Strike Shuts Down Palestinian Towns Protest Gets Attention Of Hard-Line Israeli Government

Shops and buses throughout the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem came to a halt Thursday morning in response to Yasser Arafat’s call for a protest against the hard-line policies of the new Israeli government, and initial indications were that the message had some impact.

In the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the normally bustling markets and tourist shops were dead, except for a rare merchant beckoning tourists furtively from behind closed doors. Reports from Palestinian towns spoke of near-total compliance with the strike.

Though the strike was largely symbolic and had little direct effect on Israelis, the action dominated headlines in all Israeli newspapers and prompted several commentaries sharply critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for allowing Israeli-Palestinian relations to deteriorate.

In apparent reaction to the protest, a lawyer close to Netanyahu, Yitzhak Molho, met with Arafat in Ramallah, on the West Bank, but there was no indication of what they had discussed, or whether Molho had carried a message from the prime minister.

In Jerusalem the senior negotiators for Israel and the Palestinians - the former Israeli army chief of staff Dan Shomron and the Palestinian local government minister Saeb Erekat - moved up a meeting scheduled for next week and talked for an hour at a hotel.

Shomron declared the meeting “good,” adding, “I believe after this meeting that we have the ability to advance all the issues that today are found at different levels of implementation.”

He said that the joint steering committee that he and Erekat head would begin next week to meet regularly. The committee is charged with handling the day-to-day details of Israeli-Palestinian relations.