Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Olive Tree

For Yasser Arafat, the cup is always half full. The first Palestinian prisoners released under last weekend's revised peace accords with Israel arrived in the West Bank and Gaza Thursday to a hero's welcome tinged with anger and frustration that hundreds more remain in Israeli prisons. But for Arafat, it's been a long time since he could point to tangible gains from the peace process. "Arafat will use the temporary mood of joy at the return of the prisoners to claim a victory," says TIME West Bank correspondent Jamil Hamad. "He won't mention the fact that the Israelis forced the Palestinians to accept their conditions for releasing prisoners and refused to release those who had attacked Jews." Although Arafat's lack of leverage may have left him little choice but to go along with that stipulation, it's not a proposition accepted by ordinary Palestinians. They have seen hundreds of their own people killed by Israeli forces. Immediately after their release, some of the prisoners began publicly pressing Arafat to secure the release of the comrades they left behind.

The prisoner releases will be followed by new land transfers beginning Monday, which are intended to open the way for an agreement on "final status" principles next February. To most observers, that deadline seems hopelessly optimistic. After all, the two sides nearly broke their teeth last week over a relatively simple accord on prisoner releases and previously agreed land transfers, while the final status talks include issues of the magnitude of the status of Jerusalem and the question of Palestinian refugees' returning to homes lost inside Israel. "There's still a lot of skepticism about the peace process," says Hamad. "And a fear that all it will take to stop the whole thing will be a few terror attacks by Hamas." But the specter of Hamas won't hold back Arafat and Barak for now they'll blow up that bridge when they come to it.