Quashing an Enemy of Peace

As of late Wednesday Israeli security forces had been able to find and arrest only one of the five Jewish extremists Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has ordered taken into preventive detention. Meanwhile, Rabin announced that the movements of 18 other extremist settlers would be restricted in the aftermath of last week’s massacre of Palestinians at a mosque in Hebron by an Israeli fanatic.

There’s no doubt that the revulsion, shame and concern expressed by Rabin’s government and most Israelis over that atrocity are genuine and deep. The fact remains that the government has yet to take measures appropriate to the basic threat raised by a militant Israeli minority, not just against the safety of Palestinians but against the government’s own peace policy. A U.S. State Department official told a congressional hearing this week that there are “several thousand” militant settlers Israel should be worrying about, not just the few dozen who have been targeted so far.

The peace process probably will survive the horror of last week’s killings, because in the final analysis responsible Israeli and Palestinian leaders know that to let it collapse would surely be to doom their two peoples to further years, even decades, of costly and futile conflict. Whether popular opinion would allow leaders to pursue peace should there be anything like a repetition of the Hebron blood bath, directed against either side, is another matter. It’s no secret that the most militant among Israel’s 120,000 settlers--like the most militant in the Palestinian camp--are eager to wreck the peace process. The Rabin government is courting grief if it doesn’t move quickly to neutralize this sedition.

At the same time the Palestine Liberation Organization, if it’s as serious about wanting peace as Chairman Yasser Arafat assured Secretary of State Warren Christopher it is, must stop using the Hebron tragedy as a basis for raising wholly unrealistic political demands. Rabin is not about to move the issue of the settlements to the forefront of negotiations--that, under the agreed timetable, is still several years away--nor is he going to disarm all the settlers, as the PLO insists. But Rabin can do a lot more to deal effectively with security on the West Bank just as Arafat, by taking greater care with his public comments, can do a lot more to assure the survival of the peace process.