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ne year after he won the
election, Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin still suffers
from the success of his
campaign.
His triumph of June 23, 1992,
was dubbed an "upheaval," a
promise of a "new order of na-
tional priorities." In the last
three months, his government
has begun to deliver on that
promise. But because expecta-
tions raised during the cam-
paign were so high, what has
been achieved has failed to sat-
isfy the Israeli public.
The turning point in the gov-
ernment's performance came on
March 31, when, after an un-
precedented wave of terror, it
barred the 120,000 Palestinian
laborers who worked across the
Green Line from entering Israel.
Since then, about a third of
the workers have been allowed
back, but the closure has been a
two-fold success: terror attacks
have slowed to a trickle, and,

Rabin created such
high expectations
during his
campaign that it's
been near
impossible to
satisfy Israeli vote

with Israelis taking the jobs of
many Palestinians, a serious
dent in unemployment (now
10.6 percent) has been made for
the first time in many years.
These were two of the three
major planks of the Rabin cam-
paign: stopping terror and cre-
ating jobs. (The third was
making peace, which we'll get to
later.) Objectively, the govern-
ment deserves high marks on
these issues. But in general, it
gets skepticism instead.
Ze'ev Rapp's daughter, Hele-
na, was murdered by a Hamas
terrorist near Tel Aviv one
month before the election. The
murder came to symbolize the
Labor Party's campaign for "per-
sonal security," and Mr. Rapp
became a populist hero, speak-
ing out in the name of terror vic-
tims.
He acknowledges that the clo-
sure has made Israel a safer
place — "obviously it has, peo-
ple can feel it, even a blind man
can see it," he said — but he is
still not ready to say the Rabin
government has done a better

Rabin:
A victim of his own image-making?

job on this score than its prede-
cessor, the Likud government of
Yitzhak Shamir.
Mr. Rapp blames the govern-
ment for not acting sooner, and
for not taking a whole slew of
even tougher actions — like cap-
ital punishment for terrorists
and hard labor for all security
prisoners — to clamp down
tighter on the intifada. Besides,
he added, the closure of the ter-
ritories is only a temporary so-
lution.
Asked to choose between the
Rabin and Shamir governments,
Mr. Rapp said he can't. "It's like
choosing whether you want to
see your mother killed or your
father killed," was the way he
put it.
Mr. Rabin's victory came
mainly through attracting two
new voting groups to Labor - the
Russian immigrants, who were
voting here for the first time, and
a large number of the Sephar-
di poor, who had always gone for
the Likud. He promised them
jobs and more government aid,
and here again, progress is be-
ing made.
Polls show that immigrant
unemployment is going down
(chiefly, though, because the
longer they're here, the better
chance they have of finding
work). And government money
for slum improvement and child
welfare has risen dramatically.
Still, Mr. Rabin gets little or no
credit.
Yuli Kosharovsky headed the
Soviet immigrant-oriented and
ill-fated "Da" party in last year's
elections, and now is an aliyah
consultant for the Jewish
Agency. He said most of the im-
migrants' new jobs are only part-
time and well below their
qualifications.
The Russians, he maintained,
are resentful that the U.S. loan

RABIN page 12

