UNIVERSAL GENEVE

them out to bring the "squatters"
out of the buildings.
Far from being new, the dy-
namic by which diehards at both
ends of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict serve each other's pur-
poses has been remarked upon
for well over a decade. Mr. Rabin
may have gone overboard in
charging last week that Hamas
and Israel's radical right are
bound together in a "circle of col-
lusion." But the gist of his analy-
sis was compelling: Hamas has
mastered the art of pushing the
settlers' buttons, whose response
to provocations has become pre-
dictable.
What does seem to have
changed in the past few weeks,
together with the broader cir-
cumstances in the territories, is
the immediate object of the set-
tlers' anger. Palestinians are now
doing precisely what they were
expected to do under conditions
of self-rule: Pouring their ener-
gies into their own affairs. Frus-
trated by that development,
settlers have turned their rage
on the target closest at hand,
which, in the territories, means
the army. When Major-General
Ilan Biran, head of the IDFs Cen-
tral Command, emerged from a
meeting with Kiryat Arba lead-
ers just after the recent terror in-
cident, he was practically mauled
by a crowd shouting "Traitor!"
and "Murderer!" Others reviled
soldiers protecting him as
"Arafat's army."
That wasn't the worst of the
calumny. Two days earlier, set-
tlers blocking the Jerusalem-Jeri-
cho road (on the day of Mr.
Arafat's visit) had shrieked
"Gestapo!" at soldiers trying to

Yitzhak Rabin's
problem became one
of balancing his own
need for public
support against that
of Mr. Arafat.

move them away. Such language
did not debut last week: Protest-
ers have been branding Mr. Ra-
bin with similar epithets for
months. But when leveled at the
army, such attacks shocked
mainstream Israelis, who read
them as assaults not just on a
particular policy or a national
leader, but on their sons and
daughters and themselves.
Nor was the damaging effect
of the outbursts lost on the lead-
ers of the settlement movement
itself. Yisrael Harel, chairman of
the Council of Jewish Communi-
ties in Judea, Samaria and Gaza
("Yesha"), apologized to Gener-
al Biran "in the name of the ab-
solute majority of the residents
of Yesha."
While leaders of the settlement

movement understand they have
a tenuous hold over their con-
stituents, the consequences of
this realization are slowly setting
in. For example, Zvi Katzover,
head of the Kiryat Arba Local
Council, told IDF officers sent to
evacuate the protester-squatters
that if they persisted in their mis-
sion, it might end in bloodshed.
Mr. Katzover, who considers him-
self a moderate, issued the warn-
ing to avert a clash. But the
problem with relaying such
threats is that once they are vo-
calized, they leave the realm of
the "unspeakable" and enter the
zone of the conceivable, the pos-
sible, even (in some eyes) the le-
gitimate.
Mr. Katzover should know, for
one of his public forecasts of may-
hem if the government did not
yield to settlers' demands turned
out to be a self-fulfilling prophe-
cy. Last autumn, he warned on
the prime-time news that if
Palestinian terrorism did not
abate, he wouldn't be surprised
if some settler "who could no
longer contain himself' picked up
a gun and "cut down" dozens of
Arabs. By February, that settler
had a name — Dr. Baruch Gold-
stein. ❑

Porush Loses
Knesset Seat

Jerusalem (JTA) — The luck of
the draw cost longtime member
Menachem Porush his Knesset
seat this week.
Mr. Porush, 78, has sat in the
Knesset for 39 years as a repre-
sentative of Agudat Yisrael,
which along with another fer-
vently Orthodox party, Degel Ha-
Torah, comprises the United
Torah Judaism bloc.
A ruling by the Council of
Torah Sages, the supreme coun-
cil of UTJ, ousted Mr. Porush
from the Knesset, but left the
equally colorful Avraham Shapi-
ra, also a member of Agudah, still
in the Knesset.
In the summer of 1992, when
the current Knesset was elected
and the UTJ bloc was formed, it
was agreed that one of the two
Agudah members would resign
after sitting for two years to per-
mit Avraham Verdiger, who re-
mained waiting in the wings, to
take his place.
But when the time came, nei-
ther Mr. Porush nor Mr. Shapi-
ra wanted to yield his seat. The
rabbis who comprise the Council
of Sages decreed that lots should
be drawn.
Mr. Porush took the result of
the draw with equanimity, say-
ing that he had many other pub-
lic duties to perform.
Commenting on his winning
the draw, Mr. Shapira said: "It
was apparently divine will that I
should continue."

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