(3 of 4)
Israel also redoubled pressure on Arafat to crack down on Islamic militants operating out of the semi-autonomous Gaza Strip. To date, the P.L.O. chairman has treated the Islamists gingerly for fear of igniting a Palestinian civil war. Israeli officials expressed hope that now he would get tough. Palestinian security forces have rounded up 20 alleged Islamic Jihad activists. Nabil Shaath, Arafat's planning minister, swore, ``This time, it will not be a show [detention] for two or three days.''
Washington has been urging Arafat to condemn the terrorism, impress upon his own people how much these actions hurt their cause, and take vigorous steps against the perpetrators. Officials think he is making progress, though not fast or firmly enough. President Clinton froze the U.S. assets of 12 Middle East extremist groups, including the Islamic Jihad group that claimed responsibility for Beit Lid, and its larger cousin, the Gaza-based Hamas. Washington had no illusion that this would matter much; the work of the militants does not cost a lot, and Iran, their chief bankroller, is happy to make up the shortfall. Still, the move was important symbolically to Rabin and Arafat alike.
Now Israeli government officials are taking up the political refrain of ``separation.'' For months Rabin has pushed the idea that Israel and the Palestinians should live side by side but isolated from each other, and now he is trying to devise a way to do it. Some Cabinet members spoke of erecting a physical fence to keep Palestinians out of the country. It is an unwieldy and simplistic idea: any effort to decide on the positioning of such a structure would inevitably be seen as an attempt to determine the final border between Israel and the Palestinian entity that is supposed to emerge by 1999.
Until there is a final settlement, Rabin's separation concept is decidedly one-sided. Though Israeli employers are loath to do without cheap Arab labor, the government wants to keep Palestinians out of Israel. Yet it wants to maintain Israeli settlers and--to protect them--Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and even in the Gaza Strip. That is unacceptable to Palestinian negotiators. Closing off Israel to Arab workers also deprives the Palestinians of $1 million in daily earnings. If international aid would stimulate the Palestinian economy enough to replace jobs lost in Israel, the principle of separation would become attractive to the Palestinians. But only if it is symmetrical. Says Mohamed Natshe, a junk dealer in Hebron: ``Rabin doesn't want to see my face, but I don't want to see his either, nor the faces of the settlers and soldiers.'' Under the 1993 agreement, Israeli settlements are to remain in place during the interim phase, with their ultimate fate determined by the final-status accord. In the next stage, Israel is supposed to move its soldiers out of Arab-populated areas of the West Bank to allow Arafat's administration to take charge. But the Israelis say that with Arab violence unabated, the army must remain in many of those areas in order to ensure the safety of the settlers nearby. Arafat will be hard pressed to sell such a dilution of the peace accord to his constituents. Says Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo: ``This is an attempt to draw a map of Palestinian cantons and ghettos.''