BIBI'S BLACK DAYS

By Johanna McGeary

Har Homa or Jabal Abu Ghneim? Two weeks ago, the empty hillside on the southern reaches of Jerusalem was just an obscure plot with a Hebrew name and an Arabic one. But as big yellow bulldozers began to claim the hill for Jewish houses, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was converting the landscape into a perilous flash point. Palestinians hurled stones, Israeli soldiers fired tear gas, Arab leaders issued harsh denunciations, and every single friend of Israel's disapproved. Defying them all, knowing he risked far more serious violence, Netanyahu ordered the bulldozers to dig on. Now history will decide whether those few square yards were a necessary, legitimate addition to Israel's housing stock or a flaming brand tossed on the pyre of Palestinian impatience and despair.

Black days come all too often in Israel, and Friday was another. Members of the extremist group Hamas gave their own judgment when they shattered the Jewish holiday afternoon in downtown Tel Aviv with a powerful bomb. As costumed merrymakers paraded down the city's streets to celebrate Purim, which commemorates the deliverance of the Jews in ancient Persia from a plot to slaughter them, a man entered one of the cafes and detonated himself, killing three Israelis and injuring at least 47 more. A six-month-old girl, her tiny, blood-soaked body cradled in a policewoman's arms, added one more horrific image to the Holy Land's chronicle of tragedies. Violence erupted again the next day, as hundreds of Palestinians rioted in Hebron, and Israeli soldiers responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition.

Though last week's suicide attack was the first since Netanyahu became Prime Minister last May, he has amassed a stunning record for brinkmanship during his first 300 days: three major crises in the peace negotiations; a war scare with Syria; a domestic political scandal that threatens to indict his closest aides for corruption; the alienation at one time or another of virtually all his friends, constituents and foreign allies. In the aftermath of Friday's blast, many were debating who bore the most blame and whether the peace process, already damaged goods, was now beyond repair.

Arafat played his own devil's hand. As anger rose over Har Homa, the wily Palestinian leader publicly ordered his followers to abjure violence and protest peacefully--and also freed dozens of Hamas warriors from Palestinian jail cells, including military-operations chief Ibrahim Maqadmah. If he did not literally give "the green light" for the attack, as Netanyahu charged, he did not have to. Within minutes, Hamas proudly claimed responsibility. At a rally in Gaza, Maqadmah bragged, "Jerusalem will not be restored by negotiations but only by holy war."

For Netanyahu, who won election on his promise to bring peace with security, the deaths in Tel Aviv cannot help raising questions about whether his way is working. When reporters standing amid the cafe wreckage suggested Har Homa had contributed to the bloodshed, Netanyahu bristled, "Nothing justifies terrorism." He is surely right about that, and there is an incalculable moral difference between building on disputed land and setting off a bomb in a cafe. But violence is the only real lever the Palestinians have in their conflict with the Israelis, so scenes like that in Tel Aviv are certain to be repeated.

Indeed, many Israelis fear this is only the beginning of a new terror offensive like the one last year that drove Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres from office. Allowing even one bombing to happen, though, will boomerang harshly on the Palestinians. Israel immediately closed off the territories and promised retaliation; Netanyahu has always kept open the option of sending Israeli troops back into the areas now under Palestinian control. Even worse, he might decide to use the bombing as a pretext to abandon, once and for all, the talks he has always opposed.

The carnage in Tel Aviv was only the latest, some would say inevitable, result of the troubles that have piled up during Netanyahu's 10 months in power. One difficulty was plain old inexperience. Netanyahu came into office almost wholly without practice in the real business of government. His energies in public life were spent crafting an image and smoothly making arguments for or against policies, but not formulating them. He never mastered strategy, only shifting tactics. In command of a telegenic appearance and a glib tongue, he figured his rhetoric could explain away his mistakes.

Netanyahu was always an outsider in the Likud hierarchy, which left him without the old-boy network essential to every Prime Minister. Instead, he surrounded himself with remarkably undistinguished loyalists who did not have the cleverness or clout to head off mistakes or remedy them. Last week, just before the bombing, the police were getting ready to deliver their verdict on allegedly corrupt deals behind his misguided appointment of a thoroughly underqualified Attorney General. Even if Netanyahu escapes direct taint, two close aides could face indictment.

Inexperience disrupted the peace process as well. At the outset, recalls a senior U.S. official, "this group of Israelis assumed they could just roll Yasser Arafat." After an early interview, a Jerusalem Post reporter wrote that it was clear Netanyahu hadn't actually read the details of the Oslo accords. For two months his men refused to deal with Arafat's chief negotiator. Even when pressure from Washington got talks under way, Netanyahu thought he could gain leverage by restricting Arafat's use of his helicopter.

What brought Netanyahu his worst grief, though, was his own divided feelings. From the moment he took office, he has ricocheted between the irreconcilable demands of his ideology and his ambition. He has always damned the basic principle of exchanging land for peace. But he is just as eager to succeed--to win power, to stay in power, to earn history's regard--and he has been savvy enough to recognize there is no going back. Peace is what a majority of Israel's voters want, and a Prime Minister wishing to stay in office had better deliver.

