Israeli Rightists Vow to Take to the Streets

Stunned by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s secret agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization on Palestinian self-government, Israel’s rightist opposition plans a campaign of mass protests leading to open civil disobedience to try to block the accord.

“This country can’t stomach hundreds and thousands of people being arrested and going to jail in protests against this so-called peace,” said Yehiel Leiter, a leader of the Israeli settler movement Yesha in the occupied West Bank. “That, however, is the only way left to us. . . . We will launch a campaign of civil disobedience, massive and nonviolent, to block implementation of this agreement, to change government policy and, if possible, to bring this government down.”

A coalition of opposition parties, settlers movements, religious groups and ultra-Zionist groups will launch the effort Tuesday with a demonstration, which they said will paralyze the government quarter in Jerusalem.

That will be followed, they said, by strikes at Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, protests by thousands of schoolchildren bused to the capital and other demonstrations that organizers pledge will spread through every Israeli city and town in the next week.

A rapid escalation in the protests, planners said, will bring the government into growing confrontations with demonstrators who will force their own arrests “until Israel’s jails are full of Jews,” as one organizer put it.

The aim, said Tzachi Hanegbi, an opposition Likud Party member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, will be “to make the government understand that the price it will pay for the aggressive implementation of this plan (for Palestinian autonomy) will be greater than going to elections.”

Yehoshua Matza, another Likud member of Parliament, described it as “a call to rebellion” but said he was not urging people to take up arms against the government but to go into the streets in such massive numbers that the country becomes virtually ungovernable.

The opposition objects to the agreement on two main points:

* Handing over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho to their Palestinian residents will immediately endanger Israeli security, they say, and the terms for self-government will lead inevitably to a Palestinian state, led by the PLO, which is seen as an even greater threat.

* Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip will put at serious risk the lives of the 120,000 Israeli settlers there and probably mean the end of the more than 140 communities they have established on lands to which they feel they have a biblical claim.

A further issue, the opposition asserts, is the government’s need to secure voter approval, either in new elections or a referendum, for such fundamental policy changes. “It is inconceivable that an issue this essential to the continuation of the nation of Israel would not be determined by the people in democratic elections,” said Moshe Hager-Lau of Emunim, an ultra-Zionist group backing Israeli settlement of the West Bank.

Implementation of the agreement “will bring about a general war in the Middle East that would cause the destruction of Israel,” Hager-Lau said. “Those of us who live in the territories will be the ones carrying the yoke of coexistence with the Arabs . . . and we are already confronted daily with rocks in the streets.”

Although the anger on the right over the agreement is strong, prospects of such a bitter struggle against the accord also alarm many Israelis, who fear the division of the nation at a crucial point in its history.

President Ezer Weizman appealed to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party chairman, for moderation to preserve national unity. Israel’s chief rabbis said it would be wrong to sharpen political differences when the country needs to reach a consensus. And a newspaper commentator asked, “Will we make peace with the Arabs only to go to war among ourselves?”

The PLO accord, concluded in months of secret negotiations, caught the whole opposition by surprise. Although there were strong indications both that the Rabin government was negotiating with the PLO and that there was progress, the agreement stunned the right in its scope and swiftness.

“It was a ‘done deal,’ ” said Zalman Shoval, the Likud spokesman on foreign affairs and the former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “And it won a lot of initial, although probably surface, support. We all want peace, and there were elements in this agreement that were definitely appealing--dangerously so, we believe.”

Although Netanyahu and other opposition leaders quickly rejected the accord as gravely endangering Israeli security and certain to lead to a Palestinian state, the right had no real alternative strategy. Likud itself had begun the peace talks 22 months earlier, and it differed with Rabin’s Labor Party on terms for a settlement, not on Palestinian autonomy.

“The public has been brainwashed, more or less, by the peace process, both under Likud and Labor, to accept retreat and make compromises,” said Paul Eidelberg, a conservative political scientist at Bar Ilan University. “To me, this is a charade and always has been . . . but peace process is the name of the game you have to play in Israel to get power and keep it. In last year’s election, Labor played it better and won. The result will be a national catastrophe, I fear.”

Surprised tactically by Rabin, without a strategic alternative, the right found itself unable to reply with more than angry rhetoric.

“Likud can really only do two things--in the parliamentary arena to break Rabin’s coalition and topple the government and, more broadly, to position itself as the responsible party of the center and press very, very hard for new elections,” Shoval said. “ ‘Let the people decide,’ we say, and obviously the government does not want to do that. New elections, new elections, new elections--it will be such a constant message that Labor’s rejection of those elections will become an issue itself.”

