Months of Tough Talks, Then Smiles and Cigars

By MARJORIE MILLER

Jan. 16, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

JERUSALEM — When it was all over, when from a long and troubled labor a Hebron agreement finally emerged in the wee hours of Wednesday, U.S. mediators lighted Monte Cristo cigars in the cold night and smiled with a mixture of relief and satisfaction.

The carefully choreographed summit between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat had come off without the last-minute hitch everyone had feared. No surprises, no torpedoes. At last there was an agreement to pull back Israeli troops from most of the occupied West Bank city.

Arafat broke out Cuban cigars for the Americans.

Smiles spread across faces sagging from the many all-nighters that the negotiators had pulled in recent months. Their voices were thick with fatigue.

“It is like a marathon that has finally ended,” observed Edward Abington Jr., the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu agreed. After the accord was completed and the room full of negotiators broke into applause, the prime minister reached across the table to shake hands with Arafat. Then he congratulated U.S. mediator Dennis Ross, who he said deserved “an Olympic gold medal” for his marathon efforts.

In the race for an agreement, Ross, Abington and U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk had steered the two sides through sand dunes of distrust. Netanyahu and Arafat ran in slow motion to the finish line of a Hebron accord.

Afterward, neither flashed a victory sign. “We may have reached a Hebron agreement, but I don’t know if we left that room with any more trust,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

The midnight meeting at the Erez crossing between Israel and the autonomous Gaza Strip was better than any of the previous encounters between Netanyahu and Arafat. The Likud Party leader and Palestine Liberation Organization chief were cordial with each other as they spoke through President Clinton’s translator. They were friendly as they handed a telephone back and forth, sharing calls to Clinton, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein.

But outside, neither would proffer a smile. They looked ill at ease in the same camera frame. They were tight-faced, like men focused on corns throbbing in new shoes.

“They have a long way to go to establish personal relations,” Abington said. “The level of trust is still low. Public statements on both sides continue to make the issue of trust a problem.”

The Hebron agreement itself had been all but completed for weeks. On Sunday, Hussein had brokered a compromise on future Israeli deployments in the West Bank. Ross then spent Wednesday crafting an American note assuring that both sides intended to carry out further commitments. “We had cleared away all of the issues. There was nothing [significant] left to negotiate and to have disagreements over,” Abington recalled.

Rather than create last-minute obstacles, Netanyahu and Arafat quickly wrapped up a few outstanding details, such as setting a date for Israel’s first post-Hebron redeployment for the first week of March.

At 2:30 a.m., they emerged into the night air with an agreement in their pockets and allowed the Americans to speak for them.

The “long and difficult negotiations,” Ross said, “came out of a spirit of seriousness and partnership.”