Rabin’s Victorious Hero’s Image Stirs Comparisons to De Gaulle : Israel: Premier-to-be, like late French leader, sees withdrawal from occupied lands as benefit to country.

He was a general and a war hero, a solemn figure who harbored notions of grandeur for his country and disdain for the political machinations of a series of ineffective governments that kept the nation from reaching its potential. He swept into power pledging to resolve a long, bitter conflict and to go directly to the people for their approval of a peace agreement when he had succeeded. He relied on the force of his personality.

This resume is on the lips of supporters of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister-to-be who was formally asked this week to form a new government.

But it does not fully belong to him--not yet, anyway. Rather it is a precis of Charles de Gaulle, the French leader who in the 1960s took France out of Algeria, reasoning that the country had more pressing business at hand than the continued suppression of a rebellious, colonized population.

When sympathetic observers talk about the prospects for Rabin’s term as prime minister, it is the Gaullist model they push, a grand plan buttressed by a hero’s image and by a sense of historical destiny.

Analogies are tricky, especially when dealing with a towering figure like De Gaulle. He personified France, and the French embraced this identification of man and country.

In Israel, perhaps only David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s late founding father, can be said to have enjoyed similar esteem. And the word charismatic does not apply to the shy Rabin. Nor, from his past accomplishments, does the word visionary. One observer described him as “never a brave policy-maker” but only “disciplined, analytical and photogenic.”

Yet, the situation of Israel in 1992 is similar enough to Algeria-era France to make the parallels enticing. Like De Gaulle and Algeria, Rabin, 70, is trying to persuade Israelis that withdrawal from at least parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be first and foremost good for Israel. And like De Gaulle, Rabin comes into office with something of a strongman reputation.

“I call it mini-Gaullism,” said Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist and former Labor Party official. “Rabin has been able to present the Labor point of view from the proposition of national interest. He couches a peace initiative in centrist terms, not in terms of civil and human rights expressed by the peace camp. We don’t give up the territories because we love Arabs but because it benefits us. It’s a tactical approach to get the same result without left-wing language.”

Rabin is on the verge of setting up his government, having led his Labor Party to power and ousting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Likud Party. Labor won 44 seats to 32 for Likud. He has pledged to get peace talks out of the starting blocks, repair relations with the United States and reorder Israel’s priorities to domestic, economic and social concerns.

In the view of some, Rabin’s military career gives him a Gaullist margin to pull off something opponents regard as a retreat--a trade of land for peace. “Exit from part of the territories can be accomplished only with the authority of a military person,” commented historian Shaul Friedlander.

Rabin’s muscular credentials were laid out in the election campaign, one that largely focused on his personality. Labor emphasized Rabin’s war record. It helped that the 25th anniversary of the 1967 Middle East War occurred in the middle of the race. Pictures of Rabin striding triumphantly into Jerusalem’s Old City at the conclusion of the war ratified his status as a hero.

He was chief of staff during the conflict, and the rival Likud Party tried to nullify this history with recollections of Rabin’s prewar attack of nerves. The mudslinging effort backfired; the attacks could not erase the consensus that the war was a giant victory, especially when compared with the wars since: Both the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon have left bitter memories in the minds of Israelis.

The Likud strategy may have been doomed from its inception. “They were dealing with Israeli mythology. It’s like attacking Abe Lincoln,” said Aryeh Naor, a political commentator and former high official in the Likud government of Menachem Begin.

Rabin was born in Jerusalem and educated in Tel Aviv and an agricultural school in northern Israel. He joined the Palmach, the elite of Israel’s incipient army, the Haganah, and began a military career that lasted 27 years.

He commanded troops that broke an Arab siege of Jerusalem in 1948, a key success in Israel’s independence war. The assertion of historians that Rabin at some point fled battle has done little to diminish his wartime stature and played no part in the election campaign.

Married in 1948, he has a son and daughter. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rabin and his wife, Leah, were the epitome of romantic Zionism. They were a handsome couple, the tanned image of the new Jewish society that arose in Israel out of the tragedy of the Holocaust.

But party infighting and scandal marred Rabin’s first stint as prime minister from 1974 to 1977. Israel also entered a period of economic malaise. Rabin resigned because of an uproar over an illegal bank account held by his wife. Since then, he had played No. 2 to party rival Shimon Peres, coming back only when Labor instituted primary elections this year. Rabin won the primary on the grounds that he would be a more electable candidate in the national balloting.

In 1988, during one of a series of power-sharing governments with Likud, Rabin began a two-year stint as defense minister, a role that gave him a kind of crude credibility in dealing with the Arabs. He oversaw the “iron fist” policy of beatings and shootings to put down the intifada, or Palestinian uprising.

Rabin, however, tempered this hard-line policy with open admission that the solution to the conflict lay not in force but accommodation. It was he, not his boss Shamir, who wrote the initial plans for talks with Palestinians and a plan for general elections that he continues to champion today.

Rabin is challenging the conventional wisdom that only a right-wing leader can make peace with the Arabs. “It will be difficult for opponents of a solution with the Palestinians to say that Rabin is a traitor. It won’t wash,” remarked historian Friedlander.

