Ramadan Marks Slow Pace of Peace

HEBRON, Israeli-Occupied West Bank — Marking the onset of the holy month of Ramadan, thousands of fasting Muslims streamed through cement barricades and metal detectors into the Ibrahim mosque Friday and bristled under the watch of gum-chewing Israeli troops.

On his way into the Cave of the Patriarchs compound, a site sacred to Muslims and Jews, Tarik Shaheen was pulled aside by a soldier who demanded his identity card. The 32-year-old businessman handed it over in quiet disgust.

“You see the situation. For me to pray in a Muslim holy site, I must suffer all these measures,” Shaheen said.

For Palestinian worshipers such as Shaheen, the first day of Ramadan offered a sorry benchmark for the passage of another year without an Israeli troop redeployment from Hebron.

While Israeli officials worried that the throngs at mosques in Hebron and Jerusalem would provide Islamic extremists with cover for a terrorist attack, Hebronites recalled the terror they experienced Jan. 1 when an off-duty Israeli soldier shot up their market, wounding five Arabs.

The Israeli soldiers at the mosques were a reminder that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still have not reached a Hebron accord.

“Arafat made a big mistake reopening the Hebron negotiations with Netanyahu,” said Tarik Abedin, 17, before removing his shoes to kneel in prayer. “There is an agreement that everyone already signed. That’s what should be implemented.”

Under the 1995 interim peace accord that the previous, Labor Party government signed with Arafat, Israeli troops were to have pulled back last March to a small area of central Hebron surrounding Jewish enclaves and the Cave of the Patriarchs. The redeployment was delayed after suicide bombings in Israel last spring, and then by the May elections that landed Netanyahu in power.

Negotiations between Netanyahu and Arafat have been marked by deep mutual distrust. Both sides say they have completed an agreement on terms for a Hebron pullback, but the signing has been delayed by Arafat’s fear that Netanyahu means for this accord to be his last.

Arafat is demanding that Netanyahu commit to further redeployments in the rural West Bank by September, as called for in the 1995 interim accord. Netanyahu has proposed a fundamental change--delaying the last redeployment until May 1999, when the two sides are to have reached a final agreement on such issues as the future of West Bank Jewish settlements, the return of Palestinian refugees, control of East Jerusalem and Palestinian statehood.

U.S. mediators met separately with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators Friday in an effort to break the deadlock over Hebron. “Each side has dug in on positions that, if they stick with them, will make it unlikely an agreement can be concluded,” said a U.S. official.

In Hebron, the Palestinian reaction to delays ranged from stubborn patience--a determination to out-wait Netanyahu--to a slow boil. The sunny winter day provided an air of temperance, with a threatening undercurrent. There was, amid the calm, a sense that something could happen at any moment in a city where 450 Jews live among 100,000 Palestinians.

The settlers say they will never leave Hebron, the second-holiest city in Judaism after Jerusalem. The Palestinians want them removed. For Hebronites, the settlers are an obstacle to the self-rule other West Bank cities have achieved and to Palestinian independence. As long as there are Jews in Hebron, Palestinians feel, certain Israeli soldiers will remain.

“Israel must take responsibility for whatever happens now,” said Abdel Muiz Sidr, 50, owner of a sweets shop. “People are under a tremendous pressure--they need freedom. They are like the barrel of a gun ready to explode. Many are ready to die.”

Many have died in the fight for Hebron. In 1929, Arabs angry at Jewish immigration to Palestine rioted in Hebron and killed 67 members of the Jewish community. The rest fled.

During Ramadan in 1994, Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshipers at the Ibrahim mosque, killing about 30.

In negotiations and on the street, each side seems to be concerned only with the security of its own. Israelis, who rebuilt Hebron’s Jewish community in 1968, view the Palestinians as potential executioners; the Palestinians see Jewish settlers as gun-toting crazies whom even their own government cannot control.

They rub each other raw with anger and hatred.

“You know, after the [Jan. 1] attack by the Jew against innocent people in the market, I support Palestinian movements that want to answer this violence with more violence,” said Ahmed Muhtasib, 19, a Palestinian traffic officer.

“I follow Abu Ammar [Arafat] with my head, but the anger is from my heart,” he said.

Worshipers at Friday prayers said they did not know who might have been responsible for the two bombs that exploded in a poor neighborhood of Tel Aviv on Thursday night, wounding 13 people. Israeli officials said they believed the blasts were a Palestinian “nationalist” attack, while Arafat called them an “internal Israeli problem.”

Several Hebronites, however, saw the bombs as part of an Israeli conspiracy, a pretext for further delays in redeployment.

“The Israelis do not want peace,” said Nabil Muhtasid, 37, part owner of a rock quarry. “They will continue to delay, to try to make the Palestinians hungry or desperate, to make them accept the facts on the ground.”

Muhtasib, the traffic officer, agreed. But he added that he believed Hebron eventually will see a deal to pull back Israeli troops.

“Netanyahu is difficult,” Muhtasib said. “But Arafat is even more stubborn.”