WITH PEACE IN THE CROSS FIRE

By LISA BEYER/JERUSALEM

Month after month the name Hebron was the byword for a seemingly unsolvable diplomatic dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Hebron: the last major Palestinian city under complete Israeli occupation, a status that was originally supposed to end last March, if only the two sides could agree on the terms for self-rule. Last week, just when it looked as if they might, the name Hebron reclaimed its place as shorthand for bloodlust and mayhem.

Noam Friedman, 22, had a history of mental disorders and a record of threatening to murder Arabs, but he nonetheless somehow wound up in the Israeli army, a uniformed man equipped with an M-16 rifle. On Jan. 1 he put it to use, kneeling down in front of Hebron's outdoor vegetable market, then opening fire on vendors and shoppers as close as within 15 ft. In just seconds, an alert army lieutenant, Avi Buskila, jumped him and, with the help of two other soldiers, snatched his rifle and jerked him away. Because of Buskila's quick action and perhaps Friedman's poor shooting, the harm was less than it could have been. Friedman got off 20 rounds, wounding six people but killing none. Still, the episode frayed the city's nerves, reminding residents of the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers by a Jewish fanatic.

It also underscored what makes Hebron such a difficult case. Both Jews and Muslims consider the city holy because it is host to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the supposed resting place of Abraham, who is central to both religions, and of his family. Attracted by the site, some 400 Israeli settlers, mostly religious extremists, live in enclaves amid Hebron's 100,000 Arabs. Mindful of a 1929 pogrom against Jewish Hebronites, the settlers fear that Palestinian self-rule will lead to their slaughter. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew from a settlement near Jerusalem, said he acted to stop any Israeli retreat in Hebron. Pumping his fist and grinning in triumph at reporters after his arrest, he repeated the nationalist chant "Hebron always and forever."

It is unclear how long his smile will last. On the very day of Friedman's outrage, negotiators were predicting a summit between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to put the final touches on a pact for self-rule in Hebron. After the shooting, that schedule was pushed back, but U.S. officials brokering the talks say it is still just a matter of time before an accord is reached. Such an agreement was already signed in September 1995 by Arafat and the previous Israeli government. But Netanyahu, after his election last May, insisted on reopening negotiations in order to obtain better security guarantees for Hebron's Jews.

For most of the time since then, U.S. officials have accused Netanyahu of foot-dragging. But gradually, after the September miniwar between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, the Israeli Prime Minister began to grasp the price of constantly frustrating Palestinian aspirations, thereby incurring U.S. and international disapprobation. At the same time, buoyed by Palestinian and foreign support that followed the September conflagration, Arafat turned tough and instructed his negotiators to remain steely in the Hebron talks. The result was that the Palestinians won a number of concessions. Most significant, the Israelis gave up their insistence on obtaining an explicit right, in the event of a security emergency, to re-enter areas in Hebron from which they had withdrawn. Instead, they settled for a vaguer formulation allowing each side to argue its interpretation. The Israeli compromises, U.S. officials say, should have enabled the deal to be clinched weeks ago. Says a senior State Department official: "We increased the pressure from our side for an agreement to be reached."

But then it was Arafat's turn to foot-drag. He withheld instructions to close, fearing that a Hebron agreement would lift international pressure on Israel and free Netanyahu to accelerate building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as slow action to fulfill Israel's commitment to expand Palestinian autonomy further. Netanyahu fanned Palestinian concern about the settlements when his government on Dec. 13 restored to those communities large public subsidies that had been revoked by the previous government.

That move provoked a strong reaction from Bill Clinton, generally seen in Israel as the most sympathetic of U.S. Presidents. For the first time, Clinton characterized the Jewish settlements as an "obstacle to peace," using terminology from the Reagan and Bush years that his Administration had dropped. For Netanyahu, says a senior State Department official, "it was a very strong wake-up call." Concerned that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations would peter out, or that violence would again erupt, Clinton dispatched Dennis Ross, the State Department's special Middle East coordinator, to Jerusalem with a mission to hammer away until Hebron was done.

Ross was also primed to soften up Arafat. "Arafat was stung by some of the things communicated to him about how the outcome of the talks would affect his relationship with Washington," says a negotiation insider. "With U.S. support for him eroding, he had to decide whether he'd got as much as he could. Ross persuaded him he had." Still, at week's end the Palestinians were holding out for written Israeli assurances that three further Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank countryside would take place according to a specific schedule, ending preferably by next September or, at the latest, the following January. The Israelis were prepared to commit to a date for the first pullback only, preferring to keep the timing of the other two as a card to play in later negotiations. Says the talks insider: "Arafat created something of an artificial crisis at the last minute, but that's his traditional negotiating tactic. The shooting maybe gave him an excuse, but he doesn't need much encouragement."

Certainly, exploiting the shooting to achieve better terms was a temptation for the Palestinian team. Though the talks have focused mostly on the security of the settlers, Friedman demonstrated that the Arabs of Hebron are also at great risk. Even under Palestinian self-rule, the site of the attempted massacre as well as all the areas of Jewish settlement will remain under exclusive Israeli control. Palestinian negotiators, however, resisted the lure of reopening this issue, mindful of the fact that Netanyahu will have a difficult time as it is in getting the Hebron agreement through his right-wing Cabinet. Seven of the 18 government ministers have said they will definitely vote against it, leaving Netanyahu a tiny safety margin in collecting the necessary majority.

In a strange way, the near calamity last week brought the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships closer together. Netanyahu was quick to phone Arafat, to condemn Friedman's act in strong terms and wish the victims a swift recovery. Arafat avoided inflammatory language, calling the attack "a criminal attempt to torpedo the peace process." In Hebron, Israeli security forces coordinated closely with their Palestinian counterparts, who are already in position in the city but function quietly, without uniforms. When, just after the shooting, Hebron youths began to riot, Arafat's gendarmes fanned out, persuading them to desist. Said an officer: "We don't want to give the Israelis any excuse to delay their redeployment."

At the level of the street, however, the Friedman outrage served only to intensify the bitterness of the two communities in Hebron, a mutual hatred that is unsurpassed anywhere else in the Holy Land. The mother of twin boys Akram and Abdel Karim Atrash, 16, both shot in the leg by Friedman, had but one thing to say from her sons' hospital room: "Those settlers should be butchered." For their part, the Jews of Hebron this time were careful not to give public praise. But they have a monument that to the Arabs speaks louder than words: a shrine outside Hebron erected by the Jews to honor Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 mosque massacre.

--With reporting by Dean Fischer/Washington and Jamil Hamad/Hebron

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON AND JAMIL HAMAD/HEBRON