Leaders Are Still Earning Peace Prize : Mideast: Arafat, Rabin and Peres to accept Nobel award this weekend. But they’re struggling to keep their accord intact.

The three men who travel to Oslo today to accept the Nobel Peace Prize were scrambling Thursday to salvage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that earned them the award.

Emerging from a hastily arranged meeting Thursday morning, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who are to share the prize with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, each made statements designed to reassure the other’s constituency.

Peres said the Oslo accord, the peace framework that Israel and the PLO signed in September, 1993, would be altered only “by mutual agreement” and not unilaterally, as some Israeli officials hinted last week.

Rabin and other officials have said it may be impossible for Israel to keep its commitment to pull Israeli troops out of West Bank Palestinian towns and villages before holding Palestinian elections in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Israeli officials have expressed doubt that the Palestinian self-governing authority will be able to protect the more than 100,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank once Israeli troops redeploy out of Palestinian population centers. They point to the authority’s inability to prevent attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians in Gaza, which it governs, and to its reluctance to crack down on Islamic militant groups in Gaza, as evidence that it will be unable to provide security in the West Bank.

Directly addressing that Israeli concern, Arafat said after his session with Peres that the Palestinians will take Israel’s security needs into consideration as the two sides continue to negotiate.

Arafat then rushed to Jabaliya refugee camp to mark the seventh anniversary of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza.

As the keynote speaker at a low-key rally organized by Fatah, the PLO faction he founded, he promised the cheering crowd that he will remember those who died fighting the intifada and not abandon their dream of establishing an independent Palestinian state.

“The promise is still the promise, the commitment is still the commitment,” he said. “Our journey is not a walk down the park, but a long hard road that we must travel together until we reach Jerusalem.”

Peres returned to Tel Aviv, to a special Cabinet meeting called to decide the government’s position on continuing negotiations with the Palestinians. Dovish Cabinet ministers said they were disappointed that the government’s conclusion, after a series of three special sessions on the negotiations with the Palestinians, was simply to continue implementing the Oslo accord.

The government made no mention of uprooting some of the more isolated settlements in Gaza and the West Bank as a way to ease Israel’s security dilemma. Several of the more dovish Cabinet members have been urging that settlements in the West Bank be concentrated into a few large blocs that the army could more easily defend.

Peres, Rabin and Arafat are expected to hold more talks in Oslo before receiving their joint award Saturday. Rabin is said to be trying to sell Arafat on a compromise that would allow Israel to limit the redeployment of its troops in return for Israeli concessions on the type of elections the Palestinians want to hold.

The Palestinians have been pushing for elections that would form a legislative council of 100 members. Israel wants a smaller executive council and says it does not want any Palestinians from East Jerusalem to run in the elections.

The dilemma for Arafat is that he is trying to entice the largest Islamic opposition movement, Hamas, into participating in the elections. Hamas is almost certain to boycott any vote unless Israel makes substantial redeployments from most of the West Bank.