Months of talk `put Palestine peace in peril'

Opponents of a peace between Israelis and Palestinians have been able to rally support because the negotiations are too drawn out, says Yossi Beilin, the Israeli government minister who was the intellectual driving force behind the Israel-PLO agreement signed in Washington two years ago yesterday.

He believes that, because it is taking so long to reach agreement, pessimistic suspicions have flourished on both sides. Palestinians believe they are being fobbed off with scraps and Israelis fear they are seeing the creation of a full-blown Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem.

As deputy foreign minister, Mr Beilin was Israel's most effective dove during the Oslo negotiations and subsequent talks with the PLO.

Emphasising at a meeting with British correspondents this week that "time is running out", he appeared to imply that a victory by the right-wing Likud party is likely in the general election in Israel in October 1996.

He said he thought that Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, had not "taken a final decision" about what he would do about talks with the Palestinians if he formed the next government. In any case, the withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho and the impending redeployment from at least five West Bank cities would by then be irreversible.

Mr Beilin, 47, promoted to the full cabinet as Economics Minister this summer, is a hate figure for Israeli settlers and the right. They regard him with much more animosity than they do Shimon Peres, the Foreign Minister, and his political mentor. Mr Beilin, a political scientist, says he became more of a dove after the 1973 war, which showed Israel was not as strong as it had appeared after victory in the 1967 war.

He admits that Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister, and Mr Peres do not support his belief that negotiations should be speeded up and move immediately to the permanent solution of outstanding differences between Israelis and Palestinians. These talks on Jerusalem, settlers and other apparently insoluble problems are due to start on 4 May.

Mr Beilin said yesterday that the present talks about an interim settlement were "in a way a waste of effort"; money and intellectual resources were being invested in an agreement which would be almost immediately superseded when final-status talks began. But he admits the strength of the case that a step-by-step approach is necessary to win public support for military withdrawal.

Mr Beilin takes heart from a new poll which shows the Israeli public's ambivalence on the peace talks with Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman. The poll, by Haifa University, showed that 53 per cent of Israelis say Mr Arafat is a terrorist, murderer and enemy, but 73 per cent think that Israel should continue negotiations with him.

Mr Beilin says the peace treaty with Jordan would not have been possible without the Oslo agreement. Asked about Jordanians' fears that they would be economically engulfed by Israel, he quoted a senior Jordanian official as telling him that "when you compare your economy to ours, you will dominate us by nature of your size".

Actions by Jewish settlers were dismissed by Mr Beilin as having "a nuisance value", but the murder of a Palestinian near Hebron and the attacks on a girls' school in the city this week have been condemned by the US. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns described an attack by settlers on Sunday on the elementary school, in which four pupils were injured, as "truly shocking, even by the low standards set by some of the settler communities in the West Bank".