Putting Pressure on the Peace Process

...On a normal day over 100,000 Palestinian Arabs work legally (and many more are employed illegally) inside Israel...

...Recently he conceded overop-timism...

...Israelis point out that this was ordered by Rabin after the fundamentalists claimed credit for the rising number of assaults...

...When they are dealt anew, few of the players are likely to hold a better hand than before...

...While marked by an increase in the use of firearms, the deterioration was symbolized by the plain kitchen knife many of the attackers wielded...

...He went a long way toward meeting the demands of Syria's President Hafez al-Assad when he said he was ready to discuss withdrawal from the Golan Heights...

...2) All Israeli employers should reduce drastically the number of their Palestinian workers...

...The doves see the step as the beginning of complete withdrawal from regions taken in the 1967 Six Day War...

...They cross the "Green Line" in masses at dawn and return to the refugee camps in the afternoon...

...Others think Assad has in mind a lengthy, multistage process that could start without the Palestinians...

...Many Israeli experts (and not only the hawks) caution that one should believe what the Syrian President says publicly, not privately...

...How much withdrawal would depend on how much peace Israel received in return...

...1) Jewish settlers in the Gaza area should stop employing Arab farmhands...

...But ultimately, most observers here seem convinced, it is not likely to have a substantive impact...

...Schoolgirls, village zealots and, worst of all, Palestinians working here for years suddenly drew knives and struck...

...There is, of course, never a lack of conspiracy theories in the Middle East...

...They argue that Israel has an obligation to take care of the Gaza population until an alternative source of employment and public services is found for them...

...Bad as the situation is, Arab and Israeli extremists find common interest in making it appear to be worse...

...Since the violence originated in the Gaza Strip, it revived debate here on three old ideas...

...The notion of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza is supported not only by some Israeli doves but also by some hawks...

...Hamas, fighting for the leadership of the Gaza population, and seeking to wrest the loyalty of the Arabs on the West Bank from the PLO, wants to show that it has managed to turn the stone-throwing intifada into an armed popular uprising...

...The extremist Israeli settlers' methods range from gimmicks like forbidding their children to participate in school trips to Jerusalem "because it has become too dangerous," to the instant use of firearms against stone-throwing Arabs...

...The fundamentalists pursue their ascendancy by murdering not only Arabs suspected of collaborating with Israel but those charged with "offenses against morality...

...To make the current debate still more complicated, super doves are against unilateral withdrawal as well...

...Victims included a Peace Now member who each morning used her minibus to ferry workers from the Gaza Strip to a bus station, children waiting for classes to begin in Jerusalem, a barbershop owner in downtown Tel Aviv, and Israeli hitchhikers...

...Therefore, Syria has to indicate whether it is ready for full diplomatic relations, tourism, trade, and all the rest...

...In rejecting the idea, the government has the support of the majority of Labor voters, doves included, who expect the Gaza Strip to be a bargaining chip in the overall negotiations for a settlement with the Palestinians...

...In addition, it has to make clear whether an Israeli-Syrian peace "would stand on its own feet," i.e...

...be independent of other Israeli-Arab agreements (meaning with the Palestinians...

...Assad, characteristically, is saying different things to different audiences...

...On March 30, Prime Minister Rabin's Cabinet voted to temporarily seal off the disputed territories...

...But in what seemed to become a free-for-all, members of secular extremist groups competing for primacy on the Arab street and in the PLO sought to outdo the religious fanatics...

...The heightened terrorism, on the other hand, has at the minimum partially accomplished its objective: Resumption of the peace talks, scheduled for April 20 in Washington, was postponed at the request of Arab delegates meeting in Damascus, who were angered by the Israeli government's response to the March murders...

...Palestinian spokesmen say the upsurge of violence is a popular reaction to the expulsion of 400 Hamas activists last December...

...First, there is almost no chance of picking up advance intelligence that might help prevent them...

...This would enable Assad to retrieve most of the Golan Heights and get back into Washington's good graces, without "selling out the Palestinians...

...No proof has surfaced, however, to support such a theory...

...A record 15 Israelis were killed in March...

...He is telling Western interlocutors privately that he is willing to conclude a full peace for full withdrawal...

...The hawks advocating it apparently feel the amputation of Gaza would prevent the spread of "withdrawal disease" to the West Bank...

...3) Israel should unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip and "let the Gazans stew in their own juice...

...Palestinian spokesmen, always worried about being left behind by the Arab states, stress to Israelis that "Assad cannot accept less than Sadat got"—namely complete withdrawal from his occupied land and the linking of the deal to settlement of the Palestine issue...

...Apparently agreeing, the Prime Minister subsequently expressed his willingness to have the behind-the-scenes head of the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace talks, Faisal al-Husseini, present at the negotiating table...

...He had not realized, he said, that the Palestinian leadership is so disunited, leaving nobody to make the hard decisions...

...Unorganized, or "spontaneous," acts of terror are particularly dangerous for two reasons...

...Second, they seem to confirm warnings by Israeli hawks that making territorial concessions for peace is useless, since Damascus, Amman or even the PLO cannot curb individual fanatics, assuming they wanted to...

...It is the unorganized violence that Israelis find especially threatening...

...Eliahu Salpeter, a regular NL contrib-utor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...

...Unilateral withdrawal is, as might be expected, opposed by most Likud members and those further to the Right, because they object to any kind of withdrawal, negotiated or unnegotiated...

...If that is the situation, several of Rabin's own Labor Party members suggested , perhaps it would be better to deal directly with the PLO, rather than with stand-ins lacking real authority...

...In (Arabic) public statements he says that there can be no full peace without solvingthe Palestine problem...

...The Israelis need the cheap manual labor and the Palestinians, mainly from overcrowded Gaza, need the jobs...

...The move virtually halted further terrorist acts inside Israel, although not in the territories...

...Israel's far Right magnifies the scope of Arab violence in attempting to buttress the charge that it is the direct consequence of Labor's willingness even to discuss withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank...

...But Rabin remains convinced that normalizing Israel-Syria relations, and not autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza, should be Jerusalem's top priority at the U.S.-sponsored multilateral talks...

...All this is surely adding to the inherent difficulties of keeping the peace negotiations focused...

...The latest has it that since Rabin knows Assad cannot abandon the Palestinians, and Assad knows Rabin cannot abandon the Jewish settlements on the Golan, the two have tacitly arrived at an interim understanding: For less than total Israeli withdrawal there would initially be less than full peace...

...Neither magnetic identity cards nor spot checks on the roads can sift out determined assassins—and the more thorough the controls imposed, the stronger the frustration and anger they create...

...Most of them were Muslims belonging to, or inspired by, Hamas, the fundamentalist terrorist organization...

...And Rabin could say he has achieved a de facto peace with Syria without betraying his election slogan, "There can be no security [for Israel] without the Golan...

...As the Likud opposition reminds the Prime Minister almost daily, during the election campaign he promised that within six to nine months an interim settlement with the Palestinians would be concluded...

...The main cause of alarm was the escalation of Arab attacks last month against soldiers and civilians in Israel as well as in the West Bank and Gaza...

...Israelis respond by recalling that Egypt's President Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty before any autonony talks started...

...Meanwhile, people in the region speak gloomily of "the window of opportunity" threatening to close, and Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin is the target of criticism from the Right and the Left of Israel's political spectrum...

...Neither is there evidence that Rabin might realize his hope of signing a deal with the Syrians without satisfying at least part of the Palestinians' expectations...