Massacre May Break Impasse on Peace Talks

Yasser Arafat recalled all his peace negotiators to PLO headquarters in Tunis for crisis talks on Saturday, yet many analysts said the massacre in a West Bank mosque may give Arabs important bargaining leverage and open a new window to a peace agreement.

As the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman sought to salvage his own credibility and the viability of peace talks with Israel, diplomats and others close to the talks said the tragedy--like the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace that led to the brink of international military intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina--could provide the impetus to break the deadlock in negotiations.

“It seems to me that out of this horror comes a sort of balancing of public opinion perceptions, certainly in the West,” said a Western diplomat close to the talks.

“Chernobyl got people focused on nuclear dangers across the board. This kind of slaughter, if it had taken place in incidents taking one or two lives, would have been viewed as part of the background noise,” he said. “But kind of like the mortar shell that dropped in the Sarajevo marketplace . . . ironically enough this probably gives a boost to the statesman impulse on both sides.”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s advisers made it clear that they realize Israel will have to come up with a significant package of goodwill gestures if it wants to recover the momentum lost in the talks. There is a fear in Jerusalem that anything more than a brief hiatus could lead to a serious standstill.

“This is a tactical question--how much to give and when to give it,” said Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the housing minister and a confidant of Rabin. “If we give it all up front, then the PLO will be encouraged to demand more. If we give none, we risk losing the remaining momentum and looking like accessories to those murders.

“We will probably come up with some gestures, some real concessions and some promises of much more if we can move fast.”

Arab analysts were far less optimistic, saying Friday’s attack--in which an Israeli settler opened fire on hundreds of worshipers in a Hebron mosque, killing 48--dealt a blow to the peace talks just at the moment they were beginning to bear fruit.

They said Arafat’s ability to salvage his credibility among Palestinians is in more danger than ever before.

“I think the peace process was going well, I think we were about to conclude an agreement, and I see nothing positive from this whatsoever,” one Arab analyst said glumly. “If there isn’t a substantial gesture from the Israelis, this is going to be serious trouble, because Arafat’s credibility is going to be challenged.”

Arafat summoned his negotiators from talks in Cairo, Washington and Paris to PLO headquarters in Tunisia and prepared to make a decision on how to respond to President Clinton’s invitation to resume peace talks in Washington.

While the PLO has already officially accepted, Arafat is likely to delay the resumption until he receives some gesture from the Israelis on the issues of Jewish settlers, Palestinian prisoners and additional Palestinian security guarantees, PLO officials said.

However, a senior State Department official said the United States expects the Palestinians and Israelis to restart the talks by Wednesday.

“We’ve told them: ‘We want you to be here by Wednesday,’ ” the official said. “We’re confident that they’re going to get here.”

But PLO officials said they first will seek some public statement from the White House affirming opposition to Jewish settlements in occupied Arab lands.

“It is the duty of Mr. Clinton to denounce the existence of the settlements according to international law and the U.N. Security Council. They are illegal. And something should come from the American Administration to emphasize that these settlements are illegal,” said Mohammed Sobieh, secretary general of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile.

Until those conditions are met, “the time now is not convenient to go back to Washington,” Sobieh said. “Any meeting with Rabin now will harm the credibility of Arafat. Such a massacre is very big: People are praying at a mosque without arms, with their children, in a holy month on a holiday, and they are shot (in) their backs. No, any soon meeting will harm Arafat.”

PLO officials are demanding disarmament of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a move that would prove difficult because many settlers are military reservists assigned to combat units and because the Israeli public might not support forcing settlers to live unarmed in the occupied territories.

However, the PLO will at least demand that Jewish settlements be placed on the negotiating table now, rather than waiting several years for the issue to be decided along with the final status of the occupied territories.

Rabin, who has more than 10 proposals for responding to the crisis, is said to be opposed to any measures that would compromise Israel’s security in order to appease the PLO.

But on the issue of settlers, while disarmament is unlikely, there is some support for measures such as outlawing Kach, Kahane Hai and other extremist groups.

“The very idea that we have to do something about the settlers means there has been a shift in the political ground here as a result of the Hebron incident,” one Rabin adviser said. “Politically, Rabin may feel that he can use the general revulsion over this act to press ahead. . . . The argument to get this wrapped up and to get us out of the territories becomes more powerful now.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, expressed fears that Israel in its eagerness to atone for the attack will make “undue concessions,” particularly on the issue of settlers.

“There is a need now, in fact, for restraint, caution and sober action, both on the security and on the political front. I think the opposite is happening--the government is feeling the pressure to do something dramatic. And when you do that you may do something dramatically wrong.”

The PLO is also calling for the deployment of international forces to provide protection for Palestinians--a proposal that Israel already has rejected--and is likely to make further demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners and the return of Palestinian deportees.

Arab analysts familiar with the talks predicted that any really substantial gestures on Israel’s part are unlikely.

“In light of what happened, I doubt that they will decide to dismantle the settlements. It’s not going to happen,” one analyst said. “They will probably focus on the specific event, and on the person, and if they decide to do that, it simply becomes the act of a deranged person, and there’s no addition to the peace process because of it.”

Indeed, the attack’s potential contribution to moving the peace process forward depends in large part on its resonance as the negotiations resume their tedious course.

In a region accustomed to violence, analysts say they fear that it will simply drop into the landscape of a bloody past.

“This is a region where on both sides there is an awful lot of callousness that has been acquired by so many atrocities and incidents,” one diplomat said. “Will people be holding onto this in their minds, two or three weeks down the road even?”

Murphy reported from Cairo and Parks from Jerusalem. Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.