Palestinian Accord: A Tale of Two Towns : Mideast: Arab and Israeli communities live side by side but are divided by West Bank border and views on self-rule.

With the skill of a Middle East peacemaker, Jacob Hadari sat down at his sidewalk cafe between customers arguing the fate of their Jewish town after government troops give Palestinians control of the Arab community next door in the occupied West Bank.

With or without Israeli troops in neighboring Qalqiliya, the people of Kfar Sava are vulnerable to attack, said Benjamin Kachlon, the owner of a one-truck moving company. “Qalqiliya is not 100 kilometers away, it’s next door. If they want to terrorize us, you can’t stop them,” Kachlon shouted.

“No, no, this is the worst thing that could happen to us,” yelled his business rival, Herzl Jan, who believes the soldiers are a protective presence. “Once we pull out, they are going to hit us and we can’t do anything about it.”

“You see,” owner Hadari said. “This is us. Split in the streets.”

The streets of Kfar Sava--nicely paved, trimmed with pansies and sporting a Miami-pink shopping mall and girls on in-line skates--look a lot more like Middle America than a potential flash point in the Middle East. Sitting beside the West Bank border, Kfar Sava is just two miles from downtown Qalqiliya but light-years from its rutted streets and donkey carts.

Under the second phase of the 1993 peace agreement that Israeli and Palestinian leaders hope to sign soon in Washington, Qalqiliya will be one of the first northern West Bank towns from which Israeli troops will pull out before the end of the year and turn over to Palestinian authorities.

For Israelis, the primary concern is security. Many of Kfar Sava’s 80,000 residents fear that Islamic fundamentalists will use Palestinian-run Qalqiliya as a launch pad for terrorist attacks against Israel.

Five minutes away in Qalqiliya, Palestinians also debate the self-rule agreement still under negotiation. They welcome the end of the Israeli occupation but wonder whether this agreement will give them even a fraction of the freedom and independence they seek. Israeli troops will move out of town but will likely retain control of roads, villages and the countryside.

“I would like to see the Israeli occupying force leave,” businessman Abud Daoud, 35, said in the Qalqiliya Chamber of Commerce office. “But what is proposed now is just occupation with another face.”

Many of the Israelis who oppose handing the Palestinians land that was captured from Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967 see Qalqiliya as the line in the sand. To give back Qalqiliya, they say, is to return to the old 1967 border--an unacceptable solution to opposition Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu and the tens of thousands of Israelis who joined him for a recent protest in Kfar Sava.

Even Mayor Yitzhak Wald, a member of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party and an enthusiastic supporter of the peace accords, recommends moving the border to the east, farther away from his town.

“I think that Qalqiliya should be in Israel and not in Palestinian territory,” Wald said.

Rabin is contemplating a government proposal to build a fence between the two towns and along other parts of the so-called Green Line that marks the territory captured in 1967. His critics say that would be a fatal first step toward recognizing an official border and, eventually, a Palestinian state.

A border of fear and distrust already exists between the cheek-to-cheek towns. Some Israelis would like to go to the less-expensive dentists or to shop on the Jewish Sabbath in Qalqiliya, as they did before the seven-year Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule, began in 1987. But they are afraid to enter the Arab town.

Palestinians would like to work and shop in Kfar Sava without having to secure a permit to enter Israel and having to cross through a military checkpoint. To obtain a permit, men must be older than 30, married, have children and have no jail record--and even then permission might be denied. Daoud, the businessman, has not been allowed into neighboring Kfar Sava in 15 years.

Nonetheless, the border towns are economically linked. Nearly every Arab family in Qalqiliya has a relative working on the other side. Many Kfar Sava business people depend on the labor of these estimated 2,000 Qalqiliyans who have permits to work in Israel. But many workers say they are mistreated, and bosses regard the Arabs as spies behind enemy lines, capable of passing intelligence about their town to terrorists and criminals in Qalqiliya.

Some Kfar Sava residents want to see this tortured relationship improved. “If an Israeli sees an Arab sitting next to him, he’s worried,” said Uri Paz, the owner of a music shop in Kfar Sava. “There is a border between us. But it can change.”

Palestinians worry that once a new peace agreement is signed their movements will be restricted even further, just as the residents of the Gaza Strip often have been shut in since that area came under Palestinian rule in May, 1994. Israeli officials have sealed off Gaza in response to terrorist attacks on Jews.

Despite their obvious anger at Israeli rule, Palestinians dismiss Kfar Sava’s suggestion that Qalqiliya will serve as a terrorist base. The new Palestinian police force won’t allow that to happen, they say, because the future of the peace process--and a future Palestinian state--will depend on this control.

Israelis recall that the young suicide bomber Saleh Abdel Rahim Souwi, who blew up himself and 22 others on a Tel Aviv bus last October, was from Qalqiliya. Some residents respond that such fanatics might come from any town, that Souwi did not have Qalqiliya’s official sanction or its support.

Yet after the fact, others admire Souwi as a martyr to the cause of a Palestinian state. Grocer Asmahan Basha, 48, keeps a photograph of Souwi, along with those of her four children and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Two of Basha’s sons are among the 230 Arabs from the Qalqiliya area serving time in Israeli jails for what Palestinians consider resistance to Israeli occupation and what Israelis call terrorism.

One of Basha’s sons was sentenced to four years for throwing rocks at soldiers, and another had been hauled away from home 23 days earlier without explanation. A third son is home helping in the grocery, having once been saved by Israeli soldiers from the hands of angry Jewish settlers.

“The Israelis are afraid of the breath we breathe,” Basha said while pouring strong Arab coffee for visitors. “But we are in a peace phase now. If the Israelis do everything they are supposed to do--deploy troops, hold elections, release our prisoners and bring the Palestinian police here--they have nothing to be afraid of.”

Lowering her voice, she added: “You know, it’s not only that they [Israelis] don’t trust us. We don’t trust them, either.”

Around the corner in Qalqiliya’s municipal headquarters, there are three photographs of the border town hanging on the wall: One from 1942, when Qalqiliya was a small village in Palestine; another from 1962, when the enlarged town belonged to Jordan, and a third from 1992 of an even larger Qalqiliya in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. There is room for a fourth, officials say--Qalqiliya in 1996, under Palestinian rule.

Most Qalqiliya residents agree that having a home-grown Palestinian police force will be better than facing armed Israeli soldiers in the streets. But whether Arafat’s Palestinian Authority can improve their lives in other respects is an open question to many.

Basha, who has admired Arafat since she was 12, now expects him to ensure that streets are paved and garbage is collected.

“It depends how committed they are to the people, if they want to improve schools and the economic situation of people here,” said Mustafa Nazal, who runs his family’s grocery store near Basha’s. “What we hear from Gaza is that it’s not much better. I don’t see why it should be any different here.”

It also remains to be seen whether Arafat’s municipal authorities can resume relations with the mayor of Kfar Sava. The two towns worked together to solve local garbage and mosquito problems before the intifada.

Mayor Wald thinks they can work together again. “We should have good relations because we have no other choice and they have no other choice but to find a way,” he said.

Back at Jacob Hadari’s cafe, however, his cappuccino-sipping customers were unable to agree whether the peace accord will bring peace or more terror. And Hadari, recently returned after several years in Los Angeles, found the whole debate lacking a sense of proportion.

“Terrorism?” Hadari said with a shrug. “I was robbed three times at the store where I worked in West L.A.--by 15-year-olds with guns. I lived through the riots. For me, it’s safe here.”