COLD HANDS

By LISA BEYER/JERUSALEM

For one man it was a giant leap. For the peace process, not quite a small step. Before his election as Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu had sworn he would never deign to meet Yasser Arafat, a man he considered little more than a terrorist. Last week, however, Netanyahu was finally nudged into a handshake with the Palestinian leader. It was an enormous psychological hurdle for the Israeli leader. His Palestinian partners, though, felt as if they were beginning a relationship from scratch.

Denials notwithstanding, Netanyahu had plainly been pressured into the summit. In his first three months in office he had assiduously shunned Arafat and frozen plans to expand Palestinian self-rule, as promised in previously signed accords. Then Israeli intelligence agencies began warning that as a result, Arafat was fast losing standing among his people and that instability, perhaps violence, might follow. Finally, Israel's dovish President, Ezer Weizman, threatened publicly that if Netanyahu would not meet Arafat, he would. Netanyahu agreed to a summit.

The summit produced no breakthroughs on the next steps of interim Palestinian self-rule: an Israeli redeployment in Hebron, the last major Palestinian city still under full occupation, plus further withdrawals in the West Bank. To Palestinian dismay, Netanyahu insisted on reopening the Hebron agreement already completed by the previous Labor government. And while Netanyahu said last week that he may eventually be prepared to start discussions on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, those negotiations had already begun under Labor. Publicly, Arafat's aides praised last week's summit, but privately they expressed reservations. Said one: "We are not satisfied, and we are not hopeful."

--By Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem