DATE: Thursday, March 20, 1997              TAG: 9703200002

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   61 lines

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS PEACEBREAKING

As bulldozers began scraping away soil on an East Jerusalem hillside Tuesday, a prelude to constructing 6,500 dwelling units for Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel announced that his government had ``received intelligence that the Palestinian Authority has prepared the ground for violence'' in response to the project.

He warned Yasser Arafat that ``the Palestinian side must choose, `Do we want terror or do we want peace.'''

Netanyahu's words fell oddly on the ear. The United Nations General Assembly, which condemned Israel's decision to proceed with the housing development in mainly Arab East Jerusalem, could have replied that the Netanyahu government was at that moment literally ``preparing the ground for violence.'' Indeed, Israeli police and soldiers were on alert for violence from angered Palestinians.

Washington, which vetoed the General Assembly's condemnation resolution, deplored the construction start. Indeed, initiating the project constitutes one more provocation by the Netanyahu government that could derail the precarious peace process.

Consider the East Jerusalem scene: Bulldozer blades ripping the earth while Palestinian and some Jewish pro-peace protesters paraded their objections. Armed Israeli soldiers pushing back protesters. All this was a choice for peace over violence?

Happy news from the strife-plagued Middle East is as scarce as rain in the desert. The Jordanian soldier who fired into a busload of Israeli schoolgirls several days ago, snuffing out the lives of seven and wounding others, was described as a madman. But hatred, bitterness and vengefulness keep the violence going. Madmen willing to blow themselves up in order to blow up others are no rarity in the Middle East, and their spirit infects leaders and followers on all sides, to endless horror and pain.

The peace process initiated in Oslo by Israeli and Palestinian leaders was fraught with peril from the outset. Arab and Jewish enemies of peace have done their utmost to prevent peace from breaking out. Between terrorist attacks by Arabs who slaughtered Israelis and a ``mad'' Jewish fundamentalist's assassination of peace-seeking Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the enemies of peace tilted the Israeli electorate toward placing hard-liner Netanyahu into office.

He retains that office by giving in repeatedly to the hardest hard-liners in his coalition, a spectacle that has cost him respect and support among Israelis generally. By yielding so little of the West Bank territories to the Palestinian Authority in the phased Israeli withdrawal, he has incensed the Palestinians and the extremists in his government, who oppose letting the Palestinians control even an inch of what they regard as Greater Israel. Then the Jordanian soldier fired into Israeli schoolgirls visiting the Island of Peace in the Jordan River. Now Netanyahu goes forward with the housing development on East Jerusalem land to which Israel says it is entitled.

Entitled or not, constructing the housing in the current tense climate is an invitation to further violence. Israel should back off.

Netanyahu promised to enhance Israelis' security, breached bloodily by terrorists, and so defeated Labor Party candidate Shimon Peres for the prime ministership. That most Israelis feel more secure amid the tensions exacerbated by Netanyahu's insults to the peace process seems highly improbable.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu