‘Every Time, It Hurts Again’ : Israel: Nation reeling as victories in peace process alternate with deadly attacks from opponents.

Confronted with the wreckage of Wednesday’s horrific bombing attack on a Tel Aviv bus, an anguished teen-age girl there screamed at no one in particular, “How much can we take?”

Israelis of every political stripe and from all walks of life were asking much the same question Wednesday, wondering how many more emotional shocks they can absorb on the increasingly savage road to peace.

In the past 10 days, the nation has been whipsawed between emotional highs and lows so drastic as to produce a national feeling of vertigo.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” acknowledged Education Minister Amnon Rubenstein. He put the bus attack in a unique category of outrage, something so devastating, he said, that it “endangers the government’s ability to carry on” with its process of transferring limited control of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority.

He spoke after the militant Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing.

“This is not an easy battle,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in a late-night news conference Wednesday. “. . . We have to stand in battle, facing a terrible enemy: Hamas, Islamic Jihad and parts of the Islamic movement which is spread all over the Arab and the Muslim world.”

And President Ezer Weizman, who traveled to the scene shortly after the attack, called on his countrymen to stay calm. “I appeal to the citizens of Israel to take a deep breath, (to have) a lot of patience and forbearance,” Weizman said. “These are enemies of peace who try to torpedo things.”

But for many Israelis, forbearance was difficult to contemplate.

“This is a moment when people’s emotions get control of them,” said Yoav Peck, an activist with the left-leaning Peace Now movement.

Peck, who immigrated here 21 years ago from New York, said he was braced for a right-wing backlash not only against Palestinians, but also against Israelis who support dealing with the PLO and withdrawing from occupied territory. “My car has Peace Now . . . stickers all over it,” said Peck, a Jerusalem resident. “When I parked in front of my house today, I wondered whether my headlights will be smashed, as they have in the past when such incidents occur.”

Magnifying the impact of Wednesday’s attack for Israelis was the fact that two vicious attacks directly preceded it, plus the knowledge that the organization that carried out all three has pledged to stop at nothing in its efforts to sink the peace process.

Hamas has proved itself both willing and capable of carrying out bold, even suicidal, attacks in the past and unflinching in its readiness to hit civilian targets.

On Oct. 9, a pair of Islamic militants carried out a rare attack in downtown Jerusalem, killing two people and wounding 13 when they opened fire on a street crowded with cafes. The attackers, themselves shot dead, were later identified as members of the Gaza-based Hamas movement.

That same night, another group of Hamas militants kidnaped a 19-year-old soldier, Nachshon Waxman, as he hitchhiked home to Jerusalem from his army base. The nation agonized with Waxman’s parents during the week, as they prayed and pleaded publicly for their son’s safe release.

Friday, the Waxman kidnaping ended in tragedy. Waxman was shot dead by his captors as an Israeli army unit stormed their West Bank hide-out. An Israeli officer leading the raid, Nir Poraz, also was shot dead, and nine other soldiers were wounded.

The failed rescue attempt was made just hours after Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat were awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Some Israelis now say that Rabin and Peres should refuse to accept it.

After the Waxman debacle, Rabin and Peres seemed determined to demonstrate to the nation that terrorism would not derail their peacemaking efforts. The two flew to Jordan on Sunday night and, after all-night negotiations, initialed a peace treaty with King Hussein on Monday afternoon. Israelis heard the welcome news that an Israeli Embassy may open in Amman just six weeks from now.

The good news from Amman was augmented Tuesday when Avraham Hamra, the rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community, arrived in Israel with his extended family. Just days before, the government had revealed that Syria had allowed virtually its entire Jewish community to emigrate in the past three years, and had tolerated the immigration to Israel of more than 1,000. The release of Syrian Jews was interpreted here as a sign that Syria may yet sign a peace treaty with Israel.

So plans were well under way for a gala celebration of the treaty signing, scheduled for Oct. 26, when Wednesday’s bombing occurred, killing 22 people.

The White House said Wednesday that President Clinton still plans to attend the signing, to which Israel and Jordan had planned to invite 5,000 guests. But the impulse here to celebrate vanished in the flames that leaped from the shattered bus on Dizengoff Street on Wednesday morning.

“It certainly has been an emotional yo-yo,” said Gerald Steinberg, a military analyst at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Israelis had no time to recover from the depression the nation felt when Waxman was killed, Steinberg said, before the horror of the bus bombing was plastered across their television sets.

“If Rabin is smart, he will make next week’s signing ceremony a low-key event,” Steinberg said. “It is a time for black hats and black coats, not celebrations.”

Specialists hasten to underscore that these ups and downs are nothing new to a people who rose from the ashes of the Holocaust to build a modern, thriving nation despite living in a state of war with most of their neighbors for 46 years.

“It has been the reality since the founding of the state--this oscillation between stress and lulls,” said Prof. Zahava Solomon, head of the Bob Shapell School of Social Work at Tel Aviv University. “During the (1991) Gulf War, the periods of stress and lull were even closer together than they are right now.”

Israelis cope with it, Solomon said, “because, unfortunately, there is a process of habituation in people who live in the shadow of war.” Damage done to the immediate victims of a terrorist attack, and to those who witness the act or who know people involved, may be great and lasting, Solomon said. But the rest of the nation is able to pick up the pieces and go on.

“Even today, you saw this,” Solomon said. “It took a couple of minutes, and then people in the surrounding buildings came out to help the survivors. It was not a situation of panic.”

Both professional researchers like herself and average Israelis are aware, Solomon said, “that in time of terrorist attack, in times of war, Israeli society gets very cohesive. I hate to say it, but some good things come out of these bad things.”

“Every time, it hurts again,” said Shmulik Sadan, a 28-year-old personnel director at a survey institute who was wounded in Wednesday’s bombing. “But if we don’t make peace, it’ll just get worse and worse.”

Researcher Emily Hauser of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.