And Rabin is no new convert to the idea that the Palestinians, who now number 1.7 million in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, must be cut off from Israeli rule. In memoirs published in 1979, he outlined a proposal to release areas of heavy Palestinian concentration into a union with Jordan. He foresaw a splitting into two of the land once ruled by Britain under a League of Nations mandate.

“Within the original borders of mandatory Palestine (which includes Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and what is now called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), there should be two states: Israel, basically a Jewish state that would include considerable portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (mainly the densely populated areas),” he wrote. “The Jordanian-Palestinian state will allow for the expression of the unique Jordanian-Palestinian identity of the Palestinians in whatever form they choose to exercise their right to self-determination.”

Asserting that “Israel owes it to herself to become an active partner in seeking a solution to the problem,” he added, “I am convinced that anyone willing to hold his emotions at bay long enough to look at these facts will be forced to agree that this is an eminently just and reasonable proposal.”

Rabin has yet to repeat his proposal of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation. But nothing he has said precludes it. He has been focusing instead on the interim self-rule arrangements for Palestinians and has called for “continuous talks on the subject.”

Rabin faces potentially explosive opposition from settlers who see in the Palestinian quest for self-rule an end to their hopes for controlling all of the West Bank. This is a similar sort of concern that was swept aside by De Gaulle, who faced a massive, violent backlash from settlers in Algeria.

But is Rabin prepared to take on the settlement movement and its right-wing allies?

Rabin seems to be trying to sidestep confrontation by easing settlers’ concern that they will be thrown out of the West Bank and Gaza. “I’m going to freeze new settlements and change the proportion of Israeli government money (spent) . . . without the tremendous incentives (the settlers) get that other people don’t.”

The day before, he told local reporters of the settlements, “I don’t mean to dry them out but (rather) not to invest in expanding them, not to throw billions of shekels into construction.”

In the past, Rabin showed a weak hand in dealing with settlers. When he was prime minister before, settlers squatted on land in the Palestinian-populated heart of the West Bank to protest a no-new-settlement policy that he instituted. He ordered troops to evict them. But they persisted, and, in the end, he gave in. The settlements stayed and grew.

In his memoirs, Rabin placed blame for the weak showing on his defense minister, Shimon Peres, who is today No. 2 in the Labor Party and considered more dovish than Rabin. At the time, Rabin and Peres were engaged in a no-holds-barred power struggle, and Peres used the settlement issue to set himself apart from Rabin’s rule.

Excuses aside, the settler episode casts a shadow of doubt over suggestions that Rabin will act quickly and dramatically to halt the expansion of settlements and take rapid steps to grant Palestinians self-rule.

Rabin has said that he will eliminate special incentives for West Bank and Gaza home buyers and industries. But that leaves room for private initiatives and perhaps the completion of road, water and other utility projects already under way.

“More likely we are in a step-by-step approach,” predicted political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. “Shamir practiced creeping annexation of the territories. The most we can expect from Rabin is creeping peace.”

A slow approach will not ease settler opposition, many observers predict. The settlement movement opposes not only a freeze but also self-rule plans for the Palestinians. Settlement construction is a means of blocking autonomy, not an end in itself.

To head off right-wing opposition and isolate the settlers, Rabin apparently senses a need to bring a far-right party into his coalition--even though Israeli voters gave a majority to land-for-peace parties.

The leading rightist candidate is the Tsomet, or Crossroads, Party. It campaigned vigorously against a settlement freeze and sat in the defunct Likud government, which rapidly expanded settlements. Tsomet is headed by another former general, Rafael Eitan, who commanded the Israeli troops during the Lebanon war.

Rabin is looking for a formula to bring Tsomet and left-wing Meretz together in a coalition. He is pledging to Tsomet to bring agreements reached with the Palestinians to a popular vote. Rabin deleted the pledge of freezing new settlements from Labor’s coalition guidelines, used as a basis for bringing other parties into the Cabinet.

His spokesmen have indicated that the freeze on new settlements will go on only as long as peace talks do, and he has excluded eastern, Arab-heavy parts of Jerusalem as well as the Jordan Valley from his settlement curbs.

Placing himself and Labor between Meretz and Tsomet serves the purpose of building Rabin’s image as a man of the nation. “We want to set up a stable government, not one that represents the extreme left nor the extreme right, but a government that will reflect most of the people of Israel,” he said shortly after the election.

Party Breakdown

Here are the final results of the June 23 Israeli elections. Labor, with 44 seats, is trying to bridge differences with the dovish Meretz bloc and the right-wing Tsomet Party to form a coalition in the 120-seat Parliament.

Party Seats Total votes CENTER-LEFT Labor 44 906,126 Meretz 12 250,206 RIGHT Likud 32 651,219 Tsomet 8 166,247 Moledet 3 62,247 RELIGIOUS Shas 6 129,310 National Religious Party 6 129,601 United Torah Jewry 4 86,138 ARAB-BASED Hadash 3 62,138 Arab Democratic Party 2 40,799