White House Set for Peace Pact Extravaganza

As the leading actors converged Sunday on Washington, the Clinton Administration put the finishing touches on an extravagant ceremony for today’s historic signing of the Israel-PLO peace accord.

Thousands of guests are expected to attend the signing on the South Lawn of the White House, starting at 8 a.m. PDT. But the planned sequel--a dinner tonight at the White House--will be held without the two leading parties because the Israeli leaders plan to leave Washington to return home within hours after the ceremony.

Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat was the first to arrive in Washington, smiling and without his customary side arm, for his first meeting with his enemy of a lifetime, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“We are very happy to come in this historic moment so we can make peace,” Arafat said as he arrived at sun-drenched Andrews Air Force Base outside the capital. He was dressed in his trademark black-and-white kaffiyeh, but in place of his usual green combat fatigues he wore a military-style dress uniform. The pistol that was on his hip when he left Tunis, Tunisia, had vanished.

A senior Administration official said that Arafat would not be armed today because no one would be allowed to carry firearms into the White House.

Rabin left Jerusalem for Washington after asserting that his army could oust the planned Palestinian government “in a moment” if the peace plan went sour and the Palestinians threatened Israel’s security.

As Rabin and Arafat prepared to make peace, violence flared in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, leaving eight dead, as militants opposed to the Israel-PLO accord staged a bloody effort to derail it.

Members of the Islamic fundamentalist movement Hamas ambushed an army jeep, which crashed into a mosque wall near Gaza City, killing three Israeli soldiers. In another attack, a Palestinian rammed a car loaded with gas cans into an Israeli prison-service bus, killing himself and injuring two Israelis. A terrorist with grenades strapped to his body boarded a bus and fatally stabbed the driver before being shot to death by a reserve soldier on the bus. Two other Palestinians also died, one when a grenade he was carrying exploded as he tried to escape Israeli soldiers.

More than 3,000 guests are expected for today’s White House ceremony, including 10 foreign ministers, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the president of the European Community, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush, congressional leaders and a host of former secretaries of state.

In a carefully crafted script, President Clinton will greet Rabin and Arafat inside the White House about an hour before the ceremony. This will also be the first face-to-face meeting between Rabin and Arafat.

Rabin and Arafat are clearly the stars of the show, but the accord, calling for Palestinian self-government in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, will be signed by aides--Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and one of Arafat’s top advisers, Mahmoud Abbas. Peres and Abbas, better known as Abu Maazen, negotiated the agreement in secret talks in Oslo. Rabin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher insisted that it is customary for foreign ministers to sign such agreements and that Rabin and Arafat are as committed to its provisions as they would have been if they had signed the accord themselves.

The sheer size of the gathering and the security preparations that accompanied it lent an air of unreality to an event that already seemed astonishing. A senior White House official remarked that he had spent his entire adult life watching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and never expected to see it end.

The Israel-PLO signing is expected to be followed quickly, probably Tuesday, by the announcement that Israel and Jordan have completed a “framework agreement” for a peace treaty that would clear the way for economic, environmental and other forms of cooperation between them. The Israel-Jordan pact was completed months ago, but King Hussein refused to approve it until progress was shown in the Israel-PLO negotiations.

Just before he left Jerusalem, Rabin appealed for “several hundred million dollars” in increased aid from the United States or other wealthy countries to reimburse Israel for evacuating its forces from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to pay other costs of implementing his government’s side of the peace accord.

But he brushed aside suggestions that the United States or the United Nations might be asked to send troops to help ensure the peace.

“Forget about U.N. troops,” Rabin said. “No U.N. troops, no foreign troops will be included in this agreement.”

Rabin said Israel needs to continue to receive the $3 billion a year in U.S. foreign aid that it has gotten since the Israel-Egypt peace accord was signed in 1979. And he said his government would “appreciate” additional American help in meeting the cost of relocating Israeli forces, although he said he would not make that a condition for signing the agreement. In addition to Israel’s costs, the PLO will need several billion dollars to make a go of self-government. The Clinton Administration has offered to take the lead in raising that money, mostly from other governments.

Despite Rabin’s assurance that foreign troops would not be needed on the West Bank or Gaza Strip, Christopher said that the United States is prepared to offer military forces to serve as a buffer between Israel and Syria on the Golan Heights if those two antagonists reach a peace agreement of their own.

Christopher, interviewed on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” said that a possible Golan force would be similar to the existing U.S.-led multinational contingent deployed on the Sinai Peninsula to help enforce the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. The United Nations has no role in that operation.

Rabin appeared on both NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN’s “Newsmaker Sunday” before taking off on the long flight to Washington. He made it clear that an Israel-Syria treaty will not be signed anytime soon because, he said, the Israeli public could not be expected to accept Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights so soon after permitting Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The gruff former general said that he is willing to give Arafat and the PLO “the benefit of the doubt,” but he made it clear that Israel will take a hard-line approach to implementation of the existing agreement.

Told that Arafat has said that the agreement will ultimately lead to a Palestinian state with its capital in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, Rabin responded tartly, “I assure Mr. Arafat that the Palestinian flag will not be over Jerusalem. . . . He can forget about it.”

And he said that Palestinian self-government will not threaten the existence of Israel because the Israeli army retains military superiority and could reoccupy the territories if such a step seemed to be warranted.

Although the U.S. government is playing host to both sides in the Israel-PLO ceremony, it has signaled in big ways and small ones that the United States considers Israel to be a friend and the PLO to be only a necessary part of Middle East diplomacy.

Clinton scheduled a private meeting with Rabin and Peres after today’s ceremony. Arafat and his delegation will have to get by with a meeting with Christopher at the State Department. Because of Israeli objections to the red, white, black and green Palestinian flag, neither the PLO nor Israeli flags will be displayed during the ceremony.

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.

* WHITE HOUSE SECURITY: Today’s signing ceremony presents an security challenge. A8

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