NEWS ANALYSIS : Shamir Tries to Cement Hard-Line Objectives : Politics: Labor Party members call it ‘cynical opportunism.’ Likud Party members see it as the war playing into their hands.

An Israeli who has spent hours huddled in a sealed room under threat of Iraqi missiles might be compared to the liberal who, in the old joke, has just been mugged: He tends to turn mighty fast into a conservative.

As author Zeev Chafets put it: “The first gas mask on the first child’s head was a point of no return. It meant that as long as Israel remains a democracy, there will never be a Palestinian state.”

Members of Israel’s Labor Party call it “cynical opportunism” by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, while members of Shamir’s right-wing Likud Party see it simply as the war playing into their hands.

But Israeli political analysts say that one thing seems clear: The war in the Persian Gulf has brought Shamir’s government a temporary but massive wave of popular support, and the Likud leadership is determined to use that support to cement its hard-line goals before the war ends.

“The psychological experience of sitting there and feeling threatened,” said Yaron Ezrachi, a politics professor at Hebrew University, “is not the kind of experience that engenders trust and the idea of a peaceful settlement” with the Palestinians.

And Shamir is using this moment of national consolidation and hostility toward Arabs “to prepare for the political war that will follow the Gulf War,” Ezrachi said.

Commentators and indignant leftists point to the controversial appointment of Rehavam Zeevi, a leader of the far-right Homeland Party, which advocates the mass expulsion of Arabs from the occupied West Bank, as the clearest evidence that Shamir is seizing the current moment to push his old goals.

Although Shamir has denounced Zeevi’s policy of “transfer” and has contended that he brought the former army general into the Cabinet for purely tactical reasons--to enlarge the ruling coalition--most Israeli analysts see the move as heralding new stubbornness from Shamir in any future Mideast peace talks.

“As people say, they’re raping themselves,” Prof. Itzhak Gal-Noor, a specialist on Israeli domestic politics, said of the Likud leadership. “Shamir is tying his own hands--so there will be no way they can be expected to do anything new or take some initiative” after the war.

“You would expect the Shamir government to be really busy preparing itself for a new order in the Middle East,” Gal-Noor added. “But what they’re doing instead is fortifying the internal front.”

Even before Zeevi’s appointment on Sunday, the Shamir government had given a strong signal with the arrest of Sari Nusseibeh, considered a moderate among Palestinian leaders, that it would continue to reject all negotiations with anyone affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Shamir backed up that line in a speech to the Knesset on Monday, saying that the entire world must “distance itself” from this “terrorist organization.”

Normally, the arrest of a respected academic such as Nusseibeh would have raised a major protest in Israel and abroad--but this was wartime and Nusseibeh was accused of helping Iraqi intelligence.

Furthermore, many Israelis were fuming over reports of Palestinians cheering as Iraqi missiles fell on Tel Aviv, and some of the most prominent peace activists expressed their disgust at the Palestinian pro-Iraq position and questioned their own former calls for a partnership in peace.

Even without political maneuvers, analysts say the Gulf War has borne out Shamir’s argument on the very process of Mideast peace talks in the eyes of the public, appearing to justify his assertions that peace with the Arab nations surrounding Israel must take precedence over a territorial settlement with the Palestinians.

“Up to now, everything that happens plays into our hands and goes against Labor,” government spokesman Yossi Olmert said.

“Up to now, the crisis has crystallized public opinion around positions that are what you would call right-wing or hawkish.”

At the same time, Olmert said, the government policy of holding back on immediate retaliation against Iraq has convinced some centrists and leftists who generally disagree with Likud that “we’re a responsible party.”

Commentators question, however, how deep and long-lasting the Likud’s political gains will be.

Several lawmakers contended during a Knesset debate on Tuesday that Shamir had immediately squandered his new windfall of popular trust by appointing an extremist like Zeevi to the Cabinet.

“You’ve shown us that you’re nothing but the old Shamir,” Labor member Uzi Bar-Am complained. “Rarely have you gotten such support at home and abroad, but you’re showing us that you’re nothing but what you were.”

Gal-Noor cautioned that the wave of support for the government flows naturally from a wartime desire for unity and so does not necessarily translate into votes in the next election, which is expected well over a year from now.

And Ezrachi commented that the time Israelis spent in their sealed rooms could actually make them more determined that, in the long run, Israel must reach peace with its Arab neighbors, even at the cost of territorial compromise.

Analysts said that Shamir’s support for Zeevi may have already cost him backers.

“People feel like we were giving him carte blanche, and now they wonder what his motives are,” a Jerusalem editor said.

Avraham Burg, a Labor Party legislator, predicted that “reality will be the best opposition of Yitzhak Shamir.”

When the crisis ends, Burg said, voters will notice that hundreds of thousands of Soviet immigrants have not been absorbed into the economy and the country is suffering from other results of mismanagement.

And if Shamir continues with his hard-line policies on peace, Burg predicted, he may also lose much of the worldwide support his policy of restraint has won.

“Three weeks ago, Israel was the naughty boy of the world, and in three weeks we could be again,” he said.