MIDEAST : Amid Glacial Pace of Talks, a Chill Enters

Sitting in the impoverished Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Tawfik Mabhouh was impatient with the slow-moving Arab-Israeli peace talks from which he hopes a Palestinian state will emerge--but philosophical about them, even optimistic.

“Progress--there’s not even been enough to spit at,” Mabhouh said. “But look at the (North) Vietnamese talks with the Americans and the years it took to agree on the shape of the table. By that index, we are ahead because we are already pressing the Israelis on the shape of the Palestinian state.”

Mabhouh, as a leader of the pro-Communist Palestinian People’s Party, is a Marxist and consequently a “historical optimist,” convinced that the Palestinian struggle for a national state must and will succeed.

“Negotiations with the Israelis are never easy, and these will take a long time,” Mabhouh said. “The Palestinian masses understand this, but they are anxious for peace and won’t accept any Israeli stalling.”

“The streets,” as Palestinians refer to their principal political forum in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, have been far from peaceful in recent weeks as Israeli forces clashed repeatedly with youthful protesters. Nearly 300 people have been injured and half a dozen killed.

A two-week hunger strike by “security prisoners” in Israeli jails galvanized people in much the way that early street protests of the intifada, the uprising against the occupation, did five years ago.

“Talks about a ‘Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority’ don’t mean very much to people subjected without reprieve to daily human rights abuses, such as those that Palestinian prisoners suffer,” Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian delegation’s spokeswoman at the peace talks, said here in advance of the talks’ seventh round, which begins Wednesday in Washington.

“We need genuine acts by Israel to prove that the peace process is moral as well as political. And the time for this is rapidly slipping away.”

The need for a breakthrough, for a new burst of energy, in the year-old, U.S.-mediated talks is also felt by Israeli negotiators. “The Israeli government’s political time, not chronological time, is not unlimited,” said Itamar Rabinovich, the chief Israeli delegate in the talks with Syria.

The Israelis and Palestinians are encountering fundamental differences in three key areas:

* Where Israel is willing to establish a locally run administration for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinians want self-government, limited by terms of the agreement establishing it but otherwise autonomous.

* Where Israel has now agreed to an elected “Palestinian Council,” able to enact local ordinances and responsible to voters but subject to existing laws, the Palestinians are seeking a council with full legislative authority except in areas such as security or foreign relations that Israel would still control.

* And where Israel continues to refer to the “administered territories,” the Palestinians are seeking a definition of the precise territory that the proposed authority would govern.

The underlying and essential difference, however, is one of outlook--the Palestinians are clearly aiming at an end to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the establishment of an independent state, and the Israelis, just as clearly, are prepared at present for nothing more than limited autonomy under Israeli military control.

“The Israelis are so scared that they make sure that each step they take involves no risk, no danger,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said at his West Bank home. “This is what has paralyzed the process.”