A Hawk Makes His Nest in a Prickly Peace

JERUSALEM — In the final weeks of his Israeli election campaign, candidate Benjamin Netanyahu ran a hard-hitting television advertisement slamming Prime Minister Shimon Peres for walking hand in hand with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat: “Peres and Arafat--a dangerous combination for Israel,” the narrator intoned.

By approving the accord today to pull back Israeli troops from Hebron, Netanyahu, now Israel’s prime minister, has in effect taken Arafat’s hand. He has made the strategic decision to continue the Israeli-Palestinian peace process started by his ideological rivals in the Labor Party.

Netanyahu has agreed to give up a piece of “Eretz Israel”--the idea of an enlarged Jewish state that has been a central tenet of Likud ideology for nearly half a century. He is making the territorial concession in Hebron, the West Bank city that is the holiest to Jews after Jerusalem.

A U.S. letter accompanying the accord commits him to further Israeli troop redeployments from West Bank lands captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. He promises to go on to final negotiations with the Palestinians on the future of West Bank Jewish settlements, control of East Jerusalem and Palestinian statehood.

With all of this, Netanyahu no longer can dismiss the peace process as Labor’s baggage. Now his name is also on an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

The evolution has not been easy.

Although both sides did their share of foot-dragging in the seven months it took to reach a Hebron agreement, Arafat’s was mostly posturing.

Even after combat erupted between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers in September, there was little doubt that the Palestinian leader wanted to continue the process that had brought him back from exile and put him in power as president of the Palestinian Authority. He was wrangling for the best deal he could get and trying to ensure it would not be his last.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, has been struggling with the fundamental principles of accords he has long opposed.

The framework Oslo agreements--brokered by the Norwegians and signed by Israel and the Palestinians in September 1993--presume that Arafat is an equal partner in peacemaking. They call on Israel to trade land captured from Jordan in 1967 for peace with the Palestinians. They open the way for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.

But like much of his Likud constituency, Netanyahu had long viewed Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chief, as a “master terrorist.” As the newly sworn-in prime minister, Netanyahu sought to avoid giving Arafat legitimacy by meeting with him. He did not trust the Palestinian leader to keep his word in negotiations or to control his own opposition.

Netanyahu rejected Peres’ vision of a new Middle East in which Arabs and Jews see mutual interest and economic benefit in peaceful coexistence. His underlying view has been that Israel’s security problem can best be resolved by military strength--deterrence--and not peace treaties.

In November, Netanyahu explained in an interview with the daily newspaper Haaretz that he did not believe the Israeli-Arab conflict would end with an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians because Arabs still had not accepted the right of Jews to remain in the Middle East.

But international pressure, the September violence and continued Israeli public support for the peace accords eventually brought the leaders together.

When it appeared that Netanyahu was dragging his feet on the accords, or even moving backward, Israel faced renewed anger and isolation from the Arab world. Criticism mounted in Europe and the United States.

Netanyahu apparently began to fear the economic cost of a breakdown in peace negotiations. He saw that companies and countries openly trading with Israel could back away, threatening Israel’s emergence as a high-tech economic power in the Middle East.

As opinion polls showed that a majority of Israelis still favored the Oslo accords, Netanyahu saw the alternative to peace in the September explosion of violence after he opened a second door to a tourist tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City; 75 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured.

Netanyahu met Arafat, first for a reluctant handshake, then for a grim session with President Clinton at the White House and finally for tough rounds of negotiations, including talks in the middle of the night.

After much wrangling--and a last-minute intervention by Jordan’s King Hussein--they signed a pact that neither side loved but both could live with.

“Both sides need this agreement,” said a U.S. official close to the negotiations, “Arafat because he does not want to see this process end where it is now, and Netanyahu because he has come to grips with the reality that if he is to succeed as prime minister of Israel and not be internationally isolated, he has got to continue the peace process in a realistic way.”

Each side will claim it made a better deal. Netanyahu says his accord is more secure than Labor’s. In the end, that this agreement looks much like the one Labor signed with Arafat is less significant than that it was sealed by a Likud prime minister--a step that Mahmoud Abbas, one of Arafat’s chief negotiators, called “making peace with the other part of Israel” that did not support the Oslo agreements.

Yet the hard-fought Hebron accord in no way guarantees that the path ahead for Netanyahu and Arafat will be any less grueling.

“Hebron is a cork in the bottle. Once you take the cork out, hopefully other things will start to flow. Then again, you are likely to get more corks,” the U.S. official said.

And the next obstacle could continue to be Hebron, where a Jewish community of about 450 lives in the midst of a Palestinian majority of 100,000. The city remains a tinderbox that could flare up at any moment, as it almost did earlier this month when an off-duty Israeli soldier shot up the Arab market there, wounding five Palestinians.

Under the accord’s compromises, “Hebron will be a city with two flags, two armies, two commanders and many, many firearms,” commentator Roni Shaked wrote in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “The new line of separation actually will be a wall of hatred.”

Besides Hebron and its threat of violence, other issues and problems loom. Key among them is that Netanyahu’s decision to continue peacemaking does not bring the two sides any closer on the questions at the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Arafat wants a sovereign Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. He wants Jewish settlements dismantled or left under Palestinian rule. He wants hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to be allowed into Palestine.

Netanyahu, however, envisions keeping all of Israel’s 140 or so West Bank settlements--a point driven home last month when he announced that he would give priority status and financial aid to the Jewish enclaves. He says Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty. And while his Labor predecessors appeared ready to recognize a Palestinian state, Netanyahu rules it out. He wants the Palestinians to end up in much the same place they are now, with limited self-government in islands of Palestinian territory.

So, while it took seven months for Netanyahu and Arafat to clasp hands over Hebron, with such formidable differences between them now, it most likely will be a long while before they shake on another deal.