Styles As
Rabin Marches On
Fashionable
As They y
Are Adorable,
Bus bombing doesn't knock prime minister off his
path to peace, but his voters aren't so sure.
ERIC SILVER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
itzhak Rabin is deter-
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Next time you feed your face, think about your heat
124
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"V American Heart Association
WE'RE FIGHTING FOR YOUR LIFE
mined not to let the Is-
lamic fanatics blow him
off course. The Israeli
prime minister believes that he
has created a historic opportu-
nity to solve, once and for all, the
century-long conflict with the
Palestinians.
"We will solve it," he insisted
on Monday after a suicide
bomber killed five Israelis and
wounded 33 others, three criti-
cally, on a crowded Tel Aviv bus.
"If not tomorrow, then the day
after tomorrow."
Yet every blow of this kind
makes his — and Yassir Arafat's
— task more intractable. Mr.
Rabin was elected three years
ago on a platform of "peace with
security." His voters are less and
less convinced that he is deliv-
ering. And the more insecure
they feel, the more they turn to
the right-wing opposition and its
telegenic, 46-year-old leader,
Binyamin Netanyahu.
Mr. Rabin stressed that he
was suspending the peace nego-
tiations only until after the fu-
nerals of the bus victims. Israeli
Jews are normally buried with-
in 24 hours of their death. But
Mina Zemach, Israel's leading
political pollster, suspects that
the public will not be so easily
appeased.
"My impression," she said, "is
that the public will demand a
longer suspension until Arafat
shows them that he can control
the situation. There is a real fear
now. It's not ideology. And this
bombing will definitely increase
that fear."
Even before the latest Pales-
tinian martyr blew himself up
on the No. 20 bus, Israelis were
worried about the army's rede-
ployment from West Bank Arab
towns that was supposed to have
been agreed upon by July 25. In
a poll earlier this month, Ms.
Zemach logged 64 percent as be-
ing afraid that such an evacua-
tion would increase the danger
to their personal security and
that of their families.
In the best tradition of the
army that he once commanded,
Mr. Rabin believes in leading
from the front. But he is at once
dogged and cautious. He will
persevere with the peace
process, but he will not run
so far ahead of public opinion
that he loses touch with his
troops.
The cause is not yet lost. De-
spite their anxieties, between 50
and 60 percent of Israelis want
the process to continue. "They
don't want it to stop," explained
Ms. Zemach, "but they demand
that Arafat control the terror-
ists."
Israelis have been ambivalent
from the start. "My mind," con-
fessed Daniel Stolpert, a
Jerusalem psychologist, "was ex-
tremely suspicious about the
peace process. But at the same
time I shared in the universal
exhaustion with war and the
messianic dream of peace. I was
politically identified with the
right, but emotionally hopeful
that I was wrong.
'When my heart and mind ar-
gue, I like my mind to win. But
that doesn't mean my heart
doesn't cry. I have become less
and less hopeful and fantasize
less and less about the dream of
peace."
On the left, Daniella Birgar,
a 31-year-old waitress in a
Jerusalem coffee bar, said she
was for the peace, and remained
so. "But it's harder," she agreed,
"to be for it, the more time pass-
es. It's easier for the opponents
of the process to say, We told
you so."'
Most commentators argue,
however, that it is too late to
turn back. "The response to all
the crises in the peace process,"
said Yaron Ezrahi, a political
science professor at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, "sug-
gests that nobody has the pow-
er to stop the process. When you
have a major terrorist action, the
only available remedy seems
to be to continue the peace
process — and progressively
marginalize the extremists. The
vitality of the peace process
seems stronger than these dis-
ruptive forces. But that does not
mean that the peace process can-
not be frozen from time to time,
or that it cannot go into serious
crises."
Despite Mr. Rabin's tenacity,
this may prove one of those
crises. Even if the negotiations
resume sooner rather than
later, he can be expected to dri-
ve a harder bargain. More than
ever, he will have to satisfy
Israeli voters that he is not
cutting corners with their secu-
rity, whether they live in West
Bank settlements or in Israel-
proper.
The prime minister is more
sensitive to the mood of
the street than his visionary
foreign minister, Shimon Peres.
If he misjudges, the risk is,
as the pollster Mina Zemach put
it: "Lamas will decide who will
be Israel's prime minister." ❑