Israel Parliament Ratifies PLO Pact : Mideast: After bitter debate, the narrow vote reflects the deep divisions over expanding Palestinian self-rule.

At the end of 15 hours of vitriolic debate, the Israeli Parliament early today narrowly ratified Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s agreement to give Palestinians control over much of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The 61-59 vote that Rabin called a motion of confidence in his center-left coalition government mirrors the deep schism in Israel over the peace agreement with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Two hawkish members of Rabin’s Labor Party defected to the opposition for the vote despite the prime minister’s daylong efforts to stop potential deserters.

Thursday evening, several thousand Jewish settlers from the West Bank and other opponents of the peace accord gathered in Jerusalem’s Zion Square for a protest, calling Rabin a traitor and brandishing drawings of Rabin in a Nazi Gestapo uniform.

Knesset Chairman Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, was so pained by the use of swastikas in Israel that he delayed the final vote to demand an apology from opposition Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who had spoken at the rally. Leftist members of Parliament screamed in anger at Netanyahu, and Rabin walked out on his apology.

Rabin opened the debate at noon Thursday with an appeal to “give peace a chance,” promising that he would not return the country to its narrow borders of 1967, before Israel captured the West Bank in the Arab-Israeli War.

He was heckled and interrupted by the opposition as he vowed that Jerusalem would remain united and that some Jewish settlers would stay in the West Bank after the third and final stage of negotiations with the Palestinians beginning in May. He said his ultimate goal was a Palestinian self-governing “entity,” less than a full-fledged Palestinian state.

“Lies, lies,” the opposition yelled, as Rabin then went after the moral high ground.

“The Jewish people, who have suffered so much after 2,000 years of exile, returned to our homeland, only we found it occupied with the Palestinians,” he said, taking on the myth that Jews returned from the Diaspora to an unpopulated desert.

“Thousands of people from both sides were killed in the struggle for this piece of land. Today, after wars and numerous acts of bloodshed, we rule over more than 2 million Palestinians and run their lives. . . . This is not a solution for peace.

“We can continue to kill and be killed, but we can also try to stop this bloody cycle. We can give peace a chance,” he said.

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Netanyahu, who aspires to replace Rabin as prime minister next year, countered with a fiery speech accusing Rabin of abandoning Jewish values and holy sites.

He said the Rabin government was “the most alienated, most distant from the Jewish heritage of the people of Israel that has ever been in our history.”

Netanyahu accused Rabin of lying to the public and “galloping back” to the 1967 borders of Israel, at which point Labor member Yoam Lass snapped that the right-wing Likud leader was simply “paranoid.”

“Since when are you an expert on psychiatry?” shot back a member from the Likud side.

All 120 members of Parliament were entitled to five minutes to speak on the agreement, and most took their allotted time on Israeli cable television with an eye toward next year’s first-ever election primaries.

The seemingly endless debate featured wild arm-waving and pointing while each side accused the other of trying to buy votes with promises of fancy cars and seats in the next government.

Representatives of Israel’s 800,000 Arabs accused Netanyahu of wishing to continue Israel’s occupation and domination of Palestinians. Rabin’s leftist coalition partners from the Meretz party, meanwhile, charged that he must go further to seek a Palestinian state and evacuate all 400 Jews from the center of Hebron, a city of 120,000 Palestinians.

The interim accord is the second phase of the September, 1993, peace agreement between Rabin and Arafat. It extends Palestinian self-rule from the Gaza Strip and Jericho to much of the West Bank.

Under the agreement, Israel is to fully withdraw its troops from six Palestinian cities--Janin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah--by the end of the year. Partial redeployment in the seventh, Hebron, is to be completed by the end of March.

Palestinians will also gain control over most of 450 West Bank Arab villages, although Israeli troops will retain control of settlements, new bypass roads and rural areas. The troops also may re-enter villages when they deem it necessary.

Under Israeli law, Rabin did not have to seek parliamentary ratification, but the government clearly wanted the Knesset’s stamp of approval.

Rabin persuaded one maverick, Deputy Housing Minister Alex Goldfarb from the centrist Yiud Party, to vote with him despite his public threats to cross over. But Labor Party members Avigdor Kahalani and Emanuel Zissman voted against the government after Rabin met at least four times throughout the day with Kahalani.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the principle Israeli architect of the peace accord, met a volley of opposition invective when he closed the debate about 3 a.m., urging Parliament to contain the conflict with Palestinians now or face “an out-of-control inferno” with the Arab world.

“Let us live in peace with Arabs,” he said.