Netanyahu, moving to assert his leadership in what for the right is a crisis, said after meeting with other opposition members of the Knesset in a strategy session: “Our demand is clear--to decide this agreement, and the policy even before the agreement, right now through new elections. We will act with all legitimate means to bring these elections about as soon as possible in order to stop the implementation of this agreement.”

But some Israeli political commentators believe that early elections are, in fact, part of Rabin’s political strategy.

“Rabin may go to the people as soon as the autonomy is up and running because people want peace and they will reward the man who brings it,” a Rabin aide said. “And with a new mandate, he can then go for the final stage of negotiations. He doesn’t fear elections; he just wants to decide when.”

But Ze’ev Sternhell, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said that Israeli politics are now so finely balanced that a shift of 50,000 to 70,000 votes from left to right would change the government. “Then the whole thing would fall apart,” he said.

Hanan Crystal, a Tel Aviv University political scientist, said that Netanyahu, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and other “heavyweight leaders” will probably lead the parliamentary attack on the Palestinian accord, which Rabin will present to the Knesset after it has been formally signed.

A matching campaign will be launched on television and radio and in the press to besiege the government with hostile opinion. Bumper stickers carry opposition slogans: “Israel Is in Danger--Don’t Give In!” says one. “You Voted for Rabin, You Elected Arafat,” says another, referring to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

The third arena, Crystal said, will be the streets. Hundreds of buses have been rented to bring people from around the country and the occupied territories to Jerusalem for Tuesday’s event, and the ultra-right Tsomet Party apparently is ready to finance continuing protests.

“The question is whether we can galvanize the latent anger and frustration,” Leiter said, arguing that most Israelis either oppose the agreement outright, harbor serious fears about it or resent the way it was concluded. A poll for Israel’s top-selling newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, showed 53% of those questioned backed the accord and 45% opposed it.

Political activists on the right--leaders of the settlers movement, radicals in ultra-Zionist groups like Kach and Emunim, firebrands in Likud and other parties--believe that far more forceful methods will be needed to prevent the government from implementing the deal.

“There is a lot of space for militant but legitimate action,” Hanegbi said, disavowing violence but supporting the call for mass protests and civil disobedience.

Leiter, whose organization believes it can mobilize a large proportion of the 120,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, said: “People will have to come out of their homes onto the streets, and many will probably have to go to jail. We will avoid violence--it would be a backlash--but we will push the confrontation to the maximum.”

Others threaten to go further. “Any means are legitimate to prevent this,” said Noam Federman of Kach, which has been accused of advocating violence and which has been training its own paramilitary force. “Anything that can be done, we will do. We have people already recruited. When the time is right for us, we will act.”

The right’s intention, Sternhell said, will be “to create a precedent by which it will be impossible to withdraw from the territories, from the occupation, without there being hell in the streets.”

“They will want to frighten the left and the government and create the threat of real bloodletting so that those floating voters should say to themselves, ‘If we’re to fight, then better we should fight Arabs than Jews. If there is to be an intifada (uprising), better it should be an Arab intifada than a Jewish intifada. ‘ “

Sternhell warned that the opposition could go further. “There will be little sparks of violence from all sorts of directions,” he said. “Settlers may make life impossible for the Palestinian police to show that if autonomy comes up to the gates of Jerusalem, it will be untenable. . . . There will be a lot of demonstrations, a lot of pressure in the street. They will keep the pot at the boiling point. They won’t create a real rebellion but will create the potential for rebellion.”

Already, warnings have come of so sharp an internal Israeli conflict that it will amount to a civil war.

“If this plan is executed there will be daily attacks (on the settlers),” said Rabbi Eliezer Melamed of the Rabbinical Council of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. “We are talking about PLO terrorists who will become the (Palestinian) policemen. . . . This situation is likely to lead to a civil war. When people are in danger of daily attacks, the anger they feel toward the government can lead to a civil war. We will try to prevent this, but the situation is such that it really could lead to a civil war.”

Israel 1947 to 1993

The map of the Mideast has shifted steadily for most of the last four decades, the subject of constant disputes, acrimony and war. Here is a historic look at the changing landscape of the troubled--and to many--holy lands.

U.N. partition plan: 1947

U.N. commission proposes to divide British territory of Palestine into one Jewish and one Arab state.

Armistice borders: 1949

Israel as it stood after it declared independence and fought first war with Arab neighbors.

Israel occupation after 1967 war

In Six-Day War, Israel captures territory from Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Israel and occupied territories now

The lands at the heart of the current controversies.