Talks Win Rabin No Points at Home : Israel: Premier’s summit with Arab leaders received with indifference. Palestinians also doubtful about promises of peace.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin received no hero’s welcome or messages of support from members of Parliament upon his return here early Friday from an extraordinary summit in Cairo with three Arab leaders.

True, Israelis saw what once would have been an impossible image on their television screens--their prime minister sitting comfortably next to Jordan’s King Hussein, engaging in talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on everything from negotiating peace to improving education in the region.

A headline shouting “Mubarak, Hussein, Rabin and Arafat Will Meet in Cairo” would until lately “have been the equivalent of ‘Creatures From Mars Have Surrounded the Knesset,’ ” observed diplomatic correspondent Menachem Shalev in the newspaper Maariv on Friday. “But this week, the news about the summit in Cairo was received with indifference. Who really has the strength for another ceremony, another photo op, more declarations, more ‘peace’?”

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Both Palestinians and Israelis express fatigue at witnessing historic firsts that never seem to produce the peace and security for both peoples that they promise.

Asked whether he thought Thursday’s summit would persuade the man on the street that peace negotiations with Israel are still worth pursuing, one aide to Arafat said bluntly, “No.”

“No, it will not convince them. People are fed up with what they are seeing: meetings, meetings, meetings,” Nabil abu Rudaineh said. “They want to see implementation. There should be some kind of movement on the ground.”

Before suicide bombers from an Islamic extremist faction blew up 21 Israelis in a Jan. 22 attack, Abu Rudaineh pointed out, “Chairman Arafat had reached some important agreements with Rabin. Prisoners were supposed to be freed at the start of Ramadan (the Muslim month of fasting). Safe passages were supposed to be opened between Gaza and Jericho. Redeployment of Israeli troops in the West Bank was being negotiated.”

Israel froze progress on all those agreements as soon as the bombing occurred. So instead of generating goodwill by freeing prisoners at the start of Ramadan, the Israelis on Friday earned more curses from thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza whom soldiers kept from traveling to Jerusalem to pray on the first Friday of Ramadan.

“Israel continues its oppressive, inhuman measures without considering this holy month,” said Ikram Sabri, the mufti--or official interpreter of Islamic law--of Jerusalem, in his sermon at Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday. “Muslims, I’m sure that Israel will finally be destroyed and the (Jewish) settlements will be your spoils.”

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Palestinians were turned back because Israel continues to prevent Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza from crossing into Israel, a ban it imposed after the Jan. 22 bombing. The closure is keeping about 70,000 Palestinians from their jobs and preventing patients from being treated in Israeli hospitals and students from attending schools in Jerusalem.

Thursday’s summit was important, Abu Rudaineh said, “because it got the Egyptians and the Americans involved again in the peace process.”

But the real test of its success will come next week, he said, when talks are scheduled to resume at different levels and different locations.

On Monday, the foreign ministers of Israel, Egypt and Jordan and a senior PLO representative will meet in Washington with Secretary of State Warren Christopher. That meeting is supposed to be a quick follow-up to the summit’s commitment to speed up Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and to pressure international donors to deliver the millions of dollars in aid they have promised to the Palestinian self-governing authority.

Later in the week in Cairo, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will meet for the first time since the Jan. 22 bombing to reopen their talks on holding Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza.

Those elections are already six months overdue, according to the timetable laid out in the September, 1993, framework accord that Israel and the PLO signed granting limited political autonomy to Palestinians living under Israeli military rule.

Palestinians say that Arafat’s only hope of shoring up his sagging popularity is to hold elections quickly and earn a measure of legitimacy by being elected to office.

And on Thursday, Rabin will travel again to the Erez checkpoint to hold talks with Arafat on the sensitive issues over which negotiations have stalled: the redeployment of Israeli troops out of West Bank towns and villages, and the control of Islamic and other extremist groups under Palestinian rule in Gaza.

Rabin took one small step Friday to meet Palestinian demands when he met with his senior security advisers, who reportedly recommended that the closure imposed on the West Bank and Gaza be “eased.”

On Sunday, when the Cabinet meets, Rabin reportedly will recommend that students and patients be allowed to cross into Israel. He may also recommend that workers over the age of 45 living in the West Bank be allowed back into Israel. But such a gesture will do little to relieve the economic crisis caused in Gaza by tens of thousands of workers being kept from their jobs.

Arafat also intends to again bring up Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank when he meets with Rabin on Thursday, Abu Rudaineh said. Some of Arafat’s own ministers are demanding that talks be broken off with Israel unless all settlement expansion is halted.