Arab-Israeli Conflict’s Key Question: Whose Land Claims Are Real Ones? : Mideast: In occupied territories, trading property for peace will have human costs.

Abu Yusri’s shabby little kebab stand manages to sell only 11 or 12 pounds of meat these days, down from the more than 200 pounds a day before his restaurant was seized and razed to satisfy Israeli security concerns.

And the old Palestinian just shrugged and raised his hands skyward the other day when asked whether Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s new policy of moderation--a subject of the ongoing Middle East peace talks in Washington--actually could end the decades of bitterness and bloodshed in the occupied territories.

“God knows. God, and only God, is the one who knows. Maybe, if America pressures Israel enough, yes, maybe then there will be peace. But I am just a small man who has lost his land. I cannot know what is known only to God.”

Perhaps so. But Abu Yusri’s rickety kebab cart, almost lost now beside a new, heavily fortified Israeli religious school that was built where his restaurant once stood in the heart of this ancient city of Abraham, is something of a microcosm of the land-for-peace debate unfolding at the highest levels of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Forty years of work--my entire life--gone, and not a single shekel to show for it,” Yusri said angrily during one of his many idle hours beside the smoldering charcoal. “There are 30 in my family, including sons and grandsons.

“This was our land, and now it’s gone.”

It is property such as Abu Yusri’s kebab shop and the several acres of commercial real estate around it--confiscated by Israel’s occupation forces as an urban security zone in a city that has been a hotbed of the Palestinian uprising--that Israeli negotiators are offering to return to Arab control through a phased-in plan of autonomy that would begin with elections and Palestinian self-rule in the territories that Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967.

But Abu Yusri’s claim is not that simple, something that’s true of much of the land in this real-estate conflict, one of the world’s most complex and volatile. His tiny bit of property illustrates how deeply the roots of the conflict lie within the land itself.

Just 100 yards away from his makeshift kebab stand, in a basement of the small urban Jewish settlement that depends for its survival on the new religious school and the security forces stationed all around them, is the Hebron Martyrs Museum. The facility is “dedicated to the Jewish souls martyred in the 1929 Hebron massacre”--an Arab attack that killed several Jews and forced scores of other longtime resident Jewish families to flee Hebron 63 years ago.

Hard-line Jewish settlers have come in recent years to reoccupy Hebron’s old Jewish quarter, just down the road from the shared synagogue-mosque at Hebron’s Tomb of Abraham, the patriarch revered by both Judaism and Islam. For these settlers, Yusri’s ancestors committed the original sin of land seizure.

“The problem whenever you talk about land for peace in the occupied territories is in the land itself,” said one U.N. official in Jerusalem, where similar land disputes rage over parts of the Old City and neighborhoods in Arab East Jerusalem. “These are lands that have been occupied, conquered, reoccupied and reconquered time and again through history. So whose (property) deed is the real one? Whose claim is the most just?”

The land conflict has become a human one in the years since the Palestinians, long frustrated in their fight for autonomy, launched the bloody intifada. And today, as Arab and Israeli delegations discuss the region in the abstract in Washington, there is a more immediate concern at the grass-roots level on both sides of the conflict. Simply stated, it is security--the basic right to life.

“With the Israelis here on our land, no one has security for their own lives,” Yusri said.

That fear is shared by the Jews who by choice, conviction or necessity live or work in the occupied lands. Most of the 100,000-plus Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have been stoned by angry Palestinians at least once during the past several years. And many others on both sides have been killed.

For Jacob, a Jewish cabdriver whose company is the only Israeli firm still willing to send taxis into the territories, such fears have become facts of daily life. And despite the general tone of optimism in Washington over this week’s series of talks, Jacob does not believe those facts will change much.

“Four months ago, near the Old City (of Jerusalem), a big rock came flying and hit me here,” Jacob said the other day, pointing to his scarred right eye and a large dent in the right side of his face. “This is the life for us.”

When his passengers commented on his bravery as he sped madly through the West Bank during another of the dangerous journeys that have become routine for him, Jacob laughed.

“What to do?” he said. “First, I say, ‘I don’t go here.’ Then I say, ‘I don’t go there, or there, or there.’ And soon, I just stay home all day. No work. No food. No life.”

Then Jacob took a detour to show his passengers “something important.”

“Look! Just look at this,” he shouted as he drove through a massive Jewish settlement of thousands of apartment units and homes that sprang up during the hard-line government of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his aggressive housing minister, Ariel Sharon.

“I am a Jew. I have lived all my life in Jerusalem, among other Jews and among Arabs. But these buildings, these settlements, they are a shame. Who owns this land? I don’t know. Before, it was all Arab. Before that, maybe Jew. Before that, who knows? Maybe Jew, maybe Arab.

“All I know is, this is not the way to live together. That is the only real way to end this problem: to learn to live together. But, for now, it is just trying to live at all.”