JERUSALEM — The drama inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process played out again this week with a pipe-bomb attack, the kickoff of final-status talks and the forced removal of settlers from a rogue West Bank outpost.
By now, Israelis are familiar with footage of terror victims and of diplomatic handshakes.
But images of Jew vs. Jew — of soldiers vs. settlers — are still rare enough to haunt Israelis. For many, the disturbing scene recalled the early 1980s when settlers were forcibly ousted from a Sinai Peninsula town.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s handling of each of the week’s events demonstrates just how determined he is to move ahead with the peace process.
He was, in fact, considered a winner this week in his first open confrontation with Jewish settlers since taking office. But he is hardly looking forward to any repetition of what occurred Wednesday when 1,000 soldiers and police ousted 300 settlers from Havat Maon.
Wednesday’s standoff provided its share of haunting images: settlers clinging to rooftops before being taken away; the cries of “shame,” “Arafat is proud of you” and “refuse orders” directed at the troops; eggs and paint being thrown at security forces; a settler removing a Torah scroll from a makeshift wooden synagogue under a police escort.
Just hours after the standoff, Barak secured his cabinet’s approval of the next step in the peace process when his ministers, by a vote of 17-1, gave the go-ahead to an Israeli withdrawal from another 5 percent of the West Bank next week.
At the cabinet meeting, Barak applauded the restraint shown by the troops, who he said combined “sense and determination in order to impose the government’s will on its citizens.”
What happened “at the Maon Farm is a difficult test for democracy and a red light on the road to anarchy,” he added.
Earlier in the week, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators launched talks aimed at achieving a final peace agreement. The final-status talks began nearly four years later than originally envisioned in the 1993 Oslo accord.
Monday’s meeting came one day after more than 30 Israelis were wounded, most of them lightly, in three pipe-bomb explosions in the coastal city of Netanya.
Despite the attack, Barak vowed to push ahead with the final-status talks.
“Israel’s fight against terror,” he said, “is like a boxing match…You punch and you get punched. At the end, however, I assure you there is going to be a knockout.”
Meeting on Monday in the West Bank town of Ramallah, chief Israeli negotiator Oded Eran and his Palestinian counterpart, Yasser Abed Rabbo, sat down to discuss mostly procedural issues facing them as they try to reach a framework for a final accord by February.
The meeting lasted less than two hours but negotiators later said they planned to meet again yesterday and hold several sessions each week to meet the February deadline.
There were opening ceremonies for the talks in 1996 as well as some six weeks ago, but Monday’s session represented the first time the two sides actually got down to formal business.
Along with creating an outline for an agreement within little more than 100 days, the two sides have also committed themselves to signing a final agreement by September.
Negotiators for the two sides were upbeat despite the difficult issues confronting them — including the final status of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements, Palestinian refugees, borders and water rights.
“We recognize the enormity of the problems,” Eran said. “But we commit ourselves, without reservations, to holding these negotiations as partners, to maintaining a dialogue based on mutual respect.”
Abed Rabbo described the atmosphere of the first session as “very frank, very constructive and very open. It’s a historic moment, and we believe through continuous and extensive work” the two sides will “accomplish a framework agreement for final status on the 15th of February.”
Outside the Ramallah hotel where Monday’s talks were held, a small group of Jewish protesters held signs that read, “Don’t Abandon 200,000 Israeli Citizens,” referring to Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
But two days later, their fears came to the fore.
“If this is the kind of struggle that is put up over an outpost, imagine what it will be like over a settlement,” said settler leader Benny Katzover.
The incident at Maon also drew condemnation from others.
“This is ethnic cleansing of Jews by Jews, and we are ashamed of our government,” said Nadia Matar of the Women in Green movement, which opposes any Israeli handovers of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
If settler demonstrations gather momentum in the coming weeks, the pro-settler National Religious Party could wind up bolting the coalition.
Barak — who currently has the support of 73 of the Knesset’s 120 members and wants to keep his coalition intact through the final-status talks — can ill afford any defections as he attempts to work out a final peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority.
In an effort to create “facts on the ground” in advance of the final-status talks, settlers created 42 outposts on barren hills across the West Bank during the past year.
The government of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tacitly — and in the case of some ministers, explicitly — encouraged the actions.
But under an agreement with Barak last month, settler leaders agreed to leave 12 of those sites voluntarily in exchange for government approval of the remaining 30 outposts.
The settler leadership persuaded the residents of 11 outposts to leave but Maon became a magnet for younger settlers who defied the leaders.
While most of them used passive resistance Wednesday, dozens of them were arrested for threatening or hindering the security forces.
The confrontation took its toll on the Israeli security forces who carried out the predawn evacuation.
According to Maj. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, chief of the Israel Defense Force command in charge of the West Bank, soldiers had received psychological counseling before launching Wednesday’s operation.
“We are trained to fight in battle against enemies,” he said, “not against Jews — either settlers or other Jews.”