JERUSALEM — In less than a week, any semblance of mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians appeared to come tumbling down. But, in a move to quell that breakdown, Barak agreed on Wednesday — under the guidance of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — to pull back Israeli tanks and personnel carriers from the frontlines of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. After press time, Barak was scheduled to arrive yesterday in Egypt, to put his signature on the deal.
Loss of trust — in addition to loss of life — was among the greatest casualties of the week of bloody rioting, however.
Many observers had expected the Mideast violence to cool down because of Paris peace talks between Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, mediated by Albright. But that prospect almost did not come to fruition.
Arafat reportedly stormed out of the meeting, shouting, “This is humiliation. I cannot accept it!” — followed by Albright’s pleas to the guards of the U.S. ambassador residence that hosted the leaders, “Shut the gates! Shut the gates!”
Although Arafat returned to negotiate, the occurrence itself testified to the fragile trust between the two Mideast interests, who were barely recuperating from the failure of July’s Camp David summit.
In Israel, the imagery of mistrust was more telling.
The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that on the morning of Sept. 29, a few hours before the deadly riots began, a Palestinian Authority police officer shot and killed Israeli border guard Yossi Tabjeh, 27.
As a result, the joint Palestinian-Israeli patrols, long seen as a symbol of mutual cooperation, no longer function.
And when senior Israeli and Palestinian commanders met in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday to try to work out a cease-fire agreement, they had reached a certain understanding, but continued to regard each other with suspicion.
Only a few hours after the two sides shook hands, the Palestinians accused the Israelis of not keeping their word and retractedtheir promises to end the trouble.
In Israel proper, Arab policemen serving in northern Israeli police units surprised their Jewish partners, saying they could not confront Arab demonstrators and preferred to stay in their bases while the violence was going on.
“Fifty years of trust went down the drain in two days of violence,” said Erez Kreisler, the mayor of the council of the Misgav region, which borders a number of Arab villages in northern Israel.
Although hundreds of Arab youths took to the streets in the worst violence since 1948, hundreds of thousands remained at home, waiting for the trouble to end.
Most Israeli-Arabs, although supportive of the Palestinian cause, had no interest in severing ties to the Jewish state, which they have made their home.
As for the Palestinian Authority and its police forces, this was not the first time the trust was shattered.
It began with disturbances at an archaeological tunnel in Jerusalem in 1996, when Palestinian police officers opened fire on Israeli officers, and it has deteriorated ever since.
But the incident with the joint patrols is sure to do serious damage, raising serious questions whether Israeli and Palestinians can share security arrangements in the future.
“They don’t like the joint patrols,” Lt. Roi Nahmias said of the Palestinians.
Nahmias, who served in Hebron, one of the most fragile points in the 10 regions where joint Palestinian and Israeli patrols operate, said the Palestinians don’t like the image of Israeli police jeeps deep inside Palestinian territory.
Thus, Palestinians sometimes refused to cooperate. Whenever they could stop Israeli vehicles, they did so, he said, if only to show the Israelis how they had felt when they were stopped by Israeli patrols — a frequent sight between the territories and Israel proper.
“We used to be told to be fair to them, so that it will pay off in times of trouble,” recalled Nahmias.
The problem of trust extends to the political arena — and knowing who’s calling the shots for the Palestinians, say some Israeli officials.
“We have a strong problem of trust,” said Avshalom Vilan, a Meretz member of Knesset, “partly because the Palestinians do not talk in one voice.”
That was evident in this week’s riots.
They were organized to a large extent by the Tanzim — a local body of Fatah — which is the military wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The Tanzim represent the younger guard of the Fatah. Its members aspire to operate independently, but in practice would not dare to act contrary to the specific instructions of Arafat.
Thus, the Israelis found themselves in a situation more complex than in the past: They were facing Arafat, whom they did not trust, and they were facing the Tanzim, whom Arafat could not trust completely.
Barak complained Tuesday that on one hand, Arafat was sending the Tanzim to confront the Israelis in the streets, but on the other hand he was sending the head of his West Bank security service to try and work out a deal with Israel.
By midweek, the violence continued.
And there is little doubt that the breach of trust will take a long time to repair.