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Peace Process Takes A Dive As U.S.-Led Security Meeting Fails
by Richard Engel
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Middle East peace prospects took a dive Monday as security talks in Cairo to end the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories failed, and a top Palestinian official rejected U.S. proposals for a peace agreement.
U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross was due to arrive in the region Wednesday for last-ditch talks, said senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, who was nonetheless pessimistic that a peace agreement could be reached before U.S. President Bill Clinton leaves office January 20th.
"I think it is becoming very, very difficult to reach something before Clinton leaves office," Erakat said.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Washington was not sure whether its latest push would work, "but we've got to keep trying."
"Neither side is going to get 100% of what it wants. ... This is a very balanced and careful set of ideas and I hope that the gaps can be narrowed," Albright told ABC television.
CIA chief George Tenet held 10 hours of talks in Cairo with Israeli and Palestinian security officials on ways to reduce the ongoing violence, but the talks collapsed "because of the intransigence of the Israeli position and their insistence on continuing to keep the blockade on the Palestinian territories and divide them," a Palestinian official said.
Israel had insisted on a Palestinian crackdown on attacks against Israeli troops, civilians and Jewish settlements as a condition for new peace talks based upon Clinton's peace initiative presented more than two weeks ago.
But the Palestinians counter that Israel must first lift its blockade against the Palestinian territories - which has been in effect for most of the 13-week-old Palestinian Intifada, or uprising - also accusing the Israeli military of assassinating more than a dozen Palestinian activists.
A further blow to peace came Monday when Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said "the most dangerous" aspect of Clinton’s proposals was that they were nothing more than "general principles lacking guarantees on their application, and every point of which will require further negotiations."
Referring to the 1993 Oslo accords, he said: "We have learned our lesson from the first declaration of principles, after seeing that Israel immediately got everything we had signed on, while we have to negotiate for years to receive what we are supposed to get according to the agreement."
Meanwhile, the violence continued, as Palestinians marched in Gaza City and Ramallah, where Israeli soldiers shot three protesters with rubber bullets.
In the Gaza Strip early Monday, Abdel Hamid el Hurati, 34, a Palestinian nurse, died in an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City, hospital officials and witnesses said.
More than 370 people have died since the start of the uprising, mostly Arabs.
Nabil Abu Rudeina, a top adviser to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, dismissed chances of a last-minute peace breakthrough, blaming "the Israeli government which has wasted time again and again through its continuing delays, continuing aggressions and its on-going closure against the Palestinian people."
However, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday that Bill Clinton's efforts had not been wasted, adding they "helped the process."
The Clinton plan has provoked strong resistance among Israeli right-wingers, tens of thousands of whom demonstrated in Jerusalem late Monday against concessions to the Palestinians.
In scenes resembling New York City's Times Square on New Year's Eve, tides of people waved flags, sang Jewish songs and swore allegiance to keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli rule, including the Arab eastern part of the city which the Jewish state occupied and annexed in 1967.
The event went off mostly without trouble, although four Palestinians said demonstrators attacked them. One of them was hospitalized, military radio said.
"Jerusalem is in danger for us," said 34-year-old Bini Rosenberg, who had traveled to the rally from southern Israel near Bel Sheva.
Watching her freckled six-year-old daughter Herut wave a giant Israeli flag, she said, "I do not know any Jew in the world who does not want peace, but what kind of peace?"
Eli Kazhdan, the chief of staff to opposition politician Nathan Sharansky, the rally's organizer, estimated that some 250,000 were attending the event, billed as the largest of its kind to date with 1,000 buses coming from all over Israel.
Later, police said more than 100,000 people attended the event, according to Israeli television.
Police arrested four right-wing Jewish radicals for wearing T-shirts that incited violence against Arabs, Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy told Israeli radio.
Military radio reported that an Israeli woman was arrested trying to enter the al-Asqa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam, dressed as an Arab.
The gathering was centered on east Jerusalem's walled Old City, home to what Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif and what Jews refer to as the Temple Mount. The police did not allow demonstrators to congregate between Damascus Gate and Lions' Gate in the Muslim Quarter.
"It is not just a demonstration, but a gathering to express our feeling of distress because of the dangers that threaten the Holy City," Jerusalem's right-wing Mayor Ehud Olmert told Israeli public radio.
"Jerusalem is the center of all Jewish people and no government can give away the heart of the Jewish people," Sharansky said amid a sea of Israeli flags.
Demonstrators wore stickers emblazoned with the demonstration's theme: "Jerusalem, I swear loyalty to you."
The message was also projected with purple and pink lights onto the Old City's stonewalls, as some 7,000 high school students linked hands in a symbolic display of solidarity and commitment to the place.
Protesters booed and made catcalls when speakers mentioned U.S. President Bill Clinton, who has proposed a set of peace compromises between Israelis and Palestinians.
"It's a pity that Clinton, who was such a great friend of Israel during his eight years in office, is the first president of the United States to suggest dividing Jerusalem," Olmhert told the crowd.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat have both accepted Clinton's parameters with conditions.
"Rebuild the temple! Rebuild the temple," sang a group of dancing teenagers, referring to the Old City's disputed mount, the site a Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The Western or Wailing Wall of the Jerusalem hill is the last vestige of the Jewish temple and is the most holy site in Judaism.
Noam Natan, a bespectacled 15-year-old, was let out early from his yeshiva in east Jerusalem to go to the rally. "Now after the Intifada, I see the Palestinians want us dead or out of here. I think the only way to finish it is with a war," he said.
Barak's reported willingness to make concessions on Jerusalem while violence in the Palestinian territories continues has both infuriated and united the Israeli right, and could cost him early elections due in February.
But some in the crowd voted for Barak in his landslide 1999 win.
"I'm here tonight because I'm so shocked by how massive Barak's concessions have been," said David Clayton, 43, a former Barak supporter who lives in west Jerusalem. "I'm a centrist... but I never believed he would do this."
Palestinians have also been angered by Arafat's willingness to accept the Clinton peace framework, saying it undermines the deaths of some 315 Palestinians over the three-month Intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation.
The Intifada began with the now infamous September 28th visit to the al-Aqsa mosque compound above the Wailing Wall by Israeli right-wing leader Ariel Sharon.
Israeli opinion polls say Sharon, who faces Barak in the elections, is favored to win the race.
U.S. parameters for establishing peace call for east Jerusalem to be divided, most of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be removed and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Palestinians, however, insist that some 3.7 million of their refugees must have the right to return to where they lived before the Jewish state's creation in 1948 and subsequent war with its Arab neighbors.
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