Peace Postponed

By Lara Marlowe/Gaza Strip

For a few hours, the Palestinian urchins scowling through the 20-ft.-high chain-link fence at Israeli soldiers and policemen held back their rain of stones. In a gesture calculated to show progress toward granting the Palestinians limited autonomy, the Israelis planned to hand the onetime Gaza City beachfront hotel-turned-police barracks over to P.L.O. representatives. Israeli officials had billed the ceremony as the "transfer of a police station," and TV cameras came out in force to record the event. Little matter ( that most of the 50 Israeli police who until recently slept there had already moved into other, more comfortable quarters downtown. The Israel Defense Forces fidgeted, guns at the ready, glancing at their watches as they eyed the restive crowd. Citing snags in the Cairo negotiations between Israel and the P.L.O., Yasser Arafat's representative sent word at the last minute that he could not accept the building. When the crowd learned this, the waiting suddenly ended. "Down with Israel! . . . Long live the P.L.O.! . . . Allahu Akbar!" they shouted, as boys scaled the barrier to plant a Palestinian flag on top of the fence.

The tenuous, uneven march toward peace in the Middle East stumbled again last week. Complications at the talks and unmet deadlines were punctuated with more violence, more revenge. Within an hour of the canceled Gaza ceremony, 90 miles away in northern Israel, a 25-year-old Palestinian blew up seven Israelis in a suicide attack in the town of Afula. The killer, a member of the anti-Arafat Islamic movement Hamas, detonated his car bomb alongside an Israeli bus as passengers, many of them teenagers, were boarding. Hamas promised that the attack would be the first of five in retaliation for February's rampage by an Israeli settler at the mosque in Hebron. On Thursday, a Palestinian gunman from the Islamic Jihad group shot an Israeli dead and wounded four others near the southern town of Ashdod. Following a speech in Hebron by the Rev. Jesse Jackson on Friday, the I.D.F. shot eight Palestinians with live and rubber bullets. Hamas warned that it would engulf the occupied territories in "real war" and vowed to turn Israel's independence day, April 14, "into hell." Israel responded by sealing off the occupied territories for one week.

In the six months since Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, political violence in the occupied territories and Israel has claimed the lives of 150 Palestinians and 34 Israelis. Says Yechiel Leiter, spokesman for the Yesha Council, the main lobby group for Israeli settlers in the occupied territories: "This is not going in the direction of peace. Peace is less violence, not more." That is perhaps the only point on which settlers and Palestinians agree. Short of a miracle, the April 13 deadline for Israeli withdrawal from Jericho and the Gaza Strip and commencement of limited Palestinian self-rule will not be met.

Israel had announced that a Palestinian police force would be deployed in - Jericho and the Gaza Strip and that international observers would take up posts in Hebron last week. Neither event took place, although the arrival of several hundred Palestinian police was vaguely rescheduled for this week. Contrary to the Jewish settlers' nightmares, the advance party of Palestinian police will not be allowed to roam freely with weapons; an Israeli military source insisted they will be unarmed and under Israeli supervision.

The Gaza Strip is still the site of daily clashes between Palestinians and Israelis, though last week it looked as if Israel might actually withdraw. Although no strategically important positions were abandoned, filing cabinets, computers and pre-fabricated offices were moved. The P.L.O. and Israel have not yet agreed on the boundaries of the future autonomous area in Jericho, but Israeli army bulldozers flattened ground for new military headquarters less than three miles from the city. Gazans expect the Israelis to redeploy closer to the settlements and hope a less visible Israeli presence near Palestinian population centers will lower tensions. But as impressive as it may seem to Israel's Western friends, such a redeployment carries dangers. If it occurs before establishment of Palestinian authority, especially the police force, the Israelis may leave chaos in their wake. Both Palestinians and Israelis say weapons have poured into the Gaza Strip over the past few months. Residents hear shooting every night. Any Gaza City taxi driver is able to quote the going price of M-16 and Glilon automatic rifles and Uzi submachine guns.

Members of Hamas say hundreds of activists in the Sheik Radwan quarter of Gaza City have been arrested by Israeli commando squads during the overnight curfews since the Feb. 25 Hebron massacre. Two weeks ago, an Israeli undercover unit shot dead six Fatah Hawks -- an armed group loyal to the P.L.O. -- in the Jabalia refugee camp. The Israeli army apologized for the shooting -- not because the Palestinians, who were carrying weapons, were shot without warning, but because they were Arafat's men. "If they had been Hamas members, we would have been justified in killing them," contended an Israeli military source. "I.D.F. soldiers have orders to shoot to kill anyone carrying a weapon. You don't fire warning shots in a combat situation. All Gaza is a combat situation, all the time."

Throughout the occupied territories, the continuing fragmentation of Palestinian groups bodes ill for successful implementation of the peace ^ accord. Fatah Hawks now "coordinate" their activities with the I.D.F., earning them the opprobrium of militant Palestinian groups, including the Hawks' own defectors, who want to keep fighting the occupation. "The Israelis are allowing the Hawks to carry weapons on the streets," charges a Hamas member. A Palestinian was killed when Hawks opened fire on Hamas activists who threw stones at them in Gaza's Rafah refugee camp two weeks ago. Last week Fatah and Hamas engaged in tit-for-tat kidnappings of each other's members in Jabalia. The hostages were freed within 24 hours, but tension between the two main Palestinian groups remains high.

From the minarets of Gaza City mosques last week, Hamas sheiks praised the "heroic" suicide bomber of Afula. Boys pelted Israeli military headquarters in Gaza City with stones, then waited for the inevitable rubber bullets. A donkey carcass lay rotting by the side of the road in Jabalia camp. Small boys dragged tires to construct a barricade, filling the air with the acrid smell of burning rubber. A few miles away, the police building stood empty, the morning's expectation of handshakes and smiles all but forgotten.

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Gaza Strip