Hail of Bullets Points to Vagaries of ‘Peace’

The slaying of seven Israeli schoolgirls by a Jordanian soldier this week highlighted what has become a sad truth here--that peace in the Middle East never quite lives up to its name.

Or even to expectations.

Egypt and Israel made peace nearly 20 years ago, and neither side has much good to say about it still. Many Israelis trace their disillusionment with Egyptian peace to October 1985, when an Egyptian police officer shot seven Israeli tourists to death in Ras Burka, a part of the Sinai Peninsula that was returned to Egypt under the peace treaty.

Israelis recall that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak dismissed the gunman as crazy and that although the murderer was sentenced to life in jail, he was dubbed the “Hero of Sinai” by newspapers of Egypt’s political opposition.

Now, another member of an Arab security force has killed seven more Israelis, on a swath of land that Israel returned to Jordan under their peace treaty in 1994. The eighth-graders were shot during a field trip to a scenic border spot that is supposed to symbolize peace between the two countries.

This, again, is not the peace that most Israelis had envisioned, and they are looking at Jordanian King Hussein’s reaction to the slayings for clues to the future of peace.

The king’s response has offered some hope. By asking to visit the bereaved families in Israel, Hussein demonstrated a quality that is rare in the Middle East--empathy for the other side.

Even in peace, the Middle East is a place where everyone yells and, generally, no one listens. Few cup their ears to hear another point of view, or look across the abyss and see humanity on the other rim.

Arabs and Jews try to carve out parallel lives. They walk on opposite sides of the street and pray on opposite sides of holy walls. They make pacts to end the violence but at the same time prepare for it with gas masks and guns at home.

When news broke of the slaying of the seven girls, the first reaction of many Arabs and Jews was to blame one another.

Israeli leaders place responsibility on the shoulders of Hussein, who days before had written a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that said the Israeli leader’s policies toward Palestinians were leading to “inevitable violent resistance.”

Hussein was looking at the history of a land where many gunmen have tried to halt peacemaking on their own. The king believed that he was issuing a warning to protect the fragile peace, but Israelis heard a threat. Their ally Hussein had joined the Arab drumbeat of predicting violence, a repetition they said justifies and even encourages violent acts.

Palestinian leaders and Jordanians, sometimes forgetting to lament the deaths of young girls, returned fire: Netanyahu’s insistence on building thousands of Jewish apartments in disputed East Jerusalem has fueled Arab rage, they said. Netanyahu inspired the killing, they charged.

The gunman’s motives and state of mind are still unknown, but Netanyahu linked the killings to a hatred of Jews.

“These girls were murdered for one reason: because they belonged to the Jewish people, because of the horrible hatred against which we are struggling with determination,” Netanyahu said at a late-night funeral. “Should anybody think he will break us down, that we can be forced to give up on our holy land and our eternal capital, he doesn’t understand our people.”

But Israelis are not the only ones who are disappointed with peace.

Palestinians never imagined that their 1993 peace accord with Israel would lead to military closures and lost revenue, enlarged Jewish settlements in the West Bank and a ban on travel to Jerusalem. They envisioned a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital but instead have islands of Palestinian rule and a shrinking foothold in Jerusalem.

The Palestinians want freedom and respect but say they feel humiliated.

And now Palestinians face a new hurdle in peace. Israel plans to break ground for a Jewish neighborhood in the traditionally Palestinian area of southeastern Jerusalem, on a hill that Israelis call Har Homa and Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghneim.

To Israel, this construction is a matter of principle: The government has the right to build in sovereign territory, in the “undivided capital” of the Jewish people. The government does not plan to give up any ground in Jerusalem--a position most Israelis share--so why not build the housing Israelis need now?

But to Palestinians, this is deceit. Palestinians say that Israel’s unilateral decision to build preempts “final status” negotiations on the fate of Jerusalem--one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

It would seem that the killing of schoolgirls in this climate might make politicians pause and take stock, let the wave of frustration subside.

“Israel has waited 3,000 years for Har Homa,” Hussein reportedly told an Israeli he knows well. “Why can’t you wait two more years until the end of negotiations?”

But Netanyahu’s response is to prepare to break ground. Despite warnings from security officials that bulldozers will provoke violence and even, perhaps, a collapse of the peace process, Netanyahu’s Cabinet on Friday unanimously agreed to press on.

The work is to begin Monday.