The leading Israeli cartoonist Ze’ev expressed it best.
At the beginning of December, in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, Ze’ev drew Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat chasing the dove of peace through the days of the calendar.
Ze’ev’s calendar, like every calendar, showed the days of the month: 1, 2, 3, etc.
In his calendar, however, Dec. 12 was followed by … Dec. 12, and then again by Dec. 12.
In fact, each day of the rest of the month was marked Dec. 12, pointedly noting that these two protagonists of peace were seeking desperately to put off their next appointment with history: Dec. 13.
The 13th is the day that was to have ushered in a new era of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
It is the day on which the first steps toward implementing the Palestinian self-rule accord were scheduled to begin in the Gaza Strip and West Bank town of Jericho.
Following the historic signing of the accord in Washington on Sept. 13, Israel and the PLO undertook to complete a series of detailed negotiations on Gaza and Jericho by Dec. 13 and to begin implementing the accord during a four-month period that was scheduled to start by Dec. 13.
But now, with Dec. 13 at hand, the negotiations are embarrassingly far from being concluded — while a mounting wave of violence threatens to drown public support for the peace accord among Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Midweek, as U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was shuttling between regional capitals of the Middle East, unofficial reports asserted that Rabin and Arafat had agreed to defer the Dec. 13 deadline for two weeks.
RABIN-ARAFAT SUMMIT POSSIBLE
Rabin has said publicly that what is important is the second deadline — April 13 — by which time the four-month implementation period was to be concluded.
“Better a good and clear agreement two weeks later,” Rabin said, than an agreement that meets the deadline but is full of ambiguity.
Israeli negotiators this week presented their Palestinian counterparts with a 100-plus-page draft spelling out the implementation of the self-rule accord. The draft, they said, took account of the positions of both sides.
The Israeli negotiators fully anticipated further arduous give-and-take discussions on numerous points. And with the Dec. 13 deadline fast approaching, they are beginning to accept the Palestinian view that only a meeting between Rabin and Arafat will resolve the final problems.
The problems to be worked out include the size of the autonomous Jericho area to fall under Palestinian authority, who will control the border crossings to Jordan and Egypt, and how to guarantee security for Jewish settlers.
The expected Rabin-Arafat “summit” may be held … on Dec. 12.
For his part, Arafat has indicated that he wants the meeting before Dec. 13 arrives.
Nabil Sha’ath, the chief Palestinian negotiator at the implementation talks in Cairo, told reporters Tuesday that he was urging a Rabin-Arafat meeting before the 13th.
And Palestinian representatives in the territories, meeting with Christopher, urged him to press both sides to meet the Dec. 13 deadline.
Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi said the group of 12 Palestinians had told Christopher that missing the deadline would damage Israel’s credibility and would represent a failure of the two sides’ commitment to peace just when the first tangible demonstration of that commitment was supposed to go into effect.
Whether or not the deadline is met, observers expect the day to be marked by some gestures, no matter how symbolic or unsubstantial.
Even if the Israel Defense Force is not yet prepared to pull all of its forces out of the Gaza Strip, some symbolic pullback will be likely — provided the security situation permits it.
In anticipation of the Dec. 13 deadline, leaders of Arafat’s mainstream Al Fatah movement in Gaza have been working the streets vigorously these past few days to keep a lid on violence and tension.
Recent violence by rejectionist Palestinians and, to an increasing extent, by Jewish settlers, was visibly sapping the political strength of both the Rabin government and the Arafat-led Fatah.
In less than a week, five Israelis were killed as a result of the mounting violence.
On Monday, an Israeli man and his 22-year-old son were shot dead, and three younger siblings were wounded, in an ambush by Palestinian Arabs outside the West Bank town of Hebron.
GROWING INCREASINGLY SKEPTICAL
The attack came in retaliation for the killing Sunday of an Arab man by Jewish settlers in Hebron who described the killing as an act of self-defense.
Also on Sunday, an attack on a bus on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway claimed the life of one Israeli, as well as that of the perpetrator, a member of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group, who was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier.
A second attack on a bus occurred Monday, when two Israelis were reported injured following a firebomb attack on a bus in the West Bank north of Jerusalem.
With each passing day, and with each new killing, Israelis and Palestinians grow increasingly skeptical.
And those who were previously merely skeptical become outright hostile — and actively participate in protests and demonstrations against the self-rule accord.
For Rabin and Arafat, whose futures — indeed, their very survival as politicians — are inextricably linked to the success of the accord, there can be no turning back.
They are in a complex race against the clock. They certainly want to wrap up the negotiations and begin taking tangible steps toward implementing the accord.
But they both know they must either reduce the violence, or else the accord, as well as the hopes invested in it, will go up in smoke.
With innocent people dying almost daily this week, the three months since the signing of the accord have provided a striking lesson in how quickly time passes and moods change in the tense atmosphere of a region poised between peace and renewed turmoil.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
