The Wet-Clay Protest

By LISA BEYER JERUSALEM

On a crisp autumn day last year Palestinian negotiators returned home from the opening of Middle East peace talks in Madrid to a rousing welcome from their once skeptical constituents. Thousands of Palestinians lined the streets in the West Bank city of Jericho, waving olive branches and whooping with joy. It seemed that finally the Palestinian masses had embraced the idea of bargaining -- instead of fighting -- for their future.

It hasn't worked out quite that way. One year later, and with a new, more accommodating government installed in Israel, no one in the occupied territories is cheering the peace team. But their opponents are making plenty of noise. The so-called rejectionists are better organized and more determined than ever to upset the talks. Their resurgence has put the Palestinian negotiators on edge and complicated their already tricky task of coming to acceptable terms with the Israelis. "We are a bit disturbed," allows delegate Ghassan Khatib, "to find the people falling into the hands of the opposition."

It was progress, not stalemate, that prompted the rejectionists to assert themselves. In the sixth round of bilateral negotiations, which took place in Washington and ended late last month, the Israelis and Palestinians at last got down to discussing how to create some degree of autonomy in the occupied territories. Hard-liners fear that if the Palestinians agree to limited self- rule, even as a temporary measure, the world will forget their cause and they will never achieve their ambition of creating a Palestinian state. "We got the message -- Watch out, something is going to happen -- so we'd better get seriously organized to confront it," says Ali Jiddah, a leading activist within the opposition.

The result was an unusual meeting in mid-September in Damascus of 10 Palestinian groups that announced that they had formed an alliance dedicated to foiling the talks. Predictably, hard-line outfits signed on. But so did four factions of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which as a group endorses the talks and guides the actions of the Palestinian negotiators. More surprising still was the presence of two Muslim fundamentalist organizations, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Up to now, these groups and the secular P.L.O. factions have held one another at a stiff arm's length.

The immediate ambition of the new front is to bring public pressure on the Palestinian negotiators and their P.L.O. backers to quit the talks. As an initial test of strength, the alliance called for a complete shutdown of businesses in the territories on Sept. 23. After five years of the intifadeh and countless strike calls, many Palestinian shopkeepers have begun to ignore the demands to close up. Fatah, Arafat's faction within the P.L.O., even instructed Palestinians to conduct business as usual on Sept. 23. Nonetheless, the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip shut down on the appointed day, proving that the hard-liners are able to wield considerable influence over a % frightened population.

Activists are planning a series of demonstrations, including protests at the homes of the Palestinian negotiators. "We will not let them sleep," says Jiddah. He and his supporters insist that they rule out the use of violence against fellow Palestinians -- but not against Israelis. The latest round of peace talks produced a particularly brutal series of stabbings and slashings of Israelis by Palestinians. "This is not a spontaneous thing," says Ali Abu Hilal, another opposition activist. "And I think the future will bring more violence." Israeli security experts fear that the rejectionists may embark on a new round of global terror. "Just now their alliance is more like wet clay than a finished pot," says an Israeli official.

For the moment, Israeli authorities calculate that the naysayers are a bigger problem to Arafat and his appointed negotiators than to the Israelis. Last month chief Palestinian negotiator Haidar Abdul-Shafi echoed a rejectionist demand that his camp "would be happy" to have Palestinians decide in a plebiscite whether to continue in the talks. Such a poll is unlikely to take place -- not least of all because the P.L.O. is not apt to turn such matters over to a public vote. But Abdul-Shafi's remark reflected uneasiness among the delegates over their lack of a popular mandate.

Last week the negotiators met in East Jerusalem and worked on developing a response to their detractors. It will include, they say, an intensive effort over the next few weeks to educate the public about the virtues of remaining a player in the peace process. Naturally, the most effective lesson would be a breakthrough in the talks that would accelerate the establishment of self- government in the territories.

Such a development, however, would bring its own answer from the obstructionists. They are already anticipating the establishment of a Palestinian body to monitor the territories' autonomy and are thinking of ways to undermine it. If the naysayers confine themselves to democratic protests, they will teach the Palestinian supporters of autonomy a tough but necessary lesson -- how to deal with political opposition. If they resort to sabotage, they may well ensure that their people have no chance at experimenting in self-rule for a long time to come.

With reporting by Ron Ben-Yishai and Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem