Mideast Accord Expected to Be Approved Today

After more than 70 hours of talks, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators said this morning that they expected to initial a formal agreement later today on expanding Palestinian self-rule throughout the West Bank and holding elections there.

Under the terms of the agreement, Israeli troops will begin pulling out of Palestinian towns by the end of October and handing over their administration to Palestinians. The two sides will share security responsibilities in Hebron, the only West Bank town where Jewish settlers live amid the majority Palestinian population.

Under the agreement, elections are expected to be held by February for an 82-member self-governing Palestinian council and, on a separate ballot, for the leader of the Palestinian Authority.

The Clinton Administration reportedly has invited the two sides to a White House ceremony Thursday to sign the agreement, which amplifies the historic peace accord reached by Israel and the PLO two years ago.

When negotiations seemed near deadlock last week, Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally intervened, placing phone calls to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres urging them to resolve remaining differences and get the agreement signed before the Jewish high holy days delayed the talks further.

As it was, the two sides ran right up to the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins at sundown today and lasts until nightfall Tuesday. Peres and Arafat negotiated all night Saturday, then separated to allow their negotiating teams to complete a final draft of the agreement.

After the agreement is signed, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is expected to face a tough fight in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, to win its approval. Two members of his Labor Party have already said they will resign from the party and vote against the accord, leaving him with a single-vote majority. Rabin must secure 61 votes in favor of the accord’s ratification or face a political loss that would compel him to offer his resignation to President Ezer Weizman.

This latest Israeli-Palestinian accord is more than a year behind schedule, and it is being wrapped up only after months of often-bitter negotiations marred by crises, pauses and mutual recriminations. Its elaborate provisions--embodied in more than 400 pages of text--are testimony to the suspicion with which the sides regard each other’s motives and abilities, two years after signing their framework peace accord in Washington.

Both sides say they regard implementation of the West Bank accord as politically risky but essential for creating a lasting Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

“This agreement gives the Palestinians the critical mass to reach a historic turning point,” said Uri Savir, the director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and head of the Israeli negotiating team. “It also creates greater dependency than ever before between Israel and the Palestinians, and greater chances for cooperation.”

The agreement will govern the on-the-ground reversal of Israel’s 27-year-old military occupation of the West Bank, an area many Jews regard as biblically bequeathed to the Jewish people. It also lays the groundwork for a Palestinian state by mapping out the first-ever Palestinian area-wide elections in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Under the terms of the agreement, 1.2 million Palestinians 18 years old and older living in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be eligible to vote in elections for their self-governing council. The Palestinians have divided those areas into 16 districts for the purposes of the elections, which will mark the first time that Palestinians have ever been able to decide who governs them.

It took months for the Israelis to agree on how residents of East Jerusalem will participate. Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital, but the Palestinians hope to make East Jerusalem the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Ultimately, the two sides agreed that voters in East Jerusalem will cast their ballots in East Jerusalem post offices. Those ballots will then be counted outside what Israel considers as the city’s municipal boundaries but within the larger area the Palestinians have designated as the Jerusalem district for election purposes.

In another compromise, the Arabic word raees will be used to describe the title of the head of the authority. Arafat is expected to run for the position with little real opposition. Raees was chosen because it translates as either “president” or “chairman.” The Palestinians regard Arafat as president of a future state. Israel refers to him as chairman of the PLO and the self-governing authority.

The self-governing council and its leader will be responsible for running the daily affairs of Palestinians and for conducting final-status negotiations with Israel, set to begin in May.

The agreement has been assailed by Arafat’s Palestinian critics on the left and right for falling far short of establishing Palestinian statehood, for failing to uproot any Jewish settlements and for leaving much of the uninhabited areas of the West Bank under Israel’s control.

The agreement also is despised by the Israeli settlers, who have mounted a campaign of civil disobedience in anticipation of its signing. The settlers insist that the accord will leave them vulnerable to attack from Palestinian extremists once the Israeli army pulls out of Palestinian towns and villages.

The accord will mandate the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank towns of Janin, Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem before Palestinian elections are held. After the pullout from those towns, Palestinians will be responsible for maintaining security there.

Troops also will be pulled back from all but a handful of the West Bank’s 460 villages, but they will retain freedom of movement, designed to let them pursue suspected terrorists.

Even after Israel withdraws from those areas, it will continue to fully control large swathes of uninhabited areas, military sites and all the Jewish settlements.

The Israeli army will control bypass roads now being built that will enable most settlers to drive from their homes to areas inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders without having to pass through Palestinian-controlled towns and villages. Other roads will be jointly patrolled by Israelis and Palestinians and still others will be controlled exclusively by Palestinians.

The Palestinians are expected to inject as many as 11,000 security officers into the West Bank in the coming months, to help prevent terrorist attacks against Israelis and to protect Palestinians. Israel has guaranteed to the Palestinians that they will be able to travel freely on roads connecting their towns and villages, without passing through “permanent” Israeli checkpoints that now dot the West Bank. However, Israel retained the right to set up temporary roadblocks on West Bank roads.

In Hebron, Israel’s troop presence will be reduced, and it will patrol a smaller area of the troubled city, where more than 400 Jewish settlers live among about 120,000 Palestinians. Palestinian police, some armed with pistols, will exclusively patrol some neighborhoods of Hebron and jointly patrol other areas with the Israelis.

Palestinians failed to convince the Israelis that they should simply evacuate the militant settlers living in the heart of Hebron, and the talks came close to foundering on Israel’s initial insistence that it will retain overriding security responsibility in the city.