There Is Blame to Share as Mideast Peace Withers

When construction of a new Jewish neighborhood began in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem last week, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat warned Israel: Peace and settlements cannot coexist.

Days later, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a Tel Aviv cafe, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Arafat of having given a green light to terrorists. There can be no peace with terrorism, Netanyahu said.

In the Gordian knot of Israeli-Palestinian politics, it is always difficult to pinpoint blame. What is clear is that actions on both fronts--settlements and terrorism--have brought the peace process precariously close to collapse.

Israel has all but frozen negotiations and said it will not proceed with its peace accords commitments until the Palestinians clamp down on Muslim extremists. The Palestinians, saying they will not comply with Israel’s demands as long as the Jewish state promotes settlement in East Jerusalem, have cut off security cooperation for the first time in more than three years.

As the militant Islamic group Hamas calls for a coup de grace to the peace process, few Palestinians seem to feel there is anything left to save. And increasing numbers of Israelis doubt that they have a peace partner in Arafat, who has gone abroad for a week of Arab-world lobbying as Israel braces for more possible violence.

“To believe the peace process exists, there has to be a minimum level of peaceful relations, trust and communication, and either progress or hope of progress,” said Ghassan Khatib, a political analyst and director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center. “We have none of these things.”

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Mistrust and miscommunication between the two sides were rampant even before the Hamas suicide bomber blew up Cafe Apropos on Friday, killing three Israeli women and wounding 46 people.

Netanyahu and his Likud Party have never liked the so-called Oslo peace accord of 1993 and its sequel, the 1995 interim peace agreement, and they never saw Arafat as an honest partner in peacemaking. The Palestinians have believed for some time that Netanyahu’s right-religious coalition government was pretending to go along with the peace agreements while setting them up to fail.

The Palestinians’ faith was partially restored with the U.S.-brokered agreement in January to pull back Israeli troops from most of the West Bank city of Hebron. But that quickly dissipated with Israel’s decisions to hand over less land than the Palestinians expected in a subsequent redeployment and to begin construction of a 6,500-unit Jewish neighborhood on a hill in southeast Jerusalem.

Palestinians saw the construction at Har Homa, as the site is known in Hebrew, as a serious breach of the spirit of the peace accords, which left volatile issues such as the future of Jewish settlements and control over East Jerusalem for later negotiation.

Here, Palestinians said, Israel was not only building the first settlement since the signing of the peace accords but also unilaterally determining the future of Jerusalem. On land where Palestinians want to establish their capital one day, they saw Netanyahu settling Jews and driving a wedge between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Average Palestinians who once supported a negotiated peace process began to feel they had little to lose from its collapse.

In the meantime, Arafat started a rapprochement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, extremist Muslim groups that have rejected the peace process as a sham from the start and that carried out suicide bombings in February and March last year in which 60 people died.

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Under pressure from the United States, Arafat launched a sweeping crackdown on the Muslim groups after those bombings, seizing weapons and funds, arresting scores of their military and political leaders, and busting up much of their infrastructure. But early this year, he began to release dozens of the militants from jail.

Arafat told U.S. officials that he was trying to co-opt the militant groups and draw them into the system. He ignored U.S. warnings that he was playing a dangerous game.

Then, Arafat held two meetings with Hamas political leaders beginning March 9 that Israeli officials say sent a message to extremists that they could resume the use of violence with impunity.

Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas political leader who attended the meetings, said Arafat expressed frustration with the peace process. Zahar said Hamas members argued that Arafat should release their military chiefs still in jail because the two parties were both fighting Israeli settlements.

The next day Arafat released Ibrahim Makadmeh, reportedly the leader of secret Hamas cells that carried out the 1996 bombings.

“Arafat believed he could establish an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem. Now he has discovered that will not be implemented. He is forced to come back to the opposition and strengthen himself,” Zahar said in a March 15 interview.

After Friday afternoon’s bombing, Netanyahu and his aides held Arafat responsible, while the Palestinians countered that Netanayhu had set off the violence with his bulldozers and set up Arafat to take the fall.

Netanyahu halted all negotiations except talks on security issues. He said that until the Palestinians clamped down on Muslim militants he would not go forward with his commitments to redeploy troops from rural areas of the West Bank, open a safe passageway between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and allow the Palestinians to operate an airport in Gaza.

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Palestinians said negotiations were already frozen and that Netanyahu did not intend to do these other things anyway.

“In effect, the Israelis have frozen the negotiations some time ago. Instead of negotiating, they have tried to issue dictates,” said Saeb Erekat, a member of the Palestinian negotiating team.

He accused Netanyahu of starting the Har Homa construction in order to bring the negotiations to a crashing halt.

Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, Dore Gold, accused Arafat of “playing a double game”--denouncing violence while allowing it to go forward.

A U.S. official said security cooperation between the two sides has “basically broken down” for the first time in four years. “Since Friday’s terrorist attack, the ground has shifted,” the official said.

In Washington, the State Department, appearing to align itself more closely with Israeli concerns, demanded that the Palestinian Authority tell militants that terrorism against Israel will not be tolerated.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was reportedly considering sending Dennis B. Ross, the senior U.S. mediator, to the region to try to restore calm and put negotiators back on track.

As the political leaders traded blame, low-level fighting between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers continued for a fifth day Monday in Hebron and Bethlehem.

But even as Palestinian police stood between the two sides to prevent more severe clashes, Mohammed Dahlan, Palestinian Preventive Security chief in the Gaza Strip, said that until a two-way street is established Palestinians will not meet Israel’s security demands.