Lack of trust making road to peace endless

DAY after day, just as in the tortuous years of the Intifada, Palestinians with stones and petrol bombs and Israeli troops with rubber bullets and tear gas face off against each other in the cities of the West Bank.

Day after day Palestinian workers are turned back at border crossings, barred from their jobs in Israel, for security reasons. Day after day, Israeli motorists spend hours in traffic jams, held up by roadblocks erected more in hope than in expectation of preventing Islamic extremist suicide bombers reaching their targeted destinations.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is suspended, the violence rages on, and the leaders of the two sides are ignoring each other with almost as much determination as they did before September 1993 when the late Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made their first tentative steps on what they hoped would be the road to Middle East peace.

Each side, not surprisingly, blames the other for the breakdown. Each charges that the other is "not serious" about peace, is reneging on commitments. And, equally unsurprisingly, it is extremely difficult to penetrate the mass of disinformation and accusation, and get at the truth.

As far as the Palestinian leadership is concerned, Benjamin Netanyahu, the well-known critic of the Oslo peace framework who came to power in Israel last May, has deliberately steered the process on to the rocks. He never hid his mistrust of Mr Arafat. He triggered furious Palestinian protests by opening a new exit in a highly-sensitive Jerusalem archaeological tunnel last September, setting of gun battles that left 80 people dead.

And he set off this latest cycle of violence, too, by again defying the warnings of his security advisers and ordering his bulldozers last week to begin clearing the land for a 6,500-home Jewish neighbourhood on disputed territory at Har Homah (Jabal Abu Ghneim, in Arabic) in East Jerusalem.

As far as the Israeli government is concerned, it is Mr Arafat who has breached his commitments to the Oslo process by turning a blind eye to, if not actively encouraging, the Islamic extremists blowing up Israeli civilians, and the Palestinian "street" protests against Israeli troops.

It is entirely reasonable for the Palestinians to object to the Har Homah project, say aides to Mr Netanyahu. Indeed, the whole point of a negotiated process is to resolve such frictions at the peace table. What is intolerable is that whenever Israel announces a policy that the Palestinians do not like, there is the threat, and all too often the reality, of a resort to violence.

For ordinary Israelis and Palestinians these days, there is a sense of being pawns in a chess game being played not too expertly by Mr Netanyahu and Mr Arafat, and a genuine uncertainty as to what the longer range strategy may be.

Gauging Mr Arafat's moves, Mr Netanyahu and, more credibly, his military chiefs insist that the Palestinian leader gave at least tacit approval for last Friday's suicide bombing, which killed three Israeli women in a Tel Aviv cafe.

Less trenchant critics of the Palestinian Authority president, including the former Israeli prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres, argue that Mr Arafat has successfully kept the lid on the Hamas bombers for a year, but that the organisation has now reconstituted itself and that it is wrong to claim that Mr Arafat does, or even can, "turn on" and "turn off" terrorism whenever it suits him.

Mr Netanyahu's aides suggest that Mr Arafat is trying to intimidate Israel into softening its intransigence over compromise in Jerusalem, and to extract a more generous handover of West Bank land. Those in the Peres camp reason that Mr Arafat knows he can only lose by bringing the process to a violent conclusion.

As for Mr Netanyahu's strategy, again there are conflicting opinions: those who believe he misjudged the likely reaction to building at Har Homah and would now dearly like to find a way out of the conflict, and those who say he deliberately provoked a confrontation to end the Oslo process once and for all.

While Mr Arafat's game plan may prove hard to pin down, the Netanyahu puzzle may be resolved fairly soon. If he presses ahead with vague moves, currently in hand, to disband his right-wing coalition and instead enter a "unity government" with Mr Peres's Labour Party, it will be fair to conclude that he is not bent on destroying the Oslo framework, but had merely been pushed into hardline positions by his cabinet colleagues and by Jerusalem's uncompromising Likud Mayor Ehud Olmert.

While Mr Arafat and Mr Netanyahu trade accusations via CNN, both, one feels, are casting anxious eyes towards Washington, and wondering why, in contrast to the swift intervention of the past, it is taking the US so long to step in this time and attempt to salvage peace hopes.

It may be that the Americans were preoccupied with the Helsinki summit. It may be that Madeleine Albright is still finding her feet as Secretary of State. Or it may be that the Clinton administration is so heartily sick of these two bickering purported peacemakers that it is allowing them, and their hapless peoples, to stew in their own juices for a while. Washington, however, had better not leave them unsupervised for too long.