This Week Another Peace Effort American team faces historic failures in bringing Israelis, Palestinians to peace. Near Eastern Affairs William Burns. In the most serious attack, two Palestinian gunmen from the West Bank city of Jenin entered Israel just hours after Israeli troops withdrew from Jenin in response to American pressure. The gun- men opened fire on civilians in the north- ern Israeli city of Afula, killing two Israelis and wounding dozens. Later in the day, an Israeli woman was killed in a Palestinian shooting attack on a Gaza road. Israeli soldiers at a nearby post shot and killed the Palestinian gunman, who had opened fire on passing vehicles, wounding two other Israelis. In other violence Monday, Palestinian gun- Demonstrators in Jerusalem protest the visit of U.S. envoys men wounded a foreign worker in an Israeli Anthony Zinni and William Burns. car in the West Bank and fired at workers on the Trans-Israel Highway, which is located MITCHELL DANOW inside Israel but near Palestinian-controlled areas. Jewish Telegraphic Agency Prime Minister Ariel Sharon received news of the Afula attack while he was meeting with Zinni. One New York of the gunmen was from Palestinian Authority he terror attacks that greeted the new leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. U.S. peace team in the Middle Sharon told Zinni that Arafat had estab- East this week pose the ques- lished "a coalition of terror" with Hamas, tion: Can these envoys succeed Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Palestine where their predecessors failed? Liberation Organization, the Palestinian militias and A burst of Palestinian terror accompanied the first the Force 17 presidential guard. full day of work for former U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Following the deadly attacks, Arafat had to engage Anthony Zinni and Assistant Secretary of State for in damage control Wednesday, when he met with T ANAL YSIS Zinni in the West Bank city of Ramallah. While no details of the meeting were immediately available, Arafat reportedly renewed his calls for international observers. After meeting with Arafat, Zinni called for an end to the violence, saying "both sides have suffered far too much." Even before the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, there had been no shortage of envoys — most notably from the United States, but also from the European Union, Russia and elsewhere — who sought to prod Israel and the Palestinian Authority into some semblance of peaceful relations. Failed Missions Earlier this year, a U.S.-led international panel, the Mitchell Commission, set out a series of confidence- building measures to help end Israeli-Palestinian vio- lence. Israeli and Palestinian officials welcomed the initiative, then returned to the bloodletting. Several weeks later, the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, arrived with a blueprint for a cease-fire. Officials from both sides agreed to the truce Tenet drew up, but the words were not followed with meaningful imple- mentation. Now come Zinni and Burns, accompanied by U.S. diplomat Aaron Miller, a veteran member of U.S. Mideast peace efforts. Zinni, who took a helicopter tour of the West Bank with Sharon, told the Israeli premier that he will stay as long as necessary to achieve his task. He hopes to get Israel and the Palestinians to implement the cease-fire steps spelled out by Tenet and the rec- ommendations of the Mitchell Commission. Sharon's office said on Monday that "Israel attach- es supreme importance to achieving a cease-fire." Yet even Sharon's dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, did not get carried away by the envoys' arrival. Arab Think Tank `Use Israeli Arabs to undermine Israel; SIMON CARROLL Jewish Telegraphic Agency London IV ith the Palestinian intifada (uprising) sputtering, a leading Arab think tank is backing an old strategy — to defeat Israel from within by encouraging the growth of its Arab population. The prime proponent of the conquest-by-demog- raphy theory is Wahid Abdel Maguid, chief editor of the Arab Strategic Report, the publication of Egypt's premier think-tank, the Al-Ahram Institute. The institute is part of the group that runs Egypt's semi- official newspaper of record, Al-Ahram. "We are capable of increasing the demographic threat against Israel, if we demonstrate the necessary determination," Maguid declared in a recent interview 11/30 2001 32 with the London-based Al-Hayat Arabic newspaper. Israel's Arab population is estimated at 1.2 mil- lion, compared with 5 million Israeli Jews. However, the Arabs' birthrate is far higher, and Maguid esti- mates that Israel's Arab population will equal the Jewish population in 34 years. Israeli surveys also warn of the dangers the Arab birthrate poses to a Jewish state, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stresses the need to bring as many Jewish immigrants to Israel as possible. Arab Strategy Maguid outlines a five-pronged strategy for making sure the Arab "population bomb" can be accelerated: • Limit or reverse immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. In fact, levels of immigration have fallen sharply from their highs in the early- to mid-1990s. The idea of using demography as a strategy to overpower Israel is being resurrected by a leading Arab think tank. • Bring Arabs living inside Israel's pre-1967 bor- ders into close alignment with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, encourage them to spurn their identity as Israeli citizens and give them deci- sion-making roles in the anti-Israel campaign. This development, which began with the Oslo peace process and has been encouraged by the Palestinian Authority, saw its fullest expression in the Israeli Arab riots that accompanied the outbreak of the Palestinian