the settlements."

Rabin is scheduled to visit Washington next week, and the P.L.O. clearly expects Clinton and Christopher to persuade him to offer more concessions. The Secretary of State indicated that he believes the Palestinians deserve more than Rabin has offered so far. "They need to see that they can achieve a different future," Christopher said. The immediate issues of security and international observers can probably be compromised. But if Rabin refuses to talk about the settlements and the U.S. is unwilling to push him, the P.L.O. will have to decide whether there can still be a peace process.

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Hebron, Dean Fischer/Cairo and Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem