Arafat, Barak Pledge Anew to Make Peace

President Clinton and the leaders of Israel and the Palestinians paid stirring tribute Tuesday to the memory of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and then renewed their commitment to making peace in the Middle East in a matter of months.

In the city where the peace process began more than six years ago, Clinton clasped hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and told them to “finish the job” started by Rabin.

The two Middle Eastern leaders promised a schedule of frequent consultations and intense negotiations. But no concrete progress was reported toward bridging the enormous gaps that continue to keep the two sides apart.

The three leaders met for about an hour Tuesday night, capping a two-day summit that revolved around elaborate ceremonies honoring the spirit of Rabin, whose decision to embrace the landmark Oslo accords of 1993 cost him his life. Four years ago Thursday, after a peace rally in Tel Aviv, he was assassinated by an ultranationalist Jew opposed to his conciliatory moves toward the Palestinians.

“I feel that we have revitalized the peace process,” Clinton said.

The largely symbolic gathering provided another high-level push to a peace process poised to enter its most difficult and critical phase.

Clinton, emerging from his final session with Barak and Arafat, said the next round of talks, dedicated to the final and most contentious issues--from the status of the coveted holy city of Jerusalem to the fate of 3 million Palestinian refugees--had been launched in a refreshingly positive atmosphere.

“The framework talks are off to a very good start,” Clinton said.

The U.S. president, hoping that success in the Middle Eastern arena can help repair his own political legacy, said another summit patterned after the 1978 Camp David meetings that produced an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty might be in the offing.

“They have agreed with me that we might well have a summit at the end of this process, when progress has been made,” Clinton said. “I believe that in good faith we will get an agreement and a summit.”

Barak, known to favor back-channel negotiations that he personally leads, beamed as he stood next to Clinton. Arafat, who had hoped to use the Oslo conference to secure a stronger and more hands-on U.S. role, appeared downcast.

Less than four months after taking office, Barak has pledged, with Arafat’s concurrence, to reach a framework agreement--essentially a blueprint for how to resolve the outstanding issues--by mid-February and a final treaty by September.

A senior Clinton administration official, speaking later to reporters, said he expects “an intensive period” of negotiations between now and Feb. 13, the target date for the framework agreement. Final-status negotiations are scheduled to begin in earnest Monday in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

It was widely reported Tuesday in Israel that Barak had presented Clinton with a detailed outline of how he envisions resolving the final disputed issues. The prime minister told Clinton that Israel would recognize a Palestinian “entity” in nearly half of the West Bank and would agree to the evacuation of many of the Jewish settlements that have sprouted up across the West Bank, according to Israeli correspondents traveling with Barak.

Earlier in the day, the search for peace focused on the man who was one of its earliest patrons. At the ornate Oslo City Hall, where Rabin was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in forging and accepting the original accords, Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and Europeans came together to make impassioned pleas for a definitive peace. Among them were relatives and former associates of Rabin, as well as musicians, writers and families of war victims.

Rabin’s widow, Leah, saying that her husband “fell on the altar of peace,” exhorted Barak and Arafat to build on his work.

“We have arrived at the shores of peace,” she said, turning occasionally to speak directly to a huge portrait of Rabin overlooking the audience.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who replaced Rabin upon his death, similarly encouraged Arafat and Barak to work to overcome their differences.

“Don’t give up,” Peres said. “We have to be daring.”

In the commemoration ceremony, punctuated by poems and solemn music, Clinton sounded a cautionary note.

“We have now a chance, but only a chance, to bring real and lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors,” he said. “If we let it slip away, all will bear the consequences: Israel still trapped within a circle of hostility; the Palestinians still saddled with poverty and frustration and pain; both they and their Arab neighbors wrapped in an endless and pointless cycle of conflict.”

If Rabin were alive and witnessed the Oslo gathering, Clinton said, he would say, “This is all nice, but if you really want to honor me, finish the job.”

Barak, who was Rabin’s protege and, like him, a general turned statesman, pledged to protect his nation’s “security interests and vital needs” but also said that peace, despite its “difficulties and pain,” remains “preferable to all.”

Barak then turned to address his onetime commander: “I vow to you, Yitzhak, a soldier who fell in the battle for peace, that we are determined to give your death a meaning by following your legacy.”

Arafat also spoke longingly of peace but also struck an almost confrontational tone that underscored the difficulties ahead.

“Let us together remove the obstacles,” said Arafat, who gave a military salute to the Rabin portrait at the beginning and end of his speech.

Arafat then called on Israel to return to the borders that defined its territory in 1967--something that Barak refuses--and warned against the “destructive danger of Israeli settlement.”

Israeli radio reported in Jerusalem that U.S. officials, moments before the memorial ceremony began, had urged both Arafat and Barak to tone down their rhetoric, in both Tuesday’s remarks and the coming months. As an apparent consequence, Arafat omitted his usual claim to Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state, and Barak did not repeat his so-called red lines, his bottom-line negotiating positions.

Even as the emotional ceremony unfolded in Oslo, Israel’s top military intelligence official, Lt. Gen. Amos Malka, was briefing legislators in Jerusalem with a warning that if Arafat isn’t satisfied with the pace of talks, he could orchestrate waves of street violence to ratchet up pressure on the Israelis.

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Chen reported from Oslo and Wilkinson from Jerusalem.