Peace Postponed

For a few hours, the Palestinian urchins scowling through the 20-ft.-high chain-link fence at Israeli soldiers and policemen held back their rain of stones. In a gesture calculated to show progress toward granting the Palestinians limited autonomy, the Israelis planned to hand the onetime Gaza City beachfront hotel-turned-police barracks over to P.L.O. representatives. Israeli officials had billed the ceremony as the "transfer of a police station," and TV cameras came out in force to record the event. Little matter ( that most of the 50 Israeli police who until recently slept there had already moved into other, more comfortable quarters downtown. The Israel Defense Forces fidgeted, guns at the ready, glancing at their watches as they eyed the restive crowd. Citing snags in the Cairo negotiations between Israel and the P.L.O., Yasser Arafat's representative sent word at the last minute that he could not accept the building. When the crowd learned this, the waiting suddenly ended. "Down with Israel! . . . Long live the P.L.O.! . . . Allahu Akbar!" they shouted, as boys scaled the barrier to plant a Palestinian flag on top of the fence.

The tenuous, uneven march toward peace in the Middle East stumbled again last week. Complications at the talks and unmet deadlines were punctuated with more violence, more revenge. Within an hour of the canceled Gaza ceremony, 90 miles away in northern Israel, a 25-year-old Palestinian blew up seven Israelis in a suicide attack in the town of Afula. The killer, a member of the anti-Arafat Islamic movement Hamas, detonated his car bomb alongside an Israeli bus as passengers, many of them teenagers, were boarding. Hamas promised that the attack would be the first of five in retaliation for February's rampage by an Israeli settler at the mosque in Hebron. On Thursday, a Palestinian gunman from the Islamic Jihad group shot an Israeli dead and wounded four others near the southern town of Ashdod. Following a speech in Hebron by the Rev. Jesse Jackson on Friday, the I.D.F. shot eight Palestinians with live and rubber bullets. Hamas warned that it would engulf the occupied territories in "real war" and vowed to turn Israel's independence day, April 14, "into hell." Israel responded by sealing off the occupied territories for one week.

In the six months since Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, political violence in the occupied territories and Israel has claimed the lives of 150 Palestinians and 34 Israelis. Says Yechiel Leiter, spokesman for the Yesha Council, the main lobby group for Israeli settlers in the occupied territories: "This is not going in the direction of peace. Peace is less violence, not more." That is perhaps the only point on which settlers and Palestinians agree. Short of a miracle, the April 13 deadline for Israeli withdrawal from Jericho and the Gaza Strip and commencement of limited Palestinian self-rule will not be met.