Powell ends Middle East tour

By Ramit Plushnick-Masti

JERUSALEM (Reuters): Hours after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell left the Middle East, Israel and the Palestinians were already disagreeing over the agreement he nailed down.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat agreed at separate talks with Powell on Thursday to seven days of quiet ahead of a cooling-off period under a U.S.- brokered truce to end nine months of violence.

But when does seven days of quiet begin -- and what is quiet?

Palestinians said the countdown began on Friday, but Israel said mortar bombs fired at Jewish settlements in Gaza earlier in the day meant the clock was not yet ticking.

Since Powell did not define when the seven-day period begins and what constitutes "quiet", the warring sides were left to fight it out between them.

A senior U.S. State Department official said a "shooting or a bombing" would bring both sides back to the starting line.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said he was puzzled. "I don't know (what quiet means)," he told Reuters.

"We are not going to play this game with them. The Israelis will have an opportunity to play all the games now," he added. "The United States is responsible for putting an end to this stupid game and therefore they have to interfere."

But after months of disputes on nearly every issue, and with both sides saying that a June 13 ceasefire brokered by U.S. CIA Director George Tenet is not working, consensus on the seven-day testing period will be hard to achieve.

"To leave the sides to decide is a very strange move because the CIA and the United States are supposed to be the mediators," said political scientist Reuven Hazan of Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

"I don't understand the whole Powell dance," Hazan told Reuters. "There is no American policy. They still do not know what to do with the Middle East."

Hazan noted that even when Israel controlled all of the West Bank and Gaza -- parts of which it transferred to Palestinian rule under a 1993 interim peace deal -- there was violence.

One or two "crazy terrorists" could cause the truce to break down, he said. "Maybe they wanted to leave it to the sides to decide what is a quiet day because it is not possible to reach total quiet," Hazan added.

But Dore Gold, Sharon's adviser, said Israel would settle for nothing less then a complete end to violence.

"Clearly, when you talk about a ceasefire it's hard to imagine a ceasefire that includes mortar attacks against Israeli communities and settlements," Gold told Reuters.

Despite an apparent rift between Sharon and U.S. President George W. Bush during White House talks on Tuesday, Israeli political commentator Nahum Barnea said the United States was not interested in long-term rows with Israel.

Barnea said the disagreement -- which surfaced at a news conference ahead of an Oval Office meeting -- was planned by the Bush administration to send a message to Arab countries that the president was not controlled by Israeli policy.

"The implementation was tactless, inexperienced, almost pathetic. A fight between a president and the head of a foreign state that is visiting him in his office is not acceptable," Barnea wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

Two days later, after Powell's talks with Sharon and Arafat, it seemed Israel and the United States had ironed out whatever differences had come up at the White House.

Powell agreed to Sharon's demand for a total end to violence and after handing the Palestinians a carrot -- an agreement to bring observers to oversee the truce -- he swiftly took it back.

"There's a learning curve here and they are at the beginning," Hazan said, adding that Bush already knew he could not stay out of the Middle East mire.

"We are a thorn in his (Bush's) side. A thorn he wanted to ignore and he learned he couldn't. Now he just needs to know how to deal with this thorn," Hazan said.