20,000 in Tel Aviv Demonstrate in Support of Peace Process

Singing peace songs and cheering the leaders of the Israeli left, thousands of demonstrators gathered here Tuesday to denounce the hard-line policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and voice support for the faltering Middle East peace process.

In an odd juxtaposition, many of the peace supporters walked to the rally past a nearby open-air display of military equipment, watching delighted children climb on top of tanks in the square where Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister and peace architect, spoke just before he was assassinated in November.

But the rally, held against the backdrop of an Israeli-Arab summit in Washington trying to resuscitate the peace process, easily outdrew the military exhibit. Police estimated the crowd at the peace demonstration at 20,000, more than double the number of those who stopped Tuesday to see the tanks and other military vehicles.

David Reeb, an artist and teacher from Tel Aviv, said he came to the rally to help show Netanyahu that thousands still support the peace process with the Palestinians, despite the violence that spread last week throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip and into East Jerusalem.

Three more people, including two Palestinians and one Israeli, were reported Tuesday to have died of wounds suffered in last week’s fighting, bringing the death toll to 74--59 Palestinians and 15 Israelis, the latter all soldiers.

“Many of us are really confused and concerned,” said Reeb, who carried a hand-painted sign urging the government to dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “Things that took so long to put together seem to be falling apart so rapidly. We need to stop the deterioration and move forward.”

In three months, added Elisheva Lernau, 83, of the Tel Aviv suburb Bab Yom, Netanyahu “has succeeded in almost killing the peace process, which took three years to create. I don’t believe this government wants peace at all.”

An opinion poll published Tuesday showed that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want the peace negotiations with the Palestinians to continue.

In the survey by the Maariv newspaper, 79.5% of those polled said they favored putting the existing Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements into effect.

Netanyahu, who defeated former Prime Minister Shimon Peres with a campaign that stressed “peace with security,” has delayed putting into effect several parts of the accords, including Israeli troop redeployment in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Netanyahu has said he wants to renegotiate the Hebron troop redeployment to increase security arrangements for about 450 Jewish settlers who live in the volatile town among roughly 100,000 Palestinians.

The Maariv poll, taken Monday, also found that 57% of the 521 respondents surveyed called the Israeli leader’s performance during the crisis “unsatisfactory.”

Although he was not commenting directly on the Maariv survey, Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political scientist, urged the prime minister to rethink his policies, saying: “I think Netanyahu should know that he does not have the Israeli public behind him to escalate a conflict with the Palestinians.”

At the demonstration in a central Tel Aviv park, speaker after speaker called on Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, to return from Washington with a concrete agreement with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and a new agenda for peace.

Otherwise, warned Yossi Sarid, a member of the Israeli parliament from the leftist Meretz Party, “we will concentrate our efforts only on one thing: Bring [Netanyahu] down, bring him down!”

Many at the rally, organized by the group Peace Now, also stressed their anger and feelings of betrayal over reports that a number of Palestinian police officers fired their weapons at Israeli soldiers during the fighting, causing most of the Israeli deaths.

“I feel furious about what the Palestinian police did,” said Shai Foguel, who attended the rally with his wife and daughter, 3. “But we are not as naive as the right wing has tried to make us. We know that these people, many of them, were former terrorists. . . . The shooting they did is a real problem now, but we have to go forward.”

Several said they hoped that the meetings in Washington could accomplish what suddenly seems impossible, bridging the growing gulf of mistrust between the two sides and salvaging the peace process.

Reeb said he too would like to be hopeful: “The alternative is just too scary.”