Arafat Seeks Help to Halt Israeli Plans in Jerusalem

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat gathered foreign envoys to his seaside headquarters Saturday in a last-ditch effort to put pressure on Israel to abandon plans for a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem and “save the peace process” from collapse.

“As we have stated before that peace and terrorism cannot go hand in hand, so peace and [housing] settlements cannot go hand in glove,” Arafat told the diplomats at the start of the four-hour meeting. “We have no choice but to adhere to reason . . . as well as to the option of peace.”

The high-profile meeting, however, had little effect on the ground. The diplomats offered moral support but no action. Israel renewed its vow to launch the 6,500-unit project this week. And the militant Islamic group Hamas announced it was “making the preparations for serious action to defend all Palestinian rights” in Jerusalem.

Persistent warnings of violence--from all quarters--have made a serious clash over the Jewish construction project seem inevitable. Palestinians insist they must take a stand on the land where they hope to establish a capital, while Israelis say they can never back down in the face of threats.

The housing development is slated for a pine-covered hill, known by Jews as Har Homa and by Arabs as Jabal Abu Ghneim, that provides a link between traditionally Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

Arafat charges that Israel, with Har Homa, is trying to complete a ring of Jewish settlements around Jerusalem to isolate it from the West Bank. He says Israel is preempting “final status” negotiations over East Jerusalem and other key issues, which were supposed to begin Monday.

“When we agreed to postpone issues of Jerusalem, borders, settlements and refugees until the final status negotiations, we also agreed that neither party should carry out unilateral steps that would affect those talks,” Arafat told the envoys.

He urged the diplomats from the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe, Egypt and Jordan--whose countries all backed the Israeli-Palestinian 1995 interim peace agreement--to seek “a mechanism” to guarantee implementation of the peace accords and to prevent either side from taking unilateral steps.

But the United States opposed the move. Edward Abington Jr., the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, said the envoys agreed that “each government would conduct intensive efforts to lower the tension and restore confidence” but that there would be no new forum. “The United States considers the primary vehicle for solving problems in the Middle East to be direct negotiations.”

The Palestinians have complained that U.S. opposition to Har Homa has been stronger in words than in deeds. President Clinton has said he wishes Israel would not go forward with the project, but the administration vetoed a U.N. Security Council condemnation of it and was the only country to side with Israel in a General Assembly vote on the issue.

Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, delivered a letter from Clinton to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Har Homa last week that Israeli officials said urged the government to provide a “compensation package” for the Palestinians.

“The letter takes for granted that Har Homa will go ahead,” said Netanyahu spokesman David Bar-Illan. “It says to do something else that would satisfy the Palestinians. . . . There has never been a suggestion that we stop Har Homa, only that we suspend or postpone it. The harping has been on timing.”

After a Jordanian soldier killed seven Israeli schoolgirls Thursday for what many speculated were political motives, Netanyahu announced that work would begin Monday on Har Homa.

Diplomats say the start-up may be delayed a few days by Jordanian King Hussein’s visit to Israel but that the government is likely to proceed. Hussein is scheduled to arrive in Israel today to meet with the bereaved families of the slain girls and to make his first trip to Jerusalem since the funeral of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. To send bulldozers into the disputed area on the heels of Hussein’s conciliatory visit would be seen as a slap in the king’s face.

Israel is proceeding with Har Homa despite warnings by its intelligence chiefs and Palestinian leaders that construction could lead to violence.

The pro-Arafat Israeli newspaper Al Quds ran a front-page story Saturday quoting the Hamas political leadership in Jordan as saying the group is “making the preparations for serious action to defend all Palestinian rights and interests, first of all Jerusalem.”

Arafat met with Hamas political leaders in Gaza last week and has released several of the group’s top military personnel, who were jailed after a wave of suicide bombings in Israel last year.

Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, a Hamas political leader in Gaza, said in an interview at his health clinic that the group told Arafat he should release the military chiefs because “they were fighting settlements and now you are fighting settlements.”

Zahhar indicated that violence would be a likely response to Netanyahu’s breaking ground for Har Homa, much as violence greeted Israel’s opening of a tunnel door in Jerusalem’s Old City last September.

“What would be the peaceful method to stop him?” Zahhar asked. “If you are going to push people to the corner, then you have to expect everything.”

Israeli Internal Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani said Israel is prepared to confront any possible explosion.

After his meeting with diplomats, Arafat was asked what he thought the Palestinian response will be if Israeli bulldozers start working at Har Homa.

“I do not know,” he said. “You have to ask the Palestinian masses.”