SHATTERED HOPE.

• Author: VILBIG, PETER
• Position: Middle east affairs

ONE SIDE SENDS SUICIDE BOMBERS; THE OTHER ANSWERS WITH HELICOPTER ATTACKS. ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS ARE LOCKED AGAIN IN MORTAL COMBAT. YET JUST LAST YEAR THEY WERE CLOSER TO PEACE THAN AT ANY TIME IN DECADES. HOW DID THEY MISS THEIR CHANCE?

AGAIN AND AGAIN IN A YEAR of bloodshed, the pendulum of violence has ticked from one side to the other. With each swing, someone dies.

On one day, the eerie back-and-forth might begin with young Palestinians, willing to die as martyrs for their dream of a free Palestine. Carefully, they tape pipe bombs and high explosives to their bodies and slip into busy Israeli streets. Outside a crowded disco, a bomber kills himself and 21 others, many of them teens. At a pizza restaurant, another suicide bomber kills 15 Israeli civilians.

A few hours or days later, the pendulum swings back. A black Israeli attack helicopter, its rotors chugging in the heated air, rises over the dry landscape, holds steady for an instant, and then fires its missiles in a long streak of hissing smoke. Whether the target is an office building, a farmhouse in Bethlehem, or a lone car on a deserted road at midnight, the results are the same: The Palestinian militants who have been marked for extermination end up dead, and sometimes innocent bystanders die too.

It was not supposed to be this way. Last year at about this time, the Israelis and Palestinians were said to be close to signing a peace pact, the culmination of seven years of painful negotiations. Then the talks suddenly broke down. Since last September, violence has claimed the lives of more than 550 Palestinians and more than 130 Israelis.

Each new attack leads to oaths of vengeance--from Palestinian militants bent on continuing the terror campaign, and from the Israeli Army, which vows to continue targeted killings.

A WRONG TURN

THE UNITED STATES HAS BLAMED PALESTINIAN leader Yasir Arafat for the failure. One widely accepted story goes like this: Last summer, the two sides met with President Clinton at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. At that meeting, Ehud Barak, who was then Israel's Prime Minister, offered Arafat a deal too good to refuse. But, the story continues, Arafat turned down the Israeli plan, and then "pushed the button" and chose the path of violence.

Recently, however, new details have emerged, suggesting that the version blaming Arafat for the failure of the peace talks was largely wrong. Diplomats and officials now say the reality was far more complex. "It is a terrible myth that Arafat and only Arafat caused this catastrophic failure," says Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special envoy in Jerusalem. "All three parties made mistakes, and in such complex negotiations, everyone is bound to. But no one is solely to blame."

This new analysis suggests that a breakdown was not as inevitable as it now appears. It shows how the leaders were often driven by public-opinion polls at home to take positions that made achieving a peace more difficult, and then often misjudged how the other side would react. The analysis also reveals how the story that emerged, blaming Arafat and the Palestinians, helped harden positions in Israel against continuing negotiations, thus further dimming hopes for peace.

Yet these same diplomats and experts say that neither side can win the current struggle. Eventually, both will have to come back to peace talks and base them on the rough outlines that were under discussion last year.

How close were the two sides to peace? Days before the peace process was severely damaged by Palestinian riots last September, Barak and Arafat held an unusually congenial dinner meeting in Barak's private residence. At one point during the dinner, Barak even called President Clinton and excitedly told the President that he and Arafat were going to strike a peace bargain. Within earshot of the Palestinian leader, Barak theatrically announced, "I'm going to be the partner of this man."

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

BUT THE DINNER WAS ALSO A CLASSIC example of how misunderstandings and communication failures can lead to unintended consequences. Arafat says that during the dinner, he huddled with Barak on the balcony, imploring him to...