COLUMN ONE : Israelis Confront the Heart of Hatred : Contempt for Rabin festered in religious schools and the right. Now a nation wonders why extremism went unchecked and how to defeat it.

In her grief, Leah Rabin was bitter, and she let the mourners who wept and held a candlelight vigil outside her home know it.

“It’s a pity that you all weren’t here when there were demonstrators on the other side of the street here calling him a traitor and murderer,” she said, her voice choking with emotion. “It’s too bad that you didn’t come then.”

The following day, as the nation buried assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Monday, many Israelis were forced to ask themselves: Where, indeed, were they these past two years? Why were they placid as the line between legitimate political protest and violence blurred and then disappeared? And what should they do now to deal with the sort of hatred that some among them were still openly expressing toward Rabin--a Jew slain by a Jew--even as world leaders paid their last respects?

Opposition Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu took the first step Sunday, announcing that his party would not challenge any government that acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres might form. In democracies, Netanyahu said, governments should only be changed through elections, and the assassin should not be rewarded by the fall of the Labor Party government.

“The country has lost its innocence,” said Harry Wall, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Israel office. “This requires a national heshbon nefesh , a national soul-searching. The rules of political debate are going to have to be re-examined.”

But others were short on answers when asked what could be done immediately to restore civility as the rule in public debate. Even at Rabin’s grave there were scuffles Monday evening as opponents of the peace process disrupted prayers by the hundreds of ordinary Israelis who had come to lay bouquets of flowers, light candles and pay their last respects.

And there was little to suggest that the soul-searching that began as soon as Rabin was pronounced dead would produce lasting changes in a culture riven by political, religious, ethnic and economic divisions.

On Monday, the independent newspaper Haaretz published a chronology, stretching back to Sept. 8, 1994, of what it said were incidents of incitement or attacks against Rabin. The implication was clear: If the events were recorded, why did they not spur the nation’s political leaders and others to action?

“I think that Israelis have always assumed that even though the arguments get very angry here, there was a limit beyond which no one would dare go,” Wall said. “It is a small Jewish country. You expect that people will scream at each other, but you never expect it to get violent.”

In October, 1994, according to the Haaretz chronology, a death certificate for Rabin was circulated in the Jewish settlements, listing suicide as the cause of death. This summer, mock shekel bills were printed and circulated in the settlements. On them were the words: “Kill Rabin, shoot soldiers who evacuate settlements.”

But when the head of the General Security Service, or Shin Bet, privately met with heads of all Israeli political parties in August and pleaded with them to tone down the rhetoric, his message was leaked to the media and he was ridiculed as an alarmist. President Ezer Weizman was criticized repeatedly in recent weeks by members of his ruling Labor Party when he warned that the country was dangerously divided and called for the formation of a government of national unity and a slowing of the peace process until the situation stabilized.

Since Rabin’s assassination Saturday night, the left has been leveling angry accusations at even the mainstream opposition party, the Likud, for having tolerated the increasingly vitriolic attacks on Rabin and then-Foreign Minister Peres by opponents of their peacemaking efforts. On the right, there were accusations of a witch hunt and claims that Rabin could have avoided assassination if he had not alienated the right by scorning their opposition to his policies and refusing to take seriously their fears.

Leftists and members of the government extended their criticism to the national religious education system--which operates parallel to the secular state school system, with government funding, but with autonomy to pick its own administrators and teachers and to develop its own curriculum. They also criticized the private university, Bar Ilan, where assassin Yigal Amir was a law student.

“Yigal Amir sat in the yeshiva [religious study center] of Bar Ilan and said that Rabin should be killed,” Tourism Minister Uzi Baram said. “Had he eaten tref [non-kosher food], he would have been thrown out. But he said that Rabin should be killed, and nobody threw him out.”

Avraham Burg, a Labor Party member and chairman of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, the massive bureaucracy that serves as a link between world Jewry and Israel, was even harsher in his condemnation of Bar Ilan, a private university with a nationalist-religious bent that was established as an alternative to the more liberal state universities in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.

