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David Horovitz: Happy ï¿½Hudnaï¿½?

We haven't seen the center of Jerusalem like this for, well, almost three years: Stores on and around the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall with lines at the cash registers, tables laid out and occupied all over the lawn at the downtown oasis that is the Anna Ticho House restaurant, security guards everywhere waving people past with only the most lackadaisical inspection of their bags and their waistlines.

A new peace group, "ImaginePeace," sent me a T-shirt the other day with a yellow smiley face and the inscription "Happy Hudna." And, yes, in its first month or so, several appalling fatalities notwithstanding, it has been a very happy hudna. It has been a magnificent relief to travel and stroll and shop and eat outside without perpetually looking over our shoulders for the next lurking bomber. We have jumped at the opportunity. And Jews overseas are preparing to follow suit, booking fall and winter holidays, with north American Jewish leaders registering by the thousand for Novemberï¿½s General Assembly in Jerusalem.

But will it hold? Is this the beginning of the long-delayed era of tranquillity, or, Yogi, is it that Oslo dï¿½jï¿½ vu all over again? The heart, of course, says the former; the head, bludgeoned into pessimism by bloody experience, tends to the latter. And the experts, as ever, can offer nothing definitive. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Chief of Staff Moshe Yaï¿½alon, Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter and their hierarchies are united only in their ambivalence: The cease-fire may hold beyond the three months declared by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah. And it could explode at any moment into a wave of attacks as ferocious as those we have endured since fall 2000, requiring a counteroffensive by the army that will smash the Palestinian Authority once and for all. Mahmud Abbas is only waiting for sufficient Palestinian public support to begin arresting the bombers, closing down the explosive factories, preventing the arms smuggling through the tunnels at the Egyptian-Gaza border, and thwarting the Qassam rocket improvements that are bringing Ashkelon into range from Gaza and pretty much everywhere into range from the West Bank. Or he lacks the courage to ever make such a move, and clings instead to the ridiculous notion that Hamas will quietly metamorphose into anti-Hamas, cowed into the radical reform of its maximalist ideology by the shattering realization of the damage it has done to its people through the mass murder of ours.

That Israeli ambivalence, in turn, stems from Abbasï¿½s own ambivalence and weakness. He pledges to end the armed intifada, but wants Israel to release jailed Palestinian killers who would pull out their guns on their first day outside. He sorrowfully acknowledges Israeli suffering and professes support for genuine coexistence, but he refrains from publicly retracting his Holocaust-minimizing doctoral thesis, and chooses not to exploit the recent Khalil Shikaki-run public opinion survey, which suggests most Palestinian refugees do not seek a return to Israel, to reassure Israel that this most intractable of issues can be resolved without destroying our Jewish majority. Is he still too weak to prevent the gathering of Palestinian youngsters at PA-run (and U.N.-funded) summer camps named after suicide bombers, and to initiate the rewriting of incendiary textbooks and an end to the delegitimization of Israel (and sometimes Judaism) in PA-controlled media? Or, like Yasser Arafat in the Oslo era, is he content to keep the anti-Israeli hostility on low flame?

To some extent, the ambivalence and skepticism cut both ways. There are potent questions to put to our own Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Why, just now, does the government issue calls for bids to build a couple of dozen homes at a Gaza settlement, Neveh Dekalim, where even the residents acknowledge that "natural growth" will not fill the new buildings? Why, for all his promises in that endearingly bumbling speech on the White House lawn on July 29, are there as many illegal outposts going up as coming down in the West Bank -- "settlements of the future," to quote a spokesman for the umbrella Council of Jewish Settlements? And why was the security barrier rerouted from its original path, roughly along the 1967 border, to cut deep into the West Bank, almost doubling back on itself to encompass favored settlements, prompting Palestinian and American dismay at an apparent land grab and, most pertinently, utterly undermining the expensive obstacleï¿½s very purpose: Every deviation into the West Bank brings more of the very Palestinians it was designed to exclude onto what is meant to be the safe side of the fencing.

Israel should not free those Palestinian prisoners who are bound to abuse their release to try again to kill us. It should not withdraw from West Bank areas unless it can be confident that its departure will not be exploited by bombers and gunmen. It should not be pressured to dismantle a security barrier that complicates access to Israel for bombers across the hitherto porous border. But equally, where the opportunity arises for conciliatory moves that improve Palestinian lives and give credibility to those who campaign against violence, it should not be missed. Such prisoners as can be safely released should go free. Withdrawal should be expedited where possible. The fence should be moved back. For our own sake, warily and cautiously, Israel needs to help give Abbas the chance to make a success of the cease-fire, to turn the welcome calm into more than a fleeting glimpse of how life should and could be.

The real test, though, is for him. It seems clear that Abbas, himself, long ago acknowledged that, quite apart from the inhumanity of premeditatedly killing civilians, the armed intifada was counterproductive, stripping the Palestinian Authority of territory Israel had previously relinquished, preventing Palestinians from working in Israel, prompting roadblocks and closures, deterring investors. And chiefly, postponing statehood. But will he confront those enemies for whom such considerations are outweighed by hatred of Israel? And will he survive that confrontation if he orders it?

Not long ago, I chanced to speak with a member of Abbasï¿½s family, who told me that his closest relatives had implored him not to take the job of prime minister, fearing that "nothing good will come of it." I hope they are mistaken. But Iï¿½m not wearing the "Happy Hudna" T-shirt. Not yet.