BY MARY ANN FRENCH AND ROXANNE ROBERTS | Salaam and shalom. How simply similar. Likewise the guttural consonants punctuating the Hebrew and Arabic patter that puffed around the room last night at the Hotel Washington.

The people looked stunned, as if not yet at ease with this peace they were making. But they were trying mightily. Four hundred and some of them, current and former big shots of Arab American and Jewish American organizations, many of whom were in the same room for the first time. And now, having made it through an electronic security sweep, here they were breaking bread together and raising toasts. Each side brought a folk singer to sing on the little stage in tones haunted by the same sources, evoking romantic glimpses into joined hands and broke into that standard of the American civil rights struggle, “We Shall Overcome.”

There was something nagging, all night, that had to do with context. Or was it content? At any rate, they kept trying to explain it. And it was as if they were sleepwalking, clumsily feeling their way through new terrain: Arabs and Jews at the Hotel Washington, Americans and Israelis at the Israeli Embassy, and Bill Clinton, George Bush, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter at a “presidents” dinner at the White House.

“This is not a cease-fire, this is not an administrative agreement,” Nabeel Shaath, the high-level adviser to Yasser Arafat, called out to those crowded around him at the hotel. “This is not just in the paper … No shenanigans … This is a historical conciliation of two people on the same land.”

It’s a “new existentialism” and the end of Israelis “trading on victimhood,” said Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress. Israelis, he said, are “beginning to see things in terms of human faces …”

Does that mean a separate state for Palestinians may be in the offing? Reporters asked Gad Yaacobi, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

“That was not concluded,” he replied curtly before rushing off to another engagement. On the subject of Jerusalem, he had no problem saying it would stay “under our sovereignty forever.”

Some things are nonnegotiable.

Which comes as no surprise to Fadi, a 14-year-old Palestinian who was at the reception sponsored by the National Association of Arab Americans and the American Jewish Congress. Wearing a tender smile and the bright green T-shirt of Seeds of Peace, the summer camp that took him and 45 other Arab and Israeli boys to Maine for three weeks of sports and “coexistence seminars,” Fadi said that he has made many friends here and has somewhat changed his opinion of Israelis. On the subject of their state, however, he remained unchanged.

“I don’t refuse the existence of Israel,” he said, “but I also don’t accept the existence of Israel without a Palestinian state.”

At the Israeli Embassy reception, the cake was decorated with doves and olive branches, but this was a cautious affair. “There is no euphoria,” said Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich. “We know it’s too complex for euphoria.”

Others had watched the signing of the agreement in dazed amazement.

“I thought my hands would turn to salt if I ever applauded Yasser Arafat,” said Sheldon Cohen, former IRS commissioner. “But I did—and they didn’t.”

Like a lot of Jews, Cohen came to the ceremony with doubts but found it unexpectedly moving. “I was crying,” he said. “A lot of people were.”

“Getting a ticket to the signing was as difficult as getting a ticket to a Bruce Springsteen concert,” laughed Leonard Zakim, director of the Anti-Defamation League in Boston.

“Sometimes in the White House we forget how important certain things are,” said presidential counsel Bernie Nussbaum. “Sometimes we even forget we’re making history. Today, we made history.”

And so to close out a day that will be remembered for the rest of their lives, more than 800 guests, from babies to bent gentlemen with yarmulkes in their white hair, crammed into a stifling white tent to bid farewell to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Peres was immediately mobbed with hugs, congratulations, kisses. Autograph-seekers thrust programs from the signing ceremony, newspapers or ragged scraps of paper into his hands.

“I told him that it was the most special day to come here and shake his hand,” said Susan Volchok, incoming national chairman of Israel Bonds. “We’ve all said, ‘Is it possible in our lifetime?’ And here we are.”

Violinist Isaac Stern stood in line for the telephone to beep his driver and race back to New York. Not staying for the speeches? “I don’t think so,” he confessed. “I’ve hugged both of them.”

Rabin took the podium. In his thick, deep voice he said, “It was not a simple day.”

Then, like a professor conducting a tutorial, he launched into an impassioned explanation of the historic agreement. “People can ask, ‘Do you trust them?’” he said with a shrug in his voice. “We’ll see.”

Rabin emphasized that though terrorism may remain a risk, the real danger comes from the tanks and missiles of surrounding Arab nations. “Whoever believes Palestine can threaten the very existence of Israel—it’s nonsense! Nonsense!”

Peres reiterated the message, in gentler form, while Rabin looked at his watch. They had arrived in Washington in the middle of the night; it was time to fly home and face the Knesset.

“Please don’t get tired,” Peres told the crowd. “You can rest during Rosh Hashanah. Then again we will march together to make the name of the Jewish people fully recognized in modern times.”

Then it was time for cake.

At the White House, Clinton, three of his predecessors and 50 other guests basked in history’s gratifying glow at a dinner in the Blue Room.

At Clinton’s invitation, former presidents Ford, Carter and Bush, with six past and present secretaries of state, raised their Duckhorn Sauvignon Blanc 1991 (Carter and Clinton opted for ice water) to “peace and progress and the prosperity of the American people.”

Clinton’s worn voice was barely audible as he saluted Carter for his contributions at Camp David 14 years earlier, Bush for starting the peace talks in Madrid two years ago and Ford “for his wise leadership during a pivotal time in the history of the Middle East.”

At tables set with the Truman china sat shuttle diplomacy’s founder Henry Kissinger and those who followed him on the Middle East peace path: George Shultz, Cyrus Vance, James Baker, Larry Eagleburger and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

The former presidents and their foreign policy aides, representing “a fairly wide array of views about public events,” Clinton said, would join him today in a “formal kickoff” of his administration’s effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I know that will require great effort and bipartisanship,” said Clinton. “But I believe we will succeed because of the stakes for ourselves economically and politically in this hemisphere.”

At her table, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, wearing a lipstick-red silk dinner suit, carried on an animated conversation with Presidents Ford and Carter. At the president’s table were Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and President Bush. Barbara Bush did not attend because she was not feeling well, a White House spokesman said.

The dinner started nearly an hour late because Clinton, in the Bush tradition of personally conducted tours, began the evening in the family quarters before ushering everybody onto the Truman balcony for a one-of-a-kind view of the Washington monument.

The Carters and Bush took the Clintons up on their offer of bed and breakfast. The White House said it was the first time two former presidents have stayed overnight as guests of an incumbent president.

An appropriate ending to a historic day.