“There is a continuous line from Tehran to Bar Ilan,” Burg said. “There is no difference whatsoever between [the extremist group] Islamic Jihad and Jewish jihad. This democracy should defend itself against Jewish fundamentalist jihad as fiercely as it defends itself against Islamic Jihad. It must make a decision that these people [Jewish extremists] are the enemies of this society. They are not anymore the good boys.”

Bar Ilan’s faculty and administrators have strongly rejected the charge that the university fostered or tolerated violent groups or individuals. Students erected a sign in front of the School of Law saying: “Our hands did not spill the blood.”

“My mind cannot bear the thought that such a man could have found his place in this university,” Bar Ilan’s president, Prof. Shlomo Eckstein, told students at a campus assembly Sunday. “We raise the flag of understanding, dialogue and building of bridges between people of various views. We tried, in addition to academic education, to instill in the mind of every student a sense of the love of Israel and of the individual, any individual.”

But some law students who studied with Amir gave interviews to Israel Radio and Television, alleging that debates about whether it was worthwhile to kill Rabin were commonplace in some circles of far-right students on campus.

The criticism of religious schools and Bar Ilan is sending nationalist-religious Israelis into something like a state of panic, fearful that they will be targets of a backlash after the assassination.

“My children were jeered in Jerusalem when they went to view the prime minister’s coffin, because they were wearing knitted kippot [skullcaps],” said Yehiel Leiter, spokesman for the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, a Jewish settlers organization. In Israel, a knitted skullcap commonly identifies its wearer as a member of the nationalist-religious camp.

“People shouted at them that they were murderers. We are getting reports of these incidents from all over the country,” Leiter said.

Leiter rejected the notion that the heated rhetoric used by the political right against Rabin since the September, 1993, peace treaty between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization created the atmosphere that led to his assassination. The right has no monopoly on fierce rhetoric, Leiter said, and political arguments, no matter how intense, do not inevitably lead to political assassination.

“Rhetoric isn’t to blame,” he said. “What is to blame is a deranged mind.” Had Amir been more actively involved with the right-wing opposition, Leiter insisted, he would never have resorted to assassination in an effort to stop the peace process.

“The culture of our opposition has been one of protesting in the context of the law, of Jewish tradition,” Leiter said.

But Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein said he believes that the tone of protest by the right raises grave questions not only about the nature of political discourse in Israel but about the nation’s educational system.

“The crucial majority, above 80% of our student body, have no problem with the concept of the rule of law, with the notion of tolerance, of supporting democracy. In many ways, they are a model student population,” Rubinstein said.

“But we have a very extreme right-wing minority who have also a role in the school system, particularly the national religious school system,” he said.

“Some of them are inculcated with anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian ideas at home, in their social environment, even in their synagogue, I am sorry to say,” Rubinstein said. “Faced with this, there is little that the school system can do. Can we re-educate the children of Kahane?”

Rabbi Meir Kahane, himself the victim of assassination five years ago, was the founder of the racist Kach movement, which advocates expelling all Arabs from Israel and the territories it occupies and using violence against Arabs or even Jewish leaders who it believes pose a threat to Israel.

Although Kach has been outlawed in Israel, its members still function openly as “former Kach members” and had taken to turning up at Rabin’s speaking engagements in the months before his death, heckling him and holding aloft posters depicting him washing his hands of Jewish blood.

In August, Binyamin Kahane, son of the late rabbi and leader of the Kach successor movement, Kahane Chai, which means “Kahane is alive,” told reporters that “many people think the solution is to kill Peres and Rabin.”

Avidor Askin, a Kach leader, displayed a prayer on Israel Television on Sunday night that he said the movement had instructed its members to recite months ago that called for an end to Rabin’s governance. He said he was “satisfied” that his prayers were answered by Rabin’s assassination.

Some teachers in religious schools have reported with alarm to the Education Ministry that their pupils were celebrating Rabin’s death. The teachers asked that psychologists and social workers be sent to help them deal with such reactions. Before Rabin’s burial Monday, the nation’s schools devoted sessions to discussions about democracy and the impact of political assassination on democracies.

Rubinstein said a fundamental problem is that the nation’s religious schools have autonomy within the Education Ministry under an agreement that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, signed with the national religious Establishment