Where Peace Hangs Fire in the West Bank : Mideast: Arabs, Israelis face off daily in Hebron. Each side lays claim to city.

HEBRON, Israeli-Occupied West Bank — If there were a road to hell, it would surely look a lot like this ancient city’s Street of the Martyrs, paved in hatred and posted with warning signs of bloodshed ahead.

The entire Israeli-Palestinian peace process is stuck on sun-seared blocks like these in downtown Hebron, where there is a daily face-off between many of the city’s 415 Jewish settlers and 120,000 embittered Arabs.

As Israeli and Palestinian leaders prepared to meet in Taba, Egypt, today to search for a way to cut the Gordian knot of Hebron, Israeli and Palestinian residents of the city clashed for a third day over the raising of a Palestinian flag at an Arab girls school.

On Sunday, the settlers came to blows with the preteen girls and their teachers at Qurtuba Elementary School. The settlers tore the flag off the school roof, across the street from the bunker-like Beit Hadassa building where about 40 Jewish families live, and the principal tried to get it back in a rough tug of war.

The flag was raised again on Monday and Tuesday, and both times Israeli soldiers intervened to take it down, saying it interfered with public order.

The real tug of war, of course, is over Hebron itself and whose soldiers or police will control the streets.

After touring the city under heavy guard last week, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed that he will not withdraw Israeli troops from downtown Hebron, even though a 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord commits him to redeployment from “population centers” of the West Bank. Israel took the West Bank of the Jordan River in the 1967 Middle East War and has ruled there ever since.

Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, meanwhile, met with 30 of Hebron’s Palestinian leaders and promised them he will not sign a second-stage accord to expand Palestinian self-rule unless it includes an Israeli troop withdrawal from Hebron.

The Palestinians say there can be no peace in Hebron until the Jewish settlers who arrived in 1979 leave with the soldiers, and the settlers say they will never leave Hebron peacefully, no matter what kind of agreement Rabin signs.

The only belief both sides hold is that Rabin will not have the political will or strength to forcibly remove Jews from Hebron, home of the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Jews and Muslims worship at what is believed to be the burial site of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives.

“If Rabin wants peace with the Palestinians and intends real peace, he must take the courageous decision to remove the settlers from the city center,” said Hebron lawyer Aziz Amro, an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team. “But Rabin wants the status quo.”

Amro noted that the prime minister did not move the Jews after settler Baruch Goldstein shot and killed about 30 Muslim worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in February, 1994. “That was his golden chance. Now, as the Israeli elections near, he is trying to convince Palestinians that his situation is very difficult. Well, it was very strong after the massacre.”

Shani Horowitz, a native of New York who lives in Beit Hadassa with her husband and seven children, says she believes Rabin will not pull the army and settlers from Hebron because both have a great deal of support around the country.

“The center of everything, of our right to be a Jewish country, stems from here. We are not just 40 families. We are messengers for a very special mission. . . . If we were just 400 people, he would have evacuated us long ago,” Horowitz said as soldiers stood guard outside her front door.

Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres are seeking a face-saving compromise that will allow them to proceed with redeployment in the rest of the West Bank. Israel has already agreed to withdraw its troops from the other major Arab cities and turn over civilian duties in the West Bank.

Israel reportedly has proposed a gradual withdrawal from Hebron that leaves difficult areas like the downtown to be dealt with in the final stage of peace negotiations, along with all West Bank Jewish settlements and Jerusalem. Arafat spokesman Nabil abu Rudaineh on Tuesday rejected that proposal as a delaying tactic but said Palestinians would agree to an Israeli withdrawal over three months.

Arafat is under pressure from West Bank leaders of his own Fatah faction of the PLO who have threatened to boycott Palestinian elections if he gives in on Hebron. Hebron is the third-largest city in the West Bank, and the district includes a third of the Arab population.

West Bank settlers are pressuring Rabin with a campaign to topple him in elections next year and threats of civil war.

“This is not the place to think about compromise,” said Horowitz. “This community is not going to give up. If they are scared of civil war, this is the place they have to be scared of.”

Hebron Mayor Mustafa Natsheh warns of violence from the other side. “The people have been very patient in the belief that the Palestinian National Army will come to the city. If the PNA doesn’t come to Hebron, people will lose their patience and start to reply to the presence of the Israeli army,” Natsheh said.

In heavily armed Hebron, anger and bitterness are more evident than fear. Downtown, the Street of the Martyrs is like an open wound running from the barricaded Cave of the Patriarchs through a teeming Arab market and up to the girls school and Beit Hadassa.

The street of Arab stores and coffee shops is closed to Arab cars by Israeli army barriers. It provides a corridor for Jews to reach the cave that is a kind of gantlet of hatred for both sides.

Many of the Arab stores have been spray-painted with Jewish Stars of David and slogans such as “Death to the Arabs” and “Deportation to Arabia.”

Underneath, in Arabic, is the Palestinian answer. “Hamas,” it says, referring to the Islamic extremist group that has killed dozens of Israelis with bus bombs since the peace accord was signed. Hamas has a broad base of support in Hebron.

Some settlers speed past in vans with protective glass and with shotguns between the seats. Others walk.

“They spit at us and make humiliating remarks,” said a 75-year-old Arab man sitting outside a coffee shop. He refused to give his name--for fear of reprisals, he said. “They say to me, ‘[The Muslim Prophet] Mohammed is on my shoe.’ ”

How does he respond?

“I say, ‘Go away.’ I tell them Hebron is not theirs. Not Hebron, not Ramallah, not Nablus, not Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem. It’s all Arab.”