Hanging by a thread: Middle East peace stays alive - barely.

JERUSALEM--How do you heal a wound that has bled for a thousand years?

It's not easy. And in the case of the Middle East, it may well be impossible. The immense difficulties of making peace in the Middle East were never more apparent than in last month's meetings of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat.

Albright lectured Netanyahu and Arafat as if they were naughty schoolboys. She told the leaders that she was "sick and tired" of each one "giving me a pile of complaints about the other guy....There is far too much at stake for this to go on."

The complaining is over the provisions of the 1995 Israel-PLO peace accords. The accords grant Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands, taken by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict. (See map on page 2.)

The agreement calls for Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank, but it does not specify how much of the West Bank would go to the--Palestinians. That was left for later negotiations. It is those negotiations that are now at a standstill.

Today, the Palestinians partially control more than 27 percent of the West Bank. They say they want control of 90 percent of the West Bank before signing a final peace treaty.

Israel, however, wants to give the PLO full control of only about 10 percent of the West Bank. Israeli cites security considerations--the need to protect Jewish settlers in the West Bank from terrorist attacks--in its refusal to pull its troops out of most areas of the West Bank.

Both sides look to history to support their West Bank claims.

More than 3,000 years ago, the land ancient homeland of the Jews, the land of the Bible. Two thousand years ago, that land, called Judea, was conquered by the Romans, who changed its name to Palestine. Following the Roman conquest, Jews began to leave Palestine for other parts of the world.

After the Arabs conquered Palestine in A.D. 636, the area became more of an Arab land. Arab families farmed the land and traded in the cities. The Arabic language and the religion of Islam predominated. Beginning about 100 years ago, however, Jews from Europe began coming back to Palestine. Conflicts over the land developed between Jews and Arabs. Generations of families grew up with hatred and resentments.

After World War II (1939-1945), Jews who had survived Adolf Hitler's death camps (see pages 2a-2d) flooded Palestine with new immigrants.

The Creation of Israel

In 1947, the United Nations set up a plan to divide Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. Jews accepted this plan. But many Palestinians rejected it and left to live in Arab countries. On May 14, 1948, the nation of Israel was created--and was immediately attacked by a number of Arab nations, including Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Israel fought a total of four wars with Arab nations--in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The PLO, created in 1964, joined in the wars against Israel by mounting terrorist attacks against Jews. Today, the PLO has officially renounced terrorism.

Many Israelis oppose the peace accords with the Palestinians because they think the West Bank should remain part of Israel. More than 140,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank among more than 1 million Arabs. Many settlers consider the West Bank part of Israel's ancient homeland--never to be given up.

Many Palestinians also believe that the West Bank is their homeland and charge that Prime Minister Netanyahu has no intention of ever granting the Palestinians control of the West Bank. They point to the Israeli government's support of Jewish settlements on the West Bank--more than 50,000 new settlers are expected by 2008. These frustrations have boiled over into Palestinian riots in recent months.

After her meeting last month, Secretary Albright announced that further talks to break the stalemate would take place this week in Washington, D.C.

Will these talks succeed, when so many others have failed?

As one observer said, "No one knows, but while there's talk, there's hope."

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HANGING BY A THREAD...

BACKGROUND

Many scholars believe that the Jewish people first settled in Canaan--the land now known as Israel--between 1900 B.C. and 1700 B.C. Some of these early Jews also went to Egypt. In the 1200s B.C., Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and they returned to retake Canaan from other peoples who had settled there.

Here are fuller explanations of some important terms used in the article:

* PLO--The Palestine Liberation Organization now claims to represent more than 6 million Palestinians. For years, the PLO, under Yasir Arafat, waged a war of terrorism to establish a Palestinian nation in the Middle East. Arafat and the PLO are now considered by more militant groups, such as Hamas, as "selling out" to Israel in the peace accords.

* Middle East--Term used for lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, reaching to Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Middle East includes sections of northern Africa, southwestern Asia, and southeastern Europe. Among the major countries commonly regarded as in the Middle East are Egypt, Iran, Iraw, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey.

* Camp David Accords--The name of the agreement between Israel and Egypt reached at Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland, in 1978. The accords resulted in the return of the Sinai to Egypt and a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

RELATED ARTICLE: SIDE LIGHTS

* For more than 200 years (1000s to 1200s) the area now occupied by Israel was the scene of a series of religious wars called the Crusades. The Crusades were attempts by European Christians to recapture the Holy Land from Muslims. The painting at right shows an imagined scene from the Third Crusade (1187) in which England's King Richard the Lion-Hearted (left) battles Saladin, the Muslim ruler of Jerusalem and surrounding land.

* Jericho, on the West Bank, may be the world's oldest still-inhabited city. Archaeologists believe that people have been living in Jericho for at least 10,000 years. The Bible tells the story of how Joshua's army surrounded Jericho and caused the city's walls to fall down at the blast of a trumpet.

* All of the territories occupied by Israel today were captured by the Israelis during the Six-Day War of 1967. For Israelis, perhaps the most emotional moment of that war was the capture of East Jerusalem and the Western Wall (right, behind soldiers)--the remains of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. East Jerusalem is also a sacred site to Muslims and Christians and is one of the world's great centers of pilgrimage.