Security Plan Draws Skepticism From the Battle-Weary in Hebron : Mideast: Still reeling from mosque massacre, many consider outside observers ‘useless.’

Mustafa Tamimi’s gnarled fingers moved faster and faster over his prayer beads Thursday as he sat outside his curfew-bound fruit shop. The 50-year-old Palestinian’s voice grew thin and his anger boiled over as he recalled each detail of the morning five weeks ago that thrust this desperate, seething town onto the center stage of the Mideast peace process.

Tamimi recalled how he was there, kneeling in prayer in the first row of Ibrahim Mosque, when more than 100 bullets from a Jewish settler’s assault rifle tore into his relatives, his friends, his fellow worshipers and very nearly him.

This was the massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born physician who killed about 30 Palestinians before Tamimi’s eyes in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.

And then, Tamimi laughed. Against such firepower, such hate and such helplessness, he concluded, the 160-member international observer force that Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization agreed to send here Thursday--part of a breakthrough agreement aimed at “creating a feeling of security among Palestinians in Hebron”--was, in fact, a joke.

“It is useless that they’re coming here,” Tamimi said of the force of Norwegians, Danes and Italians, who the agreement states will be armed with revolvers yet no mandate to act. “I am the first one who will say they are welcome. But this is not enough. This is not what we want. Against these settlers, against their machine guns, against the Israeli army, this will not help us.”

No sooner had Tamimi finished saying that than reality caught up with him again. An Israeli army patrol, which was stoned as it sped past his shop, slammed on its brakes. Half a dozen soldiers waved M-16 assault rifles as they scoured the street. Within seconds they led a single Palestinian off to prison, with Tamimi chasing behind.

“Hamzeh! Hamzeh! Hamzeh!” Tamimi shouted through tears as he ran after the speeding van.

The prisoner was, in fact, Tamimi’s youngest son. He is 7 years old.

Such were the scenes and the mood of rejection, anger and despair as Hebron’s more than 100,000 Palestinians reacted with fury, laughter and lament to an unprecedented compromise--the first time in more than two decades of occupation that Israel agreed to Palestinian demands for an international, U.N.-sanctioned presence in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

The security agreement for Hebron broke new ground for the PLO, its leaders and the peace process as a whole. It cleared the way for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to send negotiators back to formal talks on Palestinian autonomy for the first time since the mosque massacre. And it brought vows from both sides to speed the process of implementing a long-delayed promise for Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian self-rule in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.

But for Hebron, where the Feb. 25 massacre left wounds that remain as deep as they are fresh, the prospect of an observer force hardly allayed fears.

For most Palestinians and Jews in Hebron, the security plan served only to deepen the sense of foreboding here, where residents, for more than a month, have lived with heavy curfews and a constant threat of revenge.

Hebron is, after all, a hotbed of Palestinian radicalism, where 415 heavily armed Jewish settlers live in an enclave surrounded by more than 100,000 mostly unarmed Arabs; the Arabs, in turn, live adjacent to a sprawling settlement of more than 4,500 more heavily armed Jews.

But in a city overwhelmingly opposed to Arafat and the peace process, a handful of local PLO leaders struggled to find victory in Thursday’s agreement. Chief among them was Mustafa Abdul Nabi Natshe, Hebron’s former mayor, whom Arafat reappointed to his post on Thursday. The latest accord “is a good step forward,” he said in an interview in his Hebron home. “It is a first step.”

He reflected the universal sentiment of his city that Arafat was wise to drop his demand for a Palestinian police contingent that would have served under Israeli command here, noting: “If there is a Palestine police force here, I don’t want it to be a show.”

Although leaders of Arafat’s Islamic fundamentalist opponents, in parties such as Hamas, declared the international force was “like a watchdog in chains,” its most virulent opposition came from the Jewish settlement on the hill high above, from the heart of the former home of the doctor who staged last month’s bloody massacre.

There, at the fiercely ideological settlement of Kiryat Arba, as many as 20,000 extremist Jews from settlements and towns throughout Israel marched a mile--in celebration and in protest.

In an afternoon rally to commemorate 26 years of Jewish settlements in a city that the Bible records as the first capital of the Israelite community in Canaan, and to protest any government effort to evacuate Israeli settlers from the center of town, speakers denounced the new international force.

“It’s an un-Zionist act to bring a foreign force into Hebron,” Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of Israel’s right-wing opposition Likud, shouted to a cheering audience waving Israeli flags and posters declaring Hebron part of Israel.

“There will be much blood spilled here! Jewish blood will be spilled!” screamed Shlomo Goren, a former chief rabbi of Israel who pushed for a controversial religious ruling this week instructing Israeli soldiers to disobey any orders to evacuate Hebron settlers by force--a plan now before Rabin’s Cabinet as a more permanent solution to Hebron’s security woes. “We won’t move! We won’t move from the heart of Hebron!”

In the crowd, Ephraim Ziv, a Brooklyn-born lawyer, explained the settlers’ opposition to the new foreign force. He did so in terms remarkably similar to those of Palestinian critics.

“This international force reminds us of the (U.N.) force in Lebanon--they’re going to need soldiers to protect them,” Ziv said, adding that he believes the planned Hebron contingent is too small, too lightly armed and too powerless to be anything more than a target. “They invite Arab terrorists to put on a show for them. This new force won’t calm down the situation. They incite the situation.”

Radical Palestinian leaders echoed the arguments against the force made by settlers, who the Palestinians demand must be moved before any permanent security is achieved in a city sacred to Muslims and Jews.

“People here were looking for a real force to protect them and separate the two communities,” said Abdul Aziz Dweik, a U.S.-educated Hebron geology professor who was deported by Israel as a suspected Hamas leader and spent a year of exile on a barren hillside in a no-man’s-land in South Lebanon until he was permitted to return home in December. “These people (the international observers) will just watch and report what happens, but they will have no mandate to actually protect the people.”

On Hebron’s streets, where scores of Palestinian youths have been killed or injured in almost daily clashes with Israeli troops since the massacre, many Palestinians said the observer force will undermine security and stability here rather than safeguard it.

“When these guys come here, they will not help the situation; they will aggravate it,” said a 20-year-old factory worker who asked to be identified only as Bassam. “Look, we don’t want international forces. We don’t want Israeli forces. We don’t want Arafat. We don’t want anybody. All of this only means more massacres and death. We only want all the settlers to leave Hebron. We want the Israeli troops out of the occupied lands. And then we can take care of ourselves.”