THE DETRO IT J EWIS H NEWS
R14
last month to a single mercenary Knesset member, Mr.
Rabin bulldozed on. "A majority of one is still a majori-
ty," he insisted.
Foreign critics accused Mr. Rabin of dictating a hu-
miliating peace to a vulnerable Arafat. But for most Is-
raelis, Israel too was paying a price — not just in territory,
but in personal security. By finely calculating when to ac-
celerate the peace process and when to slow it down (by,
for instance, closing the old Green Line border to work-
ers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or suspending
the dialogue with Syria), Mr. Rabin stopped the prag-
matic center of Israeli public opinion from joining the set-
tler ideologues at the barricades.
His tenacity won Israel a peace treaty with Jordan to
match that Menachem Begin signed with Egypt in 1979.
It banished the kind of isolation that had dogged Israel
in international forums for 47 years. Israeli commen-
tators were quick to notice that when Mr. Rabin ad-
dressed the jubilee General Assembly of the United
Nations last month, no Arab or Third World delegation
walked out (the Syrians and the Libyans were not there
to start with).
King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak
dropped all their inhibitions about coming to Jerusalem
and attended Mr. Rabin's funeral on Mount Herzl.
So did representatives of Morocco, Oman and Qatar,
Arab states with which Israel still does not have formal
relations. Out of tact or prudence, Yassir Arafat
stayed away, but he sent a high-level Palestinian del-
egation.
"If you want my monument," Yitzhak Rabin might have
said, echoing Christopher Wren, the architect of London's
St. Paul's Cathedral, "look around you."
❑
A Party In Power Asks:
What Happens Now?
F
ll rom time to time, since the signing of the
Olso I agreement in Washington 25 months
ago, pundits have nervously wondered what
would become of the peace process if PLO
Chairman Yassir Arafat were to fall victim
to an assassin's bullet or other lethal po-
litical violence. On various occasions, the
same question was asked about Egyptian President Hos-
ni Mubarak, Jordan's King Hussein, even Syrian Presi-
dent Hafez el-Assad, who has barely dipped his toes into
the peace process.
But no one asked that question about Yitzhak Rabin.
The 73-year-old workaholic, chain-smoking leader was
in full health and vigor. Though it was certainly con-
ceivable that he would not survive the next election (po-
litically speaking), no one seriously entertained his being
cut down by an Israeli assassin. For several months, the
head of the Shabak (General Security Services) had been
privately warning (and his fears were leaked to the press)
that the verbal violence so prevalent on the far right and
at opposition demonstrations — calling Rabin a traitor
and murderer, portraying him as Arafat's double and
in an SS uniform — was creating a climate which might
precipitate an act of extremism.
A democratic
transition goes
unchallenged,
but the aftershocks
will reverberate on
countless levels.
INA FRIEDMAN ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT
Still, Israel's citizens slept soundly. The rhetoric, how-
ever outrageous, was put down to "letting off steam." The
plotting of an assassination — or, as it has been phrased,
that "a Jew would murder a Jew" over a political dispute,
was unthinkable. In his last speech, at the pro-peace and
anti-violence rally on Saturday night, Mr. Rabin himself