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It is not Yitzhak Shamir's first showdown; and unless some dramatic event occurs in the intervening days, he is likely to emerge with both his personal power and his Palestinian elections proposal intact. The question is, can our ex- tremely cautious, secretive prime minister really lead the way toward a settlement with the Palestinians, or will he soon go the way of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, formidable Israeli leaders who at the end of their careers became victims of historical circumstance? My own feeling is that Shamir is exactly the right man at Israel's helm at the right time, and that he will somehow manage to navigate the torturous waters in which Israel now finds itself. Shamir is definitely vulnerable, and he is under increasing attack from the radical right and even from the moderate right. But don't believe the headlines that Israel is on the verge of civil war — the Jerusalem Post, which is increasingly inac- curate these days, quoted Shamir in a page-one headline this week as warn- ing of a "civil war." What he actually was talking about was the vital need for unity at this crossroads, and his im- plied warning was of in- cidents of fraternal fighting, as when a Jewish settler at- tacks a soldier. He wasn't talking about Gettysburg. Those inaccurate headlines and reports, which are often politically motivated and reveal the wishful thinking of some journalists, are part of the reason for the widespread mistrust and outright hatred for the fourth estate in Israel. It would take a book to ex- plicate the psychological fac- tors and the political game- playing behind such jour- nalism. But as Yosef Ben- Aharon, the director-general of the prime minister's office, told me this week: "They [sen- sationalist, politically- motivated journalists] are our worst enemy." One example of tenden- cy to misreport events was last week's funeral of slain settler Freddy Rosenfeld, in which dozens of settlers engaged in a disgusting ver- bal assault against the prime minister while he addressed the mourners, and later rock- ed his car. This was widely described as a "spontaneous" action, and thus indicative of a total right-wing revolt against the Shamir-led national unity government, when it was ob- vious to more objective to more objective journalists that the incident was pre- planned, organized by the hoodlum elements among the settlers to whip up anti-Arab hysteria. "Kahane's people came with that intention," ac- cording to Ben-Aharon. But this fact was ignored, while the media, dominated by Labor-left people, had another field day. "They will exploit any action, as with the settlers," says Ben-Aharon. "These are people who will do anything to say that our moral fiber is being destroyed." Ben-Aharon, often describ- ed as the eminence grise of the Shamir government, has himself been the frequent target of vicious attacks in the press, as in Uri Porat's ar- ticle in Yediot last weekend which claimed that Ben- Aharon has now aggrandized his powers, allegedly taking on the role of chief govern- ment spokesman in addition to heading the prime minister's bureau. But Ben- Aharon, like his boss, has learned to live with the cons- tant, petty smears, to disregard what Nietzsche called "the flies in the marketplace." The current challenge to Shamir within the Likud is a joint venture by the leaders of the three other party camps: Ariel Sharon, David Levy (known as "the peacock of Beit She'an," his hometown) and Yitzhak Modal, leader of the Liberal faction. All three are government ministers. They are all ambitious men who each believes that he should lead the nation. Their intramural intrigues and political soap operas are familiar and by now quite boring to most Israelis. They say that they are not trying to get the Likud Cen- tral Committee to vote down the government peace in- itiative, but to amend it — which amounts to the same thing.