Mideast Clashes Ease as Leaders Call for Calm

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinians in the streets of several West Bank towns Friday, leaving two dead and about 200 injured. However, the overall intensity of violence in the region appeared to be easing after a declared truce.

For a second day, leaders on both sides called for restraint and worked to cool the charged atmosphere so that a cease-fire announced early Thursday could take hold. Other steps also were underway to regenerate movement toward peace.

In Washington, the White House confirmed that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat will visit President Clinton next week to discuss the search for peace. Clinton reportedly was also trying to set up a separate meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Although there was markedly less shooting during Friday’s clashes than in recent weeks, the day was not free of death.

A 21-year-old Palestinian was killed during a stone-throwing incident in the West Bank town of Tulkarm, while another, an 18-year-old, died of gunshot wounds after clashes between youths and Israeli forces in the village of Hizma, northeast of Jerusalem. Most of the day’s injured also were Palestinians.

Despite the violence, there were signs of progress on the ground in the West Bank.

In Ramallah, where one of the day’s biggest clashes unfolded, imams and Palestinian leaders urged followers to continue attacking Israeli troops with rocks and bottles--but to put lethal weapons aside.

Although the message still seemed radical to outsiders, there is a belief among many Palestinians that the level of anger and frustration boiling over in their communities makes more moderate tactics impossible to sell.

“The cease-fire doesn’t stop us from expressing our feelings--it’s about halting the shooting,” said Ghassan Khatib, director of a Jerusalem-based media center and a respected Palestinian political analyst. “We’ve got to remind the world that Palestinians are the only people on Earth living under occupation.”

The crowd of about 2,000 Palestinians that marched from mosques near the center of Ramallah toward an Israeli checkpoint was filled with as many middle-class fathers taking sons to witness history as it was with hard-core activists. A small number of mothers, walking arm in arm with their daughters, joined the march.

The families and older people tended to stay well back as a heated battle unfolded. Hundreds of Palestinian youths threw rocks and an occasional Molotov cocktail at Israeli forces defending the checkpoint. Israelis responded with salvos of tear gas, rubber bullets and occasional stun grenades.

But the presence of families reflected the breadth of the uprising that has spread through the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the past five weeks. For many parents, Friday’s demonstration was part protest and part education for their children.

“It’s important for them to experience the struggle,” explained Amer Jaber, a clerk at the Palestinian Institute of Standards, nodding to his son Hazzam and brother-in-law Hamza, both 11.

Palestinians also were eager to deliver a message to their offspring that few of the parents ever got as children: Israelis are not invincible.

“When we were young, our parents told us the Israelis would kill us,” recalled Mohammed Salim, whose three daughters--ages 9, 6 and 3--were perched atop the family’s Peugeot station wagon for a better view of the burning tires and the contrails from flying tear gas canisters at the flash point several hundred yards away. “Now I want to show my kids that they shouldn’t be afraid of Israelis, that they are weak and can be challenged.”

It is a lesson to embolden a generation.

Those who attended Friday prayers a few hours earlier at the Jamal Abdul Nasser mosque in nearby Al Birah heard a similar message from the imam.

“Israelis are not the strong society we think they are. They are getting weak, and our attacks make them still weaker,” he told them.

Two Israeli soldiers were slightly injured by flying rocks in the Ramallah clash, and scores of Palestinians were treated for tear gas inhalation and rubber bullet injuries.

An Israeli Defense Forces spokesman said one round of gunfire came from the crowd but was not returned because its source was unclear.

The number of weapons carried during the march Friday was sharply down compared with previous weeks. There were indications that Palestinian leaders were trying to prevent their use. One youth was cursed and yanked out of the Ramallah gathering by protest organizers after he fired an AK-47 assault rifle into the air.

Despite the relative calm of the day, by Friday evening some gunfire was reported near Israeli military positions in the Bethlehem area, in Hebron and outside Janin. Israeli forces responded in one instance with machine-gun fire and in another with tank shells.

But Barak said Israel will continued to support the cease-fire.

“We will persevere in our efforts for peace, and we will devote all our strength to it,” Barak told a group in Jerusalem gathered to mark the upcoming fifth anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.

Israeli leaders made it clear that they want an even sharper decline in all forms of street violence as a result of the cease-fire--a development that seems highly unlikely given the smoldering atmosphere in Palestinian-controlled areas.

Speaking in New York, acting Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami urged Arafat to weigh in personally to halt the violence.

“He must tell his people that now is the time for resuming talks, not inviting them to continue demonstrating,” Ben-Ami said.