A Glimmer of Hope for Israel, Palestinians

As Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Palestinian Authority counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, met behind closed doors with their senior Cabinet ministers, an Israeli aide rushed in and handed Sharon a note.

Everyone in the room held their breath. Such interruptions usually meant bad news: Another bombing? A shooting?

“Is it another terror attack?” asked one of the Israeli ministers. Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian security chief, piped up: “No, no. Trust me. I’d know. There wasn’t anything.”

The room erupted in laughter.

That scene from Tuesday’s meeting, as recounted by Israeli state television, reflects in small part a remarkable shift in relations between two leaderships that, just a short time ago, were fighting each other to the death.

Neither Palestinians nor Israelis really trust each other, and once-giddy dreams of friendly relations may be dead forever.

But perhaps because the two sides have suffered so deeply, perhaps because some are so desperate, Israeli and Palestinian leaders are grasping at a U.S.-backed peace plan, the so-called road map, taking it forward with almost myopic determination and going to great lengths to create a sense of progress.

On Wednesday, Israelis and Palestinians took the next step. Israeli troops pulled back, slightly, from the biblical West Bank town of Bethlehem and handed control to Palestinian police, who paraded in new uniforms and battered vehicles.

Although Israeli forces will continue to staff checkpoints that encircle the city, residents welcomed the bit of self-rule that the returning police represented. Bells on the ancient Church of the Nativity pealed in celebration.

It is a rare glimmer of optimism after nearly 1,000 days of bloodshed in which people were killed at an average of three a day. Or, as one longtime Jerusalem resident put it, not exactly optimism, but the hope to hope.

This could all collapse tomorrow. Any major act of violence -- another suicide bombing or the assassination of another top Palestinian militant -- has the power to stop the process in its tracks.

And the optimism is still largely limited to leadership circles and has not filtered to the ground or the street.

But there are signs and images that give pause, tone and rhetoric that have changed, if ever so slightly.

“I must tell you that the atmosphere yesterday at the meeting between the two prime ministers reminded me very much of Oslo,” said Shimon Peres, the veteran Israeli politician who won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize -- along with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat -- for the peacemaking efforts that led to the landmark 1993 Oslo accords.

Oslo has since been largely discredited -- for Palestinians who saw it didn’t give them a state and for Israelis who saw it didn’t end political violence. But its advent was a wellspring of hope and promise.

“What I say isn’t a guarantee. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any problems,” Peres said Wednesday in a radio interview. “The problem is how do we overcome the problems that will arise. Not to be scared. Not to give up.

“We’ve wasted enough time.”

The decision by Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, to appear in public at the Israeli government headquarters in Jerusalem was a first. Flags were deliberately removed from the ceremony, but Abbas stood at a lectern decorated with a candelabra symbol of the Jewish state, and his ministers sat, with Israeli counterparts, at a table festooned in blue and white, Israel’s colors.

Traditionally, even during more promising Oslo days, Palestinian leaders were loath to publicly recognize Israel’s claim to Jerusalem by appearing at official government installations. But those who know Abbas say he is not encumbered by such symbolic scorekeeping.

And Israelis found Sharon’s remarks and demeanor particularly conciliatory for a man who has fought Arabs almost his entire life.

“I was so emotional, so excited yesterday when I saw the two prime ministers on TV saying those things,” said Natasha Pollak, an Israeli physician who was visiting Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday to show a visiting friend the Western Wall.

“All the people have gotten very tired. And maybe the politicians are getting more mature.”

Stuart Schoffman, a Jerusalem writer and political commentator, said he felt encouraged for now but believed neither side would ever be able to compromise to the point that would satisfy the other.

“I’m tired of being pessimistic. I’m bored with being pessimistic,” Schoffman said. “But I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He was attending Fourth of July festivities hosted by the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, a rare converging of Palestinians and Israelis. This year, the audience included a Palestinian police chief from the Gaza Strip and a Jewish settler spokesman, the Palestinian mayor of Bethlehem and the Jewish Orthodox mayor of Jerusalem.

Jeffrey Feltman, the acting U.S. consul, said in remarks to the gathering that he was more optimistic about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy than he had been in a long time.

He praised the art of being “steadfast and hopeful” and invoked images of America’s birth as a nation.

Those watching the latest efforts to revive the pursuit of a solution to this enduring conflict recall that many of today’s positive steps have been taken before. Wednesday’s withdrawal from Bethlehem was the fourth in 2 1/2 years. Cease-fires are counted on two hands, maybe three.

A colder realism has settled in for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Many have concluded that the best they can hope for is a tense, hard-nosed coexistence.

Significantly, they have also concluded that they cannot reach a military solution: Palestinians now realize that battling Israel with suicide bombs and guerrilla ambushes will not win independence; Israelis now believe that their considerable military might cannot completely crush Palestinian resistance.

The expectations associated with the Oslo land-for-peace process now seem pie in the sky. The protagonists of this tortured landscape have perhaps learned not to take momentum for granted. After Oslo, there was an assumption here that the move toward peace was irreversible; that assumption is no longer alive.

The minefields are everywhere. Israel has started allowing non-Muslims, including Jewish Israelis, to visit a disputed shrine in Jerusalem that is sacred to both Jews and Muslims but is under Muslim control. The visits, Palestinian officials say, are a provocation.

Jewish settlers in the volatile, divided West Bank city of Hebron received permission Wednesday to continue building a four-story building in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods. And Palestinians accused Israel of continuing to confiscate their land for settlements and for a separation wall, including a large swath east of Jerusalem on Wednesday.

“We’re seeing the typical Israeli pattern that emerges ... regardless of who is shaking hands” at public ceremonies, complained a decidedly unoptimistic Michael Tarazi, a legal advisor to the Palestinian Authority.

“When you know how the movie ends, how can you get excited watching it a second time?”

Shootings by Palestinians have taken place every day since the leading Palestinian militant groups called a truce. On Wednesday, Palestinians reportedly fired three antitank rockets at a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, and police scrambled in north-central Israel on a “security alert,” which usually means an infiltration by a possible suicide bomber. A poll published Wednesday said only 6% of Israelis believe violence will stop completely.

“Things are a lot better, but it could go either way,” Israeli police Supt. Gil Kleiman said. “We are still mobilized. No one has gone home.”

Both Sharon and Abbas hope that the charged symbolism of their meeting will translate into political capital, analysts in Israel said. Sharon wanted the carefully staged addresses and handshakes to create an aura of public support for his efforts. Abbas continues on a mission to rehabilitate the Palestinians in the world’s view.