Time and again that has forced him to be pragmatic, to keep negotiations moving by retreating from his core ideology and making compromises with the Palestinians. But every time he does, his base supporters among Israel's hard-liners threaten to topple his coalition government, and Netanyahu has to come up with a countervailing move to pacify them.

For his part, Arafat has used tough tactics. He dallied on arresting activists, reinforcing Netanyahu's belief that Arafat was cheating on the accords. Catering to his own extremists, he helped unleash a brutal spasm of violence last September when Netanyahu, asserting Israeli authority in East Jerusalem, opened a tunnel near Islamic holy sites in the Old City. When Netanyahu was ready to dicker over withdrawal from Hebron in earnest, Arafat procrastinated in hopes of gaining more concessions.

And when the Hebron agreement was finally signed after four months of excruciating bargaining, the Israeli Prime Minister was still not a winner. Palestinians came away convinced that Netanyahu would never yield anything to them except under extreme duress. Many Israelis wondered what real security advantage all the tension and ill will had gained them. What the rest of the world regarded as a significant breakthrough for peace ranked as total betrayal to Jewish settlers and hard-line nationalists. At bottom, both his Palestinian foes and his right-wing faithful suspected the Prime Minister of terminal insincerity.

So after Hebron, when Netanyahu declared he would begin construction of 6,500 housing units for Jews on the hill in Arab East Jerusalem called Har Homa, it looked like another reckless move to appease the right wing of his coalition. This would be the last link in a chain of settlements surrounding the city that would permanently cut off the Arab part of Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. Nothing inflames Palestinian opinion more than the creation of "new facts on the ground," especially those designed to foreclose Arab claims to the Holy City. Nor did the government make much pretense that it was doing anything less. "The struggle for Jerusalem has begun," said Internal Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani. "When we take this decision, we make it clear once and for all that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people."

A week later, Palestinians were stung again when Netanyahu announced that Israel would fulfill its obligation to make another partial pullback from the West Bank but would vacate just 9% of the land still under occupation--of which only 2% was not already under shared Israeli-Palestinian authority. Israeli nationalists were up in arms again at the "giveaway," while Palestinians had expected to retrieve at least 20% or 30% of the West Bank. Arafat was so enraged that he rejected the handover and refused to take any calls from Netanyahu.

Breaking ground at Har Homa just as negotiations on a "final status" agreement were supposed to get under way last week seemed so unnecessary, so calculated to disrupt the delicate proceedings. To reassure his hard-line constituents that he would not back down, Netanyahu complained he was "fed up" with international charges that "everything we do is a violation of the accords and everything the Palestinians say is in compliance." To appease the peace camp, he tossed out an old proposal to accelerate the final-status talks so that agreement on the hard issues--such as Jerusalem, borders, Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish settlements--could be reached within six months.

In an interview last Wednesday with TIME managing editor Walter Isaacson, Middle East bureau chief Lisa Beyer and contributor William Stewart, the Prime Minister sounded like a man eager to deal. "We're gaining nothing from this protracted feud," he said. Intensive final-status talks now would be "a way to lock horns on the big issues and finish the talks, because you waste as much energy, as much friction, over the smallest detail as over the big issues. Just do it. Get it over with."

But even if the idea had merit, Netanyahu simultaneously offered virtually no hope that the Palestinians would gain a thing. They could "technically" bring up Jerusalem at the table, he told TIME, but Israel would talk only about "formalizing the present freedoms enjoyed by the three religions." Expectations that Arafat would ever regain 80% or 90% of the West Bank were "way out of line," and in any final agreement Netanyahu signed, "there would be a limitation of certain sovereign powers normally associated with statehood." Arafat rejected the idea out of hand, regarding it as a ploy to distract attention from Har Homa and an excuse for Israel to avoid more withdrawals from the West Bank.

Israel's security chiefs explicitly warned Netanyahu he was courting a violent outburst. Some officials say the Prime Minister even had advance word Thursday night that something worse was in store, but nobody warned the holiday crowds in Tel Aviv, where it is so easy for a suicide bomber like this one to step into an open-air cafe carrying a satchel filled with nail-studded explosives and rip another bloody hole in the peace talks.

When crises threatened to disrupt the peace process under Yitzhak Rabin and Peres, the willingness of both Israelis and Palestinians to take a risk and trust each other--however distasteful that might be--provided a cushion. Arafat and Netanyahu so distrust each other now, and the residue of the tunnel and Tel Aviv explosions have left such deep scars, that even dogged American intermediaries, who will certainly be called in to save the day, believe they have very little to work with.

--Reported by Lisa Beyer, William Stewart and Eric Silver/Jerusalem

With reporting by LISA BEYER, WILLIAM STEWART AND ERIC SILVER/JERUSALEM