NO PEACE AT HOME

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS HAS fertilized political and religious causes for thousands of years. So too in the case of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His murder by an anti-Arab Jewish fanatic gave immediate new life to the cause of peace with Israel's Palestinian and Arab neighbors that Rabin had determinedly pushed.

But for how long? And what happens when the horror and revulsion in Israel over the assassination ebb, as such tides of intense emotion inevitably do?

For the moment, that tide has drowned out the most vituperative antipeace zealots. Slogans denouncing Rabin, the Labor Party government and the peace plan have disappeared from Israeli auto bumpers, windows and walls. Some of the most militant Zionist groups hastened to condemn Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, and anyone who applauded his bloody act. The Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza even passed a resolution pledging to "silence those voices."

Such contrition is the more urgent if the radical right is to dissociate itself in the public mind from what Israeli police now say was a murderous conspiracy. Amir insists that he had only one prompter and helper: God. But Police Minister Moshe Shahal asserts, "We believe that a group of people carefully prepared the ground to murder carefully chosen targets," not stopping with Rabin. Besides Yigal Amir, Shahal's cops so far have taken into custody his brother Hagai Amir, who has admitted giving Yigal the homemade, hollowed-out bullets that tore apart Rabin's chest, and six other men. Most, like the Amirs, are in their 20s, army veterans and fervent religious students; one is currently a member of an elite army unit.

Evidence so far is thin. The police did dig up a large cache of explosives--sticks of TNT, detonators and a silencer--buried under a sandbox in a kindergarten run at home by the Amirs' mother (who has tearfully disowned her son Yigal). But none of it was used in the assassination of Rabin, which seemed to be carried out in a haphazard rather than a well-planned fashion. Police have indicated they intend to charge Yigal Amir and one other man with murder; the others could be charged with helping to plan the assassination or knowing about it but not stopping it. Shahal also said the group targeted Palestinians.

The assassination has dealt a terrible, humiliating blow to Shin Bet, the internal-security service supposed to be the best in the world. The head of Shin Bet, known only by his Hebrew initial "Kaf," acknowledged a complete security breakdown as Rabin descended from the podium at the end of the peace rally. Though close to 20 protective agents were present, Rabin was not cocooned within a ring of bodyguards facing in and out, nor was his back adequately shielded. No one had prevented Amir from hanging around the parking area where Rabin's car waited. Although Shin Bet knew Rabin had received death threats, they did not noticeably tighten their procedures at the giant public rally.

Yigal Amir's ideas, if not his plans, were shared widely enough on the far right to amply justify a public backlash. Says Rabbi Sholomo Aviner, head of a religious school in Jerusalem: "The students would ask the question--like they were asking what food should be eaten on the Sabbath--'Is it O.K. under Torah law to kill the Prime Minister?' Everyone was talking violence. There were hundreds like Amir."

The backlash has also thrown the more respectable opponents of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank on the defensive. Rabin's widow Leah has repeatedly accused Likud, the chief opposition party, and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, of tolerating, if not helping to whip up, the climate of violence that felled her husband. Netanyahu, in a telephone interview with TIME, responded with uncharacteristic mildness. "If the left can draw a distinction between moderate and extreme Palestinians," he said, "at least they could do the same for our own people."

Netanyahu added that "we are not going to stop the legitimate and forceful debate" about the peace process. It is a debate, however, that the assassination of Rabin has turned suddenly and sharply against him. Likud and Netanyahu had for months been building up a big lead in public-opinion polls over the Labor government. But the first postassassination poll, published Friday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, showed that Rabin's successor, acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres, would win 54% of the votes if an election were held today; Netanyahu would take only 23%. The poll also indicated that if a new Israeli Knesset were elected now, Labor would win 46 seats and Likud 30. That would be a relatively small change from the lineup in the current Knesset (Labor, 44 seats; Likud, 32) but a very big change from earlier polls, which showed Likud heading for a majority.

