FIFTEEN months after the deal was originally signed, and nine months after it was supposed to have been implemented, Israel and the Palestinians were last night on the brink of signing a renegotiated accord on the Israeli military withdrawal from most of the West Bank city of Hebron putting the Middle East peace process back on track.
After two days of frantic diplomatic efforts led by the US mediator, Mr Dennis Ross, Israeli and Palestinian officials said all significant differences between the sides had been bridged. A meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mr Yasser Arafat, will take place today in an attempt to finalise a new accord.
While details of the final agreements remained scarce, it appeared that Israel had bowed to Palestinian demands for a binding timetable not only for the Hebron pullout, but for further West Bank redeployments as specified in the Oslo peace accords, and for the resumption of talks on the "final status" the permanent Israeli Palestinian peace deal.
It was also understood that the US was providing its own written guarantees to both sides to ensure full compliance with the terms of the accords.
This latest round of negotiations on the Hebron deal had been going on for close to three months since gun battles in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem in late September brought the peace process to the brink of complete collapse.
Yesterday's dramatic breakthrough appeared to stem directly from a change in attitude by the Americans from passive mediation to a more active role. Mr Netanyahu has been under considerable pressure from the US in the past few days to reassure a wary Mr Arafat that Israel is not about to launch a new West Bank settlement drive Mr Arafat has been urged by the US not to delay signing the accord any longer.
Although it was Mr Netanyahu who insisted on renegotiating the Hebron deal, originally signed by Yitzhak Rabin in September 1995 as part of the Oslo II accords, it is Mr Arafat who seems to have benefited most from the delay. Given the furore surrounding his recent talk of expanding settlements, Mr Netanyahu can now hardly dare approve the major settlement construction campaign he may have envisaged.
Furthermore, it seems, he has had to commit himself to the post Hebron West Bank redeployments required under the terms of the Oslo framework military pullbacks from rural areas that he had been reluctant to sanction, and that give Mr Arafat considerably wider control and authority.
Mr Netanyahu's advisers were insisting last night that the new deal was far better than the original, suggesting that some of the prime minister's demands on the weapons to be carned by Hebron's Palestinian policemen, on a timetable for a new PLO charter, on the disarming of Islamic militants, and so on had now been incorporated.
Belying the deadlock, Mr Netanyahu has always stressed his desire to proceed with the process it is significant that, in the months that the Hebron deal has been stalled, the hardline Israeli prime minister's own position on the nature of the final Palestinian entity appears to have softened. He has himself hinted that some kind of independent statehood for the Palestinians might be acceptable. Some of his advisers are saying so more explicitly, and two Knesset members from the governing Likud party yesterday endorsed the idea which had hitherto been anathema to the Israeli rightwing.
Not surprisingly, these signs of flexibility have been met with horror by more unbending hardliners. The 450 Jewish settlers of Hebron, who are to stay on in the city in a sector heavily patrolled by the Israeli army, last night accused the prime minister of abandoning all of his principles and said the terms of the accord would make Jewish life there impossible.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report
Reuter adds Israel will soon begin selling land on the occupied Golan Heights in order to expand the Jewish settlement of Katzrin, a housing ministry spokesman said yesterday.
Israel's leading Peace Now movement criticised the decision as a "countdown to war" with Syria, which lost the Golan Heights to Israel in the 1967 Middle East War and demands their return.
The Housing ministry spokesman, Mr Moshe Friedman, confirmed media reports that land on which 96 homes are planned would soon go to market. He did not specify when tenders would be issued.
"It was decided last June to allow for natural growth of Katzrin," Mr Friedman added.
He said Israel's northern district planning and building committee had already approved construction of the 96 homes.