BREATHLESS IN GAZA

By Michael Kramer

It is Wednesday evening, the night of the Israeli elections, and the atmosphere in the Gaza City home of Nabil Shaath is quiet and tense. About a dozen people have gathered to watch the returns. Most are top aides to Yasser Arafat. Shaath, the Palestinian Authority's Minister of International Relations and Development, negotiated the complicated arrangements for the staged Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. As a member of the authority's six-member senior committee overseeing the crucial "final status" talks, he has just returned from Washington, where he and the Clinton Administration's top Middle East hands held yet another strategy session. For the peace process to go forward as planned, all that remains is for the voters to confirm what the pre-election surveys were showing--that Shimon Peres would serve another term as Prime Minister.

In Shaath's well-appointed home--an incongruous sight in the midst of Gaza's rubble--one TV is tuned to CNN, another to Israeli television. Various radios blare with election news. The guests fidget and curse Peres' rival, Benjamin Netanyahu. "It's amazing," Shaath says, "for decades, each Israeli Prime Minister was as bad for us as every other. But this time our whole future is on the line. This is our election too, so of course we're all anxious--and believe me, no one is more anxious than Arafat. Given where we are with the peace process--we're so close to a real resolution after so many decades of hate--and given how much we have invested in Peres' being able to continue it on the Israeli side, well, for us it's as if Arafat were running himself."

In fact Shaath and his colleagues have been operating on that premise for months. Just about anything that could help Peres, they have done--or more exactly not done--avoiding rhetoric and protests that could stir up unrest. In response to terrorist attacks, Peres has for the past three months prevented workers who live in Gaza and the West Bank from entering Israel, but Palestinian officials said little about it in the final weeks of the campaign. If, because of his political situation, Peres failed to live up to one of his promises, they simply ignored it. The accord Shaath brokered, for example, calls for Israelis to withdraw forces from the West Bank town of Hebron, but that hasn't happened yet. "We normally would have screamed," Shaath says, "but we've generally kept quiet. We've been patient with Peres as he has had to satisfy the Israeli right wing. The question is whether that patience will have been worth it."

As the vote count starts, early reports predict only a modest turnout of Israel's Arab citizens; Shaath becomes nervous. "We need an 80% Israeli-Arab participation rate," he says heatedly ("we" refers to the Peres effort, and Shaath uses the word throughout the evening). To reach that goal the Palestinian Authority had urged Arab clerics and other trusted pro-Peres Palestinians to go door to door to push Arab Israelis to the polls. After a last-minute surge, 79% of them did vote, and more than 94% supported Peres. "Remember," Shaath says, smiling, "we don't interfere. But after this, you can't say that Israel's Arabs haven't done their part for Peres."

At 10 p.m. the polls close, and the next five minutes crawl by. Then polling experts project a narrow victory for Peres. "It could be as close as Kennedy and Nixon in 1960," says Shaath, who at the time was studying for a doctorate at the Wharton School of Finance in Philadelphia. "I remember that one well." (Later he would become a professor at Wharton. "That was fun," he recalls. "I taught corporate finance to the kids of all those Jewish investment bankers on Wall Street.")

Eighteen minutes after the polls' closing, with Peres' slim lead still apparently holding, Shaath and Arafat get on the phone to congratulate each other. Shaath pulls his wife aside for a kiss and a loud high five, then adds lustily, "Now we can eat, but we can avoid the bowls of sour cream. They were here in case Netanyahu won." By 1 a.m. the guests have cleared out. Shaath goes to bed.

The next morning, when he hears the results, he is incredulous and devastated. "What happened?" he asks. "How did it happen? I went to sleep with Peres the winner. I was ready for the endgame, to make the final peace."

There is nothing Shaath, Arafat or any Palestinian leader can do now except hope that everything Bibi Netanyahu said during his campaign was nothing more than electioneering rhetoric. Three years ago, though, Shaath predicted a Netanyahu government would mean the "end of the peace process." Nothing that has happened since has caused him to change that view. He will probably soon begin to sound the optimistic notes that are the only acceptable public reaction Arafat and his aides can offer at a time like this. But in the shock of the moment Shaath candidly characterized Netanyahu's election. It is, he says, a "disaster."