JERUSALEM — It is too early to tell whether the long-awaited and controversial meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat will produce a true cease-fire and a resumption of peace negotiations between the two sides.
Wednesday’s meeting, which produced a commitment to turn a shaky, week-old truce into a lasting cease-fire, had a symbolic significance that went beyond any of the details contained in its final communiqué.
The impact was felt even before the meeting was held on the eve of Yom Kippur and two weeks after Sept. 11: It almost brought down Israel’s unity government, with intense arguments raging about whether to hold the meeting at all.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon found himself awkwardly placed between his government’s rightist faction — the hardliners of his own Likud Party — and Peres, his Labor Party foreign minister.
And the government became entangled in a web of diplomatic maneuvering by the United States to form an international coalition against terror.
If the Peres-Arafat meeting does prove a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, and the course of events in this troubled land is markedly changed, the catalyst will have been the terror attacks on America and the diplomatic aftermath.
Senior Palestinian officials say the armed al-Aksa intifada — an uprising that began a year ago today –is now effectively over, or at least greatly reduced. They cite the categorical orders issued publicly by Arafat, in Arabic, last weekend to military and paramilitary groups under his command to cease their attacks on Israel and Israelis, and to rein in the opposition and fundamentalist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
They cite, too, the fact, confirmed by Israeli military sources, that the level of violence, though not completely halted — Palestinian gunmen carried out two fatal ambushes of Israeli women driving on West Bank roads — has dropped considerably during the past week.
Israeli sources also say that Arafat, for the first time since the outbreak of the intifada, is acting in earnest to restrain would-be terrorists.
There does, however, appear to be opposition to Arafat’s willingness for a cease-fire.
Islamic Jihad spokesman Abdallah al-Shami said his group would continue suicide bombings, and Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader, announced his faction was “committed to resisting the occupation until it is removed,” according to Reuters.
In any case, Arafat’s shift — along with much international pressure — helped provide the opening for the meeting near the Gaza airport.
In a joint communiqué issued after two hours of talks, the two sides renewed their commitment to recommendations made in May by the Mitchell Commission, a U.S.-led international panel that set out a series of confidence-building measures to help end the intifada.
The communiqué said the two sides would resume security cooperation, Israel would lift its blockades on Palestinian population centers, and Arafat would clamp down on Palestinian attacks against Israel.
Peres and Arafat also agreed to hold a second meeting “within a week or so,” the communiqué said.
According to the Associated Press, Secretary of State Colin Powell said from Washington he was “pleased some progress was made” at the talks, and suggested that implementation of the Mitchell Plan was what the Jewish state wanted, as it “doesn’t require Israel to be put back on its heels.”
Arafat’s decision to end the violence is seen as a direct response to the popular Palestinian reaction that followed the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Palestinian and outside observers say Arafat and his top leadership were appalled by the scenes of public rejoicing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan.
For the Palestinian leadership, those scenes — captured by Western media despite the Palestinian Authority’s strenuous efforts to censure — evoked memories of Arafat’s alliance with Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War and the huge price, in terms of Western support that the Palestinian cause paid for that blunder.
Indeed, American public support for the Palestinians fell dramatically after Sept. 11, according to polls.
Arafat knows, say analysts, that if the Palestinians’ standing continues to plummet in American public and governmental opinion, there will be powerful forces in Israel that will move to exploit his weakened situation, perhaps even by removing him and his coterie altogether.
On the Israeli side, that is precisely the sentiment one hears on the political right — much of which is represented in the Cabinet. Conservative legislators — many from Sharon’s own party — have threatened to quit the unity government over the meeting and its outcome. An emergency meeting was scheduled Wednesday to discuss such possibilities.
“If I was hesitant before Sept. 11 about a Peres-Arafat meeting, but did not act to block it,” says Eli Yishai, the Shas Party leader, “after Sept. 11, I see no reason to proceed with it. It will only strengthen Arafat and weaken us.”
Yishai cited top Israeli intelligence officers who had warned that such a meeting would give Arafat legitimacy in American eyes and enable him to be part of the anti-terror coalition being built by President Bush.
Early in the week, Yishai swung his considerable political weight against the meeting — and succeeded in having it delayed.
Without saying so explicitly, Yishai plainly agreed with hardliners in Israel who believed that the new world-configuration against terror immediately following the U.S. attacks presented the Jewish state with a golden opportunity to defeat and perhaps even remove Arafat.
After all, Arafat had encouraged — or at least not prevented — acts of indiscriminate terrorism perpetrated against Israel in the past year.
Another powerful player on the right, with influence over Sharon, is the former prime minister.
In a slew of statements since Sept. 11, Benjamin Netanyahu openly compared Arafat to Osama bin Laden, and said Israel should take this opportunity to get rid of him.
The former premier is plainly preparing his political comeback, preparing either to directly challenge Sharon for the Likud leadership or to lead a right-of-Likud alliance of parties to topple the premier.
Political pundits here attributed much of the prime minister’s apparent zig-zagging about the Peres-Arafat meeting to the Netanyahu effect.
For his part, Peres was livid that the meeting with Arafat that Sharon had approved on Saturday night had been canceled on Sunday morning. He told his Labor colleagues he was going “on holiday” and muttered threats about quitting his job, since “I am not prepared to be a truncated foreign minister.”
The next day, Sharon and Peres breakfasted together and patched up their quarrel, agreeing that the meeting would take place if 48 hours of quiet elapsed.
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