SOUTHLAND RESPONSE : ASSASSINATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST : Sorrow Unites Those Still at Odds Over Peace Effort

While they may have been divided over Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace efforts in the Middle East, Southern California Jews united Saturday in mourning his death as a tragic loss.

“It just drains me,” said Betsy Shore, a substitute teacher from West Hills. “It makes me just want to give up.”

Amid widespread grief there was also recognition that Rabin’s assassination stemmed from an issue that has divided America’s second-largest Jewish community as have few others.

Consider the 3,000 families who attend Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin’s Stephen S. Wise Temple in Bel-Air. The largest synagogue in the Western United States houses a wide array of viewpoints about how--or even whether--the Arab-Israeli peace talks should succeed.

“We are divided,” the Reform rabbi said Saturday. Nonetheless, “most of my members support the peace process . . . if it is done cautiously and with all due deliberation.”

The Studio City publisher of National Jewish News was even blunter.

The negotiations have been “the most divisive issue in the Jewish community,” said Phil Blazer, who also hosts a television talk show on Jewish topics.

In September, when the first of 10 retired generals and ranking Israeli figures came to Los Angeles on a cross-country campaign to explain the Israeli government’s position, several synagogues and community groups would not see them.

Blazer recalled a demonstration last month by Orthodox and other Jews outside the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles to protest relinquishing land to Palestinians.

“I don’t think a credible religious group has ever done that before here,” he said. Usually, the Los Angeles Jewish community tries to maintain a united front on Israeli issues, he added.

At the same time, Blazer said the majority of American Jews “are befuddled with the issues because they are so complicated.”

The sorrow that has accompanied countless deaths in the longstanding Arab-Israeli dispute was tinged by a new, uncomfortable feeling: This time, the Israeli had been felled by a Jew, not an Arab.

“I couldn’t understand how Jewish people can do this to each other,” lamented Bernard Gales, 74, of Woodland Hills.

In the Fairfax district, Betty Ingber declared herself shocked: “He was a great man. It’s unbelievable that when the peace process was going along that he should be gunned down.”

But there were, within a mile or two, other voices, stronger critics.

Returning from temple with his four children, Yitzhak Fuchs declared in Hebrew: “Blessed is the true judge.”

Fuchs opposes the peace pact’s ceding of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “Nobody will condone killing. I feel badly that this happened to him, but unfortunately, it seems God has judged.”

And Abraham Polonsky, who teaches film at USC, said in reference to the politics of the alleged assassin: “Very religious Jews are just as bad as all other people in the world. They can’t live a second with others that disagree with them.”

Not unexpectedly, expressions of sorrow from the region’s Middle Eastern community were mingled with relief at the news that the alleged assassin is Israeli. Arab Americans are just recovering from the premature finger-pointing that blamed Islamic terrorists for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, my God, I hope it’s not an Arab,’ ” said Don Bustany, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The accused assassin, Bustany said, is “an Israeli John Wilkes Booth.” If he had been an Arab, the peace process might well have been derailed. Now, Bustany believes, the assassination could hurry peace along.

“Rabin will become a martyr, a symbol of peace. . . ,” he said. “The peace process is unstoppable because of the dollars at stake.”

The assassination came as the committee’s Western regional conference was under way in Anaheim. The pro-peace organization supports Palestinian self-rule.

Samir Hijazi, a former organizer for the committee, said the killing underscores the fact that “extremists are not only on one side.”

“It’s always portrayed that way, that Muslims are doing this or that. Sometimes the ones you don’t watch get you,” Hijazi said.

All you had to do, said organizer Waleed Ali of Los Angeles, “was listen to the right wing in Israel. You had rabbis saying it would be a moral act to assassinate Rabin. You have rabbis teaching soldiers to ignore any orders to evacuate the West Bank. That’s sedition.”

Dr. Maher Hathout of the Islamic Center of Southern California said Rabin’s death “will add confusion and difficulty to the Middle East during this time of delicate peace negotiations.” Bloodshed or assassination “enhances no cause.”

While most people insist they want peace, there is dissension over how to achieve it.

A September poll by the American Jewish Committee, one of the nation’s largest Jewish groups, showed the dichotomy: 68% of American Jews backed Israel’s handling of peace talks, but 63% opposed any more U.S. aid to Palestinians.

Especially disturbing to Israeli leaders was the loss of support among the Orthodox. The poll found that 52% supported the Rabin government at the onset of peace talks but that, by September, 64% opposed the way talks were going.

Still, several Southern California rabbis suggested Rabin’s death may have a unifying effect.

“The irony is that this assassination will draw the vast majority of Israelis closer together as a grieving community, and it will propel the peace process forward as a living tribute to the life of Yitzhak Rabin,” said Rabbi Allen I. Freehling of University Synagogue in Brentwood.

Rabbi Harvey J. Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple agreed. “Certainly to American Jews, there has to be a sense of pulling together.”

Fields, who spoke from the East Coast, where he had stopped on his return from a trip to Israel, said the death of a national hero was bound to sober the rhetoric of the right as well.

“I think the opposition if anything will probably begin to sense the danger of heating up their own language and their own vitriol in a situation such as this and would if anything tend to calm the waters,” Fields said.

Times staff writers Bettina Boxall, Sharon Bernstein, Karen D’Souza, Peter Hong and Bob Pool contributed to this report.