REFLECTING the growing Israeli public concern at the government's disinclination to advance the peace process with the Palestinians, President Ezer Weizman announced yesterday that he would have the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, as his guest at his private home in the very near future.
Mr Weizman said he was arranging the meeting in response to an emotional plea he received last week from Mr Arafat. The Palestinian Authority president sent him a letter expressing deep distress over the refusal of the new Israeli government to sanction any substantive progress, and declaring that "the time has come to end the fight between the Palestinian people and the Israeli people".
The Israeli president, whose powers are largely ceremonial, likes to see himself as the barometer of Israeli public opinion. In that context, he criticised the Rabin and Peres governments publicly and often in the past two years over what he said was their over hasty approach to peacemaking, and was prone to calling for at least a temporary halt to negotiations in the aftermath of each of the Islamic extremist suicide bombings that punctuated the process.
Now Mr Weizman has evidently concluded that the new government, headed by Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, has swung too far the other way.
Mr Netanyahu has thus far refused to meet with Mr Arafat, there have been no meaningful negotiations since the May 29th elections, and the next phase of the process Israel's much postponed troop withdrawal from Hebron remains in dispute.
Talks on Hebron and other pressing issues are set to resume this week or next, now that the Palestinian Authority has bowed to an Israeli demand to close three minor offices in East Jerusalem.
Mr Weizman consulted with Mr Netanyahu before accepting Mr Arafat's plea for a meeting. Indeed, it was at a joint press conference with Mr Netanyahu that he announced he would hold the talks. Mr Arafat, he said, "today has control over two million plus Palestinians. He is rightly seen as the leader of the whole issue. When a leader like this, our neighbour, who essentially sits amidst us . . . asks to meet with me, I feel I have to accede to this."
According to some reports, the president effectively issued an ultimatum to Mr Netanyahu - telling him that he would convene the meeting unless the prime minister agreed to meet Mr Arafat by the end of the month. Mr Weizman denied this yesterday, but Mr Netanyahu looked deeply discomfited at the press conference, and is unlikely to be pleased about the president's move.
The two presidents have met before, in South Africa, at President Nelson Mandela's inauguration, but this new meeting will have far greater symbolic value - and will also represent Mr Arafat's first official visit to Israel. (He paid a private condolence call Ms Leah Rabin soon after her husband was assassinated last November).
Less than three months after the elections that brought him to power, the prime minister is increasingly being perceived not so much as hardline, but as simply indecisive. The best selling newspaper here, Yediot Ahronoi, yesterday accused his government of wasting time, of failing to make decisions, and of reversing the few decisions it does manage to take.
Inside his own Likud party, several leading figures, alarmed by reports of nose diving support for Mr Arafat among the Palestinians, are now calling on Mr Netanyahu to stop procrastinating and meet the Palestinian president. Israel must give Mr Arafat credibility, said one Likud Knesset member, Mr Gideon Ezra, "in order for him to do what we want him to do".
It was time to stop playing games, added another, Mr Meir Shitreet. "I call on the prime minister to meet with Arafat immediately, not to delay for even a day. He has to lead the country to peace. That is what he pledged to do in the elections."