AT AN anti climactic ceremony in Jerusalem's Laromme Hotel, held in the absence of the chief protagonists Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat, the main Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators affixed their full signatures to the Hebron redeployment accord formalising the transfer of power from Israeli to Palestinian hands of 80 per cent of the city.
In fact, the handover had already been completed in Hebron itself several hours earlier with another humble ceremony between Israeli and Palestinian military commanders, at the crack of dawn, in the former Israeli headquarters building that now serves of Mr Arafat's security HQ.
That both ceremonies were brief and modest seemed entirely appropriate. The change on the ground wrought by this arduously negotiated deal is modest too. Mr Arafat's 400 uniformed policemen are now deployed in that four fifths of Hebron from which Israel had long since removed most of its occupying forces. And in the eye of the storm itself - the central area where 52 Jewish settler families and 150 students live alongside 20,000 Palestinians - the accord has little impact. The Israeli army remains in formal control, albeit with the unofficial assistance of plainclothes Palestinian security personnel.
Still, Mr Arafat seemed well content with the agreement yesterday. The Palestinian leader, who is expected to visit the city in triumph within the next few days, said in Gaza that he now expected Palestinian claims to Jerusalem to be realised within the next two years.
Mr Mustaphe Natsche, Hebron's Palestinian mayor, has described the decal as "the best the Palestinians could get at this time". But his distant relative Mr Rafiq Natsha, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, charged yesterday that Mr Arafat had made "a big mistake in agreeing to divide the city. But "there are positive aspects," he allowed. "The settlers wanted to take over all of Hebron. They certainly can't do that now."
But as long as the settlers stayed, he said, the sense would be "a false peace". And the settlers, he warned, constituted "a time bomb that can explode at any moment".
Three years ago, after Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs, members of Yitzhak Rabin's government urged the then prime minister to remove the Jews from the city. But Mr Rabin declined, insisting that no settlers would be uprooted in the five year interim period of the peace process. And Mr Netanyahu now says the Jews will maintain a presence in Hebron forever.
Although it was noticeable yesterday that Palestinians in the Israeli held part of Hebron had not pasted up posters of Mr Arafat, as was the norm in the other West Bank cities Israel left in 1995 and 1996, there was a palpable sense of joy - enhanced by a deliberately restrained Israeli security presence - for much of the morning. But that soured later in the day, with a series of scuffles, and even a curfew on parts of the central area.
Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the man who led the first settlers back into the city after it was captured by Israel from Jordan 30 years ago, lambasted the government for placing its trust in "that arch murderer Arafat" who, he declared, had cold bloodedly ordered his policemen to open fire on Israeli troops during the gunbattles in the territories last September. "How could we forget what happened less than six months ago?" he wondered.
Mr Noam Arnon, the settlers chief spokesman, urged Mr Netanyahu to at least now allow an expansion of the Jewish settler presence. Predicting that blood shed was "inevitable", he insisted nevertheless that the Jews would never leave. "This is the most ancient Jewish community in the world," he said. "If Jews don't have the right to live in Hebron, where do they have the right?"
Yesterday afternoon, other West Bank settler leaders met the Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, but apparently failed to secure any explicit commitment about new building. Indeed, the Netanyahu government is under tremendous pressure from the United States not to approve; further construction, since this would jeopardise the fragile progress made with the signing of the Oslo deal.
Talks over the next phases of the peace process are going to be sticky enough, with major discrepancies between the sides over the interpretation of clauses relating to the next three Israeli West Bank withdrawals.