President Weizman and Arafat Meet in Israel

Making his first official visit to Israel, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat met Tuesday with Israeli President Ezer Weizman in a display of personal peacemaking as negotiators for the two sides renewed troubled talks over the redeployment of Israeli soldiers from the West Bank city of Hebron.

Arafat flew in an Israeli air force helicopter to Weizman’s home in the seaside city of Caesarea for a reconciliation two weeks after gun battles between Palestinian police and civilians and Israeli soldiers left at least 75 people dead and more than 1,000 wounded.

“Negotiations will be the tool to resolve our differences,” Arafat told the handful of reporters allowed past a heavy security ring around the Israeli president’s house. “We are determined to continue with this road of a new Middle East that will be devoid of wars, violence and counter-violence.”

Israeli-Palestinian tensions, however, appeared to be straining Israel’s relations with its closest ally in the Arab world, King Hussein of Jordan.

The king, who signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to uphold peace accords with the Palestinians and warned that lack of progress in the negotiations could lead to renewed war.

At the same time, his government formally complained about Netanyahu’s decision to complete the excavation of an archeological tunnel near Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. The tunnel project sparked the recent violence that threatened the peace process.

The Jordanian complaint said Netanyahu should have consulted with Hussein, who is the official overseer of Muslim holy sites in East Jerusalem. Israel seized East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.

In an interview Friday, after taking part in the hastily arranged Mideast summit in Washington, Hussein said that he had met with Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, Dore Gold, just hours before the new tunnel door was opened in the dead of night “and he didn’t mention a word.”

Such behavior, the king said, amounted to an assertion by Netanyahu that in Jerusalem, “ ‘We can do what we please.’

“This is totally unacceptable,” Hussein said.

Nonetheless, the diplomatic disagreement failed to throw a cloud over Arafat’s midday meeting Tuesday with Weizman, whose role in Israel is largely ceremonial. Arafat wore his usual military garb and checkered kaffiyeh to the luncheon and looked far cheerier than the shellshocked visage he presented after his White House summit with Netanyahu last week.

Weizman, a former defense minister, is seen by the Palestinians as more sympathetic to the beleaguered peace process than is Netanyahu. The Israeli president in effect forced the reluctant Netanyahu to meet with Arafat last month by suggesting that he would do so if the prime minister did not.

Weizman had issued a veiled criticism of Netanyahu’s inflexibility on Monday, saying: “I am a great believer in personal contacts, but we must put something on the table. We cannot simply say, ‘It will be all right.’ ” But on Tuesday, Weizman said he had consulted with Netanyahu before meeting with Arafat.

The Palestinian leader’s previous trip to Israel was in November, when he secretly paid a nighttime condolence call on Leah Rabin, the widow of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

On Tuesday, Weizman said he and Arafat spoke about “the recent tragedy of gunfire, losses on both sides, and we decided this kind of thing cannot happen again.”

But Israeli and Palestinian negotiators remained at odds over how to prevent violence in the future and how to proceed with the pullback of Israeli troops from Hebron, the last West Bank city under Israeli occupation.

The talks reached an impasse Monday night after each side dismissed the other’s proposal for redeployment, and they resumed only after U.S. peace envoy Dennis B. Ross intervened.

Israel reportedly is seeking expanded authority for “hot pursuit” of suspected terrorists into areas of Hebron that will be turned over to Palestinian police; a ban on automatic weapons for Palestinian police; and creation of buffer zones, or areas around Israeli soldiers, that would be off limits to armed Palestinian police.

“The main thing is to have the ability to take action when it is absolutely necessary,” said an Israeli official who asked not to be identified.

Israel wants to keep control of the high ground overlooking the Jewish quarter in downtown Hebron, where about 450 Jews live among about 100,000 Palestinians, and of a broader-than-agreed-upon belt linking the Jewish enclaves with the Cave of the Patriarchs, a holy site in Hebron.

Israel also proposes retaining some civilian authority in the city, including veto power over changes in infrastructure such as the construction of tall buildings that could serve as Palestinian police positions.

The Palestinians rejected all of these as alterations of the detailed interim peace accord that Arafat and Rabin signed last September. They said they will not reopen talks on signed agreements that already include negotiated safeguards for the security of Jews in Hebron, and that the two sides simply have to work out implementation of those existing accords.

To address Israeli concerns stemming from the violence two weeks ago, the Palestinians proposed that the two sides engage in more joint patrols and increase the number of international observers to be based in the city. Israelis say they want their own security, not the protection of foreigners.

Israel tried to ease the tension around Tuesday night’s talks by lifting a blockade on the West Bank town of Ramallah near Jerusalem and announcing that 10,000 Palestinian workers will be allowed into Israel beginning today. Israeli and Palestinian police, both armed only with pistols, opened the Karni commercial crossing from the Gaza Strip to Israel.

Also Tuesday, Netanyahu tried to patch up his fraying relations with Jordan, where more than half the population is of Palestinian origin, after the criticism over the Jerusalem tunnel project. Jordanian Information Minister Marwan Muasher accused the Israeli prime minister of having made Hussein look like a co-conspirator in the opening of the tunnel.

Netanyahu said political differences with Jordan are natural and that such differences occur “in the finest families.” An aide who asked not to be identified added that Hussein’s criticism was a response to pressure from the Arab world.

“Of course there has been an anti-Israeli mood in the Arab world, and Hussein is not known for standing alone against the consensus,” the aide said. He added, however, that a high-ranking Israeli official probably will go to Jordan within the next week to try to smooth things over.

In his interview Friday with Stanley K. Sheinbaum, publisher of New Perspectives Quarterly, and Nathan Gardels of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Hussein described the mood in the Arab world as one of “anger, bordering on despair.”

“We are sliding back toward a very dangerous psychological moment when people believe there is no hope,” he said.

Hussein argued that Jerusalem’s Old City is so religiously significant to Muslims, Jews and Christians that it should be “above sovereignty.”

“This does not make it possible for any one side to unilaterally disturb the status quo until there is agreement all around,” he said.

Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, and all other progress toward peace “will definitely be in question” if Israel fails to live up to what already has been agreed upon, the king said.

“A lot has been accomplished, even between Syria and Israel. . . . Are we going to put all that in jeopardy by turning back the clock? Does Israel really want to return to a fortress mentality with the image of arrogance of power? I have come to know the Israelis, and I am worried about them.”

Hussein said he still believes that the peace process is irreversible, as long as “people of responsibility control the situation.” But he cited a list of extremist acts on both sides and added: “I am very distressed to sense now that the close-minded people are influencing the movement of events in the opposite direction of peace.”

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What Israel Wants

Negotiators are struggling over Israel’s promised troop pullback from the West Bank city of Hebron. Here are some of the things Israel wants:

* The right of “hot pursuit” of suspected Palestinian assailants into areas of Hebron that will come under Palestinian control.

* Control over a broader area that links the Jewish enclaves with the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site in the center of Hebron that is holy to Muslims and Jews.

* A ban on automatic weapons for Palestinian police.

* Buffer zones around Israeli soldiers that would be off limits to armed Palestinian police.

Source: Times staff and wire reports