While the domestic opponents of Rabin's peace process are muffled if not silenced, its foreign friends are speaking up as never before. More than 80 dignitaries from all over the world flocked to Rabin's funeral and mourned him as a martyr to peace. King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the two countries that have signed peace treaties with Israel, delivered eulogies. Government ministers from Morocco and the Persian Gulf emirates of Oman and Qatar attended too, even though these Arab states have no diplomatic relations with Israel. The generous sprinkling of red-checkered kaffiyehs and flowing Arab robes among the black mourning wear of Jews gave Israelis watching the funeral on TV visual proof of how far Rabin had progressed in ending Israel's isolation from its neighbors.

Yasser Arafat also seized the occasion to visit for the first time the country he had so long preached unrelenting war against. The Israelis refused to invite the Palestine Liberation Organization chief to Rabin's funeral. But an Israeli military helicopter flew him into Tel Aviv Thursday night to pay a condolence call at Leah Rabin's apartment. Arafat told Mrs. Rabin that her husband was a "hero of peace" and a "dear friend." She responded that "Yitzhak saw in you, Mr. Arafat, a partner in making peace." If tact forbade either to mention what both well knew--that Rabin had brought himself only with the utmost reluctance to shake Arafat's hand--well, good manners are not the least important ingredient in peacemaking.

Yet the insistence with which Rabin's mourners proclaimed that the peace process must not be buried alongside him betrayed their fear that eventually it might be. Not soon, certainly. The timetable for the next several months has been set by agreements already signed, and neither side has any reason to alter it--except possibly to speed it up. Thus Peres has already announced that he will finish pulling Israeli troops out of five of the West Bank Palestinian towns by year's end (excluding Hebron, where they must be out by March). That is to be followed by elections Jan. 20 for a new self-governing Palestinian Authority in the no-longer-occupied territories. Arafat is working very hard to get the extremist Hamas movement into switching from suicide bombings to balloting, something he needs badly to shore up his credibility and the authority of the newly elected governing council. But nothing is final. Two months after the voting, Arafat has promised, he will at long last eliminate the provisions in the P.L.O. covenant calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

Then comes the hard part. By next May, Peres must begin negotiating the final settlement with the Palestinians. That will raise all the most explosive questions, such as those about the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Full-fledged Palestinian state? Federation with Jordan? Autonomous entity? And about Jerusalem: United capital of Israel or some sort of divided city? And about the fate of the Jewish settlers in what will be Palestinian territory. And about the right or nonright of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel and reclaim property there.

Moreover, Peres will be racing against a deadline. He needs to have a settlement--or to have made significant progress toward one--that he can sell to Israeli voters in elections that must be held no later than next November. Peres could call the election as early as February, and some supporters want him to do so to take advantage of the postassassination surge in the polls. But knowing that voter sentiment can reverse itself in Israel almost overnight, the acting Prime Minister seems to prefer giving himself the full year to negotiate a peace that will win at the polls.

It is a very big gamble. Though Rabin's martyrdom has given the peace process a boost, says a U.S. Pentagon official, "the question is, will it outlast the next Palestinian car bomb that kills Israelis? Nobody knows." Earlier terrorist attacks that have killed 150 Israelis since the original Rabin-Arafat accord in September 1993 did more than anything else to turn almost half the Israeli public against those accords.

Terrorism or no, the surge of grief for Rabin and emotional support for his cause cannot continue long at its present intensity. When it ebbs, Peres will again have to face the fact that Israel is a nation sharply and closely divided. The Yediot Aharonot poll shows that three-quarters of the public favors the peace process at the moment, but over the long run nearly half have expressed opposition.

Moreover, Israeli politicians generally figure that most voters most of the time are deeply cemented into their positions, leaving only perhaps 4% to 5% of the electorate open to persuasion. It took Rabin, the old war hero, conqueror of the West Bank and tough opponent of the Palestinian intifadeh, to allay even temporarily their deepest fear: that handing much of the land back to the Palestinians was taking unwarranted risks with Israel's security (the contention that it is also surrendering land that God gave to the Jews troubles the fervent far right).

Can Peres win over these doubters? He is one of Israel's most formidably experienced and cunning politicians, a veteran of top posts in past Labor governments and a former Prime Minister (for two years in the 1980s, as part of a national-unity government in which the two parties agreed to rotate the highest office). He has compiled a solid record: building up Israel's arms industry, starting an economic boom while reducing triple-digit inflation. As Rabin's Foreign Minister and acknowledged peace visionary, he did much of the negotiating that resulted in the 1993 accord with the P.L.O., and he shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Arafat.

But Peres has always had a higher reputation abroad than at home, where he has never won an election in three tries. Fairly or unfairly, he is often regarded as a bit soft, a bit too visionary; at best he lacks Rabin's towering credibility on security issues. Within political circles he has a reputation as a slippery manipulator who will make promises in return for support but will not always keep them. Some Palestinians who have negotiated with Peres express doubts about a man they regard as "a master bargainer in the suq." A senior Palestine Authority official describes another concern: "We worry Peres will need to prove to the Israelis he is as tough as Rabin." When Arafat visited Egypt last week, Mubarak felt obliged to warn the P.L.O. leader to suppress any criticisms he might have of Peres, lest he undermine the new Israeli chief and wind up dealing with a Likud government.

On the other hand, Syrian officials have been hinting that they might find Peres easier to deal with than the sometimes flinty Rabin. Should Peres be able to move the stalled peace negotiations with Syria forward, however, it might not do him much good. Peace with Syria could be achieved only by relinquishing Israeli control of the Golan Heights, a move that is massively unpopular in Israel. Peres thinks the opponents will change their mind if they are presented with not a proposal but an actual peace treaty. But there is, to put it mildly, no assurance he is right.

In any case, Peres' ability to make peace internationally depends heavily on whether he can reach some kind of modus vivendi with his enemies at home. "Unless we make peace among ourselves, there will never be peace," said Noa Segal, 11, a Jerusalem schoolgirl.

But how to achieve it? Peres is pursuing two somewhat discordant tracks. His government has a razor-thin margin in the Knesset and at times has survived only with the somewhat embarrassing support of five Israeli Arab members. To give himself breathing room and to counter the charge that he lacks a Jewish majority, Peres is angling to get two religious parties to join the Labor coalition. If he succeeds, he will have to pay a high price in political favors. Even then, most analysts doubt that he can bring them into the coalition; though the religious parties' leaders do not actively oppose the peace accords, many of their followers do.

Simultaneously, however, Peres' government is debating how far to go in cracking down on the far right. Attorney General Michael Ben Yair is consulting legal scholars on whether Jewish extremists can be detained without charges, disarmed, tried in military courts and restricted in their movements; such methods have previously been used only against Palestinians. Ben Yair has even suggested that the Israeli press and television not be allowed to publish or air inflammatory statements by extremists. Some rabbis who suggested that killing Rabin could be justified under Jewish law or who celebrated his death have been picked up for questioning--about what is not entirely clear.

It is not certain that a crackdown would much diminish the danger from the radical right. Some of its members might shut up for a while out of fear of arrest, but the silence would probably only mask a bitterness made greater than ever by being driven underground. In the West Bank settlements where Amir was initially hailed as a hero, most hard-rightists simply refused to talk to visiting journalists. Those who did, though, confirmed that the crackdown had cut any frail links they might have had to a state they already suspected of betrayal.

In the militant settlement of Yizhar near Nablus, Noah Ariel asserts that "whatever connection there is between me and the country is severed. From now on, I will live in the country but not the state. It isn't mine anymore." The grief felt by the majority of Israelis over Rabin's death may have generally healing effects, but for a small minority of embittered rebels--and a much bigger minority that shares some of its worries about the peace process, if not its wild rhetoric or propensity for violence--Israel remains a nation divided.

--Reported by Edward Barnes/ Hebron, Jamil Hamad/West Bank, Scott MacLeod/ Gaza Strip, Johanna McGeary/Jerusalem and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by EDWARD BARNES/HEBRON, JAMIL HAMAD/WEST BANK, SCOTT MACLEOD/GAZA STRIP, JOHANNA MCGEARY/JERUSALEM AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON