Three years after
Yitzhak Rabin's
murder,
Israel remains
on edge about
security for its
prime minister.
Top: Bodyguards
were out in force
for a Netanyahu speech
last week to Likud.
LARRY DERFNER
Israel Correspondent
Jerusalem
n the days leading up to the
third anniversary of the Rabin
assassination on Wednesday,
Nov. 4, right-wing extremists
were again screaming "traitor" at a
prime minister who dared to trade
land for peace.
The funeral of a West Bank settler
killed by a Hamas terrorist turned into
a political rally in which rabbis, Kach
leaders and Knesset members, ostensi-
bly delivering eulogies, blamed the
Netanyahu government for the murder.
Outside the prime minister's official
residence in Jerusalem, a few teen-agers
in knitted kippot were heard threaten-
ing the prime minister. A new poster
hit the streets, showing Binyamin
Netanyahu and Yassir Arafat shaking
each other's blood-smeared hand.
Yet, Professor Ehud Sprinzak, a
Hebrew University expert on right-
wing extremism, maintained that the
threat of assassination is nowhere near
what it was during Rabin's time,
I
because the decisive factor is missing:
runaway terror.
"It was the bus bombings that
raised the public's blood pressure so
high, that put hundreds of thousands
of protesters into the street, and that
fostered the rage, hatred and despera-
tion that culminated in Rabin's mur-
der," he said.
And the halachic death sentences
cited by Yigal Amir as his justification
for assassinating Rabin were based
mainly on the terror killings of Jews,
not the handing over of parts of the
Land of Israel, Dr. Sprinzak added.
Besides, Israeli society as a whole is
less tolerant of political
violence, added
Professor Ephraim
Yuchtman-Ya'ar, head of
Tel Aviv University's
Tami,.teinmetz Center
for Peace Research. The
center's polls showed
that public support for
the use of violence to
achieve political goals
stood at 13 percent on
the eve of the assassina-
tion, then fell to 4-5
percent immediately afterward — and
has stayed down at that level ever
since.
But that's the general public. On a
smaller level, the tiny circle of poten-
tial assassins and their supporters still
could be a real threat.
The question: Have these people
moderated their ways along with
Israeli society as a whole, or are they
just as volatile — or even more so —
than on the eve of the Rabin assassina-
tion? And is the Wye River agreement
enough to set one of them off?
Then there's this: Israeli society
may have learned that it must keep a
safer distance from inflammatory
'political expressions and take threats
of political violence much more seri-
ously, but the hard-core extremists
may have learned that assassination
works.
After all, some say that Amir suc-
ceeded, at least in the short term. The
peace process stopped for a few years
and Netanyahu rose to power.
Disputing this view are those who
say that Netanyahu's popularity plum-
meted in the polls following the mur-
der. He eventually won - because of the
terror bombings that occurred three
months before the election.
Regardless, it no longer requires
such a leap of the imagination for a
Jew to conceive of assassinating an
Israeli prime minister.
Another condition changed since
the Rabin assassination: the prime
minister giving up land to the
Palestinians today is a man of the
right. The extreme right, from where
the threat of assassination seems most
likely, provided Netanyahu with many
of the most enthusiastic election cam-
paign volunteers.
Will they feel duped by their own
leader, or be more likely to forgive
because they see Netanyahu as some-
one who gives up land unwillingly,
out of weakness, rather
than out of "malice"
toward everything Jewish,
as they believed Rabin
did?
Dr. Sprinzak insisted
that the far-right never
had a familial feeling for
Netanyahu, so they aren't
as betrayed as it might -
seem. "They always saw
Yitzhak Rabin
11/6
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