It was no coincidence that Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were intensifying their efforts to reach a new accord this week as Israeli right-wing activists were stepping up their campaign of civil disobedience.
Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian talks are acutely aware that the longer it takes to reach an agreement, the more time the Jewish settlers and their political supporters have to thwart it.
While demonstrators have been engaging in high-profile protests against government policies, there is no clear consensus among Israelis regarding the peace process or, for that matter, the actions of the settlers.
Palestinian opposition, too, has more opportunity to disrupt the process the longer it takes to reach the long-elusive agreement for extending Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank.
If further acts of Palestinian terrorism occur during this period of uncertainty and dangerous political tension, the position of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government will grow steadily weaker – and with it the ability to negotiate.
This common awareness of the precariousness of the current situation threw a shadow over the Peres-Arafat meetings, which were held early this week in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba, site of a series of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations last year.
“We, too, have our opposition,” Arafat spokesman Marwan Kanafani said during a break in the talks. “Some of our people, too, even with the Palestinian Authority, are dissatisfied with the way the peace process is going.”
But Kanafani maintained that violent opposition to the self-rule accord among Palestinian fundamentalists in the Gaza Strip and West Bank has largely been quelled by Palestinian security forces. And he said Israeli authorities should adopt a similar course if and when the Israeli opposition turns violent.
Kanafani said the key area of discord in the ongoing negotiations is the issue of security – a point later confirmed by Peres himself.
Nonetheless, after meeting with Arafat for five hours Monday, Peres told the Cabinet that “some progress” had been made in the talks.
The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that the two sides have set Sept. 13 as a new target date for completing their negotiations.
Earlier this week, Peres said that even though differences remain between the two sides, the main body of the agreement has already been written. But Israel and the Palestinians have already missed several summer deadlines for concluding the second-phase agreement.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators meeting in Eilat have already reached broad agreement for an Israeli army withdrawal from six Palestinian population centers in the West Bank prior to the holding of Palestinian elections.
Israel balked, however, at withdrawing its troops from West Bank Arab villages located near Jewish settlements before the elections.
Peres told Cabinet ministers that he and Arafat had agreed that this second phase of an Israel Defense Force pullback from the villages would take place over the course of 18 months after elections in the territories.
Despite the agreements reached in Taba, there are still a number of other thorny issues in dispute: * Water rights: The Palestinians are demanding control over subterranean water sources in the West Bank immediately; Israel wants this issue deferred until next year’s so-called “permanent status” talks. * Election procedures: Israel is insisting that any granting of voting rights to Palestinians residing in eastern Jerusalem not have any effect on its claims to full sovereignty over the city. The two sides are also deadlocked over the size of the Palestinian Council that is to be elected.
A highly placed Palestinian official told Israeli reports in Taba that these ongoing disputes would require a meeting between Arafat and Rabin, “since we know that Rabin calls the shots in Israel, not Peres.”
As the Israeli-Palestinian talks intensified, the Rabin government was forced to contend with escalating public unrest among Israelis concerned about the outcome of those talks.
Rabin met with settler leaders at the end of last week and secured a three-day Tisha B’Av “cease-fire” in the four days of often stormy demonstrations the settlers launched last week on West Bank hilltops to protest any hangover of West Bank lands to the Palestinians.
But on Sunday night, immediately after the truce ended, settlers and their supporters took over two more hilltops in the Jerusalem area – only to have their demonstrations ended the next day by Israeli troops.
The depth of support for settlers was directly tested when the settlers group Zo Artzeinu, or “This is Our Land,” called for demonstrations of mass civil disobedience throughout Israel on Tuesday.
Although the turnout was not as large as organizers had apparently hoped for, the thousands of demonstrators who did coverage at major thoroughfares succeeded in disrupting traffic at crossroads throughout the country.
After the demonstrations, settlers leaders emerged from yet another meeting with Rabin disappointed and angry that the prime minister had rejected their demands for a national referendum before implementing the next phase of the self-rule agreement.
The vowed that they would not meet with Rabin again and said the failed encounter was reason enough for them to continue their campaign of civil disobedience.
Tiny groups of settlers then proceeded to set up five or six new settlements in the West Bank Tuesday night as a symbolic act of defiance.
The extent of support for such activities, though difficult to gauge at this point, is a key factor in the unfolding political drama.
Polls published last week gave conflicting signals regarding Israeli attitudes toward the settlers campaign of civil disobedience.
A poll conducted by the Israeli daily Ma’ariv showed that 54 percent of 500 respondents disagreed with the actions taken last week by Israeli security forces when forcibly removing the settlers from the West Bank hilltops.
A survey in Yediot Achronot gave the opposite result: 75 percent of 501 respondents opposed last week’s protests by the settlers. And this week, Ha’aretz weighed in with another poll indicating that 54.4 percent of the Israeli public supports the peace process.
Rabbi Benny Elon, a leader of Zo Artzeinu, said this week that the campaign depended for its ultimate success on the staying power of the activists and their supporters.
They are hoping that if they maintain a high-profile, they could attract even more Israelis to their cause.
For its part, the government is walking a fine line. Although pledging to crack down on the civil disobedience, too much force could be counterproductive for the government’s own cause.
Meanwhile, the protesters are reaching out for support in the United States.
Supporter of the settlers demonstrated outside Israeli consulates across the United States over the weekend.
And on Tuesday, Yechiel Leiter, executive director of the Yesha Council, said his council, which represents settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, plans to establish an “emergency relief fund” in the United States and Canada for the West Bank settlers.
In a teleconference with members of the Jewish media on Tuesday, Leiter said the fund would defray the financial expenses of settlers who have taken time off from work to demonstrate, as well as pay for the legal defense of settlers who have been arrested.
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