Israel Hints That Troops May Not Leave West Bank Before Elections : Mideast: Remarks by Rabin are meant to reassure Jewish settlers. Palestinians are infuriated.

Just days before talks are set to resume with the Palestinians on holding elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel is suggesting that it may be impossible to keep its commitment to pull its troops out of West Bank towns and villages before voters go to the polls.

“We will have to check to what extent elections can be held without the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) necessarily moving out of the city centers,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said during a tour this week of the West Bank town of Hebron.

Rabin and other Israeli officials--alarmed by a series of bloody attacks by Palestinians that public opinion polls show are undermining Israeli support for the peace process--are now publicly casting about for ways to rework the Sept. 13, 1993, accord they signed with the Palestinians.

Rabin has suggested slowing down negotiations with the Palestinians on redeployment and the holding of elections in the territories. The September, 1993, framework agreement sets a timetable for the first phase of Palestinian self-rule, but many deadlines have already been missed.

Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, in contrast, is urging that the process be accelerated by abandoning the current phase and going directly to the final status talks that are not scheduled to begin until 1996.

“Let’s try to start thinking now about the final arrangement and leave the interim settlement alone,” Beilin told an impromptu news conference Wednesday.

Rabin repudiated Beilin’s remarks within hours. “I want to make it clear: This government has one policy,” Rabin said. “The deputy foreign minister doesn’t express it. . . . The government is going toward an interim agreement.”

Rabin’s suggestion that Israel might not pull troops out of West Bank towns was meant to reassure settlers, particularly those in Hebron, whose existence in the midst of a hostile Arab population is made possible only by the presence of hundreds of heavily armed soldiers.

But for Palestinians, Rabin’s comments were explosive, because they suggested that he may hold elections hostage to a rewriting--or at least a reinterpretation--of the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In that agreement, Israel says that “not later than the eve of elections for the (Palestinian) council, the redeployment of Israeli military force in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will take place. . . . In redeploying its military forces, Israel will be guided by the principle that its military forces should be redeployed outside populated areas.”

Palestinians say redeployment is necessary to ensure that the elections are fair and free. And they say that elections must be held soon to give PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s shaky self-governing authority the legitimacy it badly needs.

“Rabin can’t be serious,” said Radwan abu Ayyash, head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Authority, the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian self-governing authority. “This is not acceptable to the Palestinians at all. How can you hold elections with Israeli troops there?” he said. “We believe that this is a violation of the Declaration of Principles and a new obstacle the Israelis are laying on the path to elections.”

Israel and the PLO are set to resume talks Monday in Cairo on holding elections and redeployment.

Rabin’s comments came as the army has been expressing increasing concern over its ability to protect about 120,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank once redeployment takes place. The Palestinian Authority, which now controls only Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho, has been unable to stop attacks by militants on Israeli civilians and soldiers.

According to army figures, the number of shooting incidents in the territories has sharply increased in the last five months--since Arafat moved to Gaza to take control of the self-governing authority. The army has recorded about 80 such incidents in Gaza since July, and 35 in the West Bank.

In Gaza, where most Jewish settlers are concentrated into two blocs of settlements, four Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past month guarding the isolated settlement of Netzarim. One soldier was killed in a drive-by shooting, and three others were killed when a suicide bomber bicycled into the Netzarim checkpoint.

The newspaper Yediot Aharonot warned in a survey of West Bank settlements last week that there are 69 isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank, each of which would be at least as difficult as Netzarim for the army to protect.

“One thing is clear: The Gaza method will not work,” wrote Yediot reporter Naomi Levinsky. “If these settlements stay where they are, in their current situation, the IDF will not be able to pull out of the Arab population centers.”

Rabin continues to insist that no Israeli settlements will be uprooted or relocated in either Gaza or the West Bank until negotiations with the Palestinians on the final status of the territories begin in 1996.

But some Israeli officials seem prepared to offer the Palestinian Authority a deal: Israel will immediately move some isolated settlements if the Palestinians will not force Israel to redeploy its troops out of areas where Jewish settlers would be vulnerable to attack.

“It could be advantageous for us to start moving some small settlements . . . into larger settlements that are easier to defend,” said Ori Orr, chairman of the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee in Israel’s Parliament. Orr, a retired general who is close to Rabin, made his comments Wednesday to Israeli army radio.

Orr’s proposal was similar to one made by Yossi Sarid, the left-wing environment minister, who is intimately involved in negotiations with the Palestinians.

“I have no doubt that some . . . perhaps even a large number of settlements, will have to be moved from their place,” Sarid told army radio during a visit to several settlements Tuesday. “Other settlements will remain under different sovereignty, Palestinian of course, and (some) settlements will remain in a framework of, apparently, two large blocs, under Israeli sovereignty.”

“These suggestions being made start with the recognition that the redeployment is not a good idea,” said Joseph Alpher, director of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. “Obviously, you have to first persuade the Palestinians of that fact, then together with them look for new trade-offs that will allow you to make progress.”

But Alpher scoffed at the notion of moving some isolated settlements into larger blocs.

“If you move these people, you have to build homes and infrastructure for them,” he said. “Then, two years from now, are you going to remove these very same settlers again? This is absurd.”

For Palestinians, the incentive in the trade-off would be the precedent it would establish. For the first time, Israel would be offering to remove some of the more than 144 Jewish settlements scattered across the West Bank.