The peace push is also being helped by renewed U.S. pressure on Israel to moderate its policies toward Palestinians, outspoken criticism of Sharon's policies by current and former high-ranking Israeli security officials, and rising impatience among people on both sides with leaders who, after three years of bloodshed, have made no headway toward resolving the conflict.
"These agreements are flourishing because people, I think, are sick of [the situation]; they're ready for a change," Elisheva Leibler, 32, an American who moved to Israel two years ago, said while tending to her two children at a Jerusalem mall. "Too much blood has been shed, and there is a sense that we're stuck in a quagmire."
Fahed Abu Elhaj, left, a Palestinian coordinator of the People's Voice petition drive in the West Bank, seeks support from a dubious Nasir Zaydan in the town of Rantis.
(John Ward Anderson -- The Washington Post)
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"For the first time in Palestinian history, an initiative is coming up from the street instead of being imposed on the people from above," said Abu Elhaj, one of the top coordinators for the People's Voice in the West Bank. "We want to convince people to be involved in determining their future."
Yossi Beilin, the senior Israeli negotiator on the Geneva Accord and an architect of the 1993 Oslo peace agreements, said that immediate, scathing attacks against him and his new plan by Sharon's government and its allies provided unexpected publicity and legitimacy.
"They became our best PR people," he said. The publicity bonanza continued last week when Israel's High Court ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to lift a ban on airing commercials on state radio about the People's Voice petition drive and the Geneva Accord, so named because of the Swiss government's active promotion of the negotiations.
On the Palestinian side, radical groups including Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, staged a rally in Gaza City last week that drew thousands of protesters to denounce the Palestinian negotiators of the Geneva Accord as traitors for giving up the right of return.
In a documentary aired last week on Israeli television, the top Palestinian negotiator on the Geneva Accord, former cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, was asked if he was not betraying a Palestinian dream.
"I am not, as a leader and as a politician, responsible for dreams," he replied. "I am responsible that the dreams shall not become nightmares."
Here in Rantis, about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, workers for the People's Voice campaign said they are engaged in more than simply gathering signatures. They said they see their mission as educating and lobbying the public to change its ways, which often means spending hours in debate to gather a few signatures.
A suicide bomber who killed nine Israeli soldiers at a bus stop outside Tel Aviv 10 weeks ago hailed from this town of 3,100 Palestinians. After the Palestinian uprising began about three years ago, most Rantis residents who worked in Israel lost their jobs. The main entrance to town was barricaded by the Israeli army, and the only way in and out is by a dirt road.
Unemployment is at about 70 percent, town officials say. There is no telephone service. More than half the homes have no running water. And last week, Israeli bulldozers and dump trucks arrived to begin work on the barrier system that Israel is building around the West Bank. People here said it will carve off much of their agricultural land.
"We spend two or three hours arguing with someone that there's a possibility for peace, and the same person has to go to the doctor and tries to leave the village and is stopped by the Israeli military and changes his mind, and we have to start all over," said Balut, the top People's Voice official in Rantis. "Getting them to sign is only the beginning of convincing them in the direction of peace."
Special correspondents Samuel Sockol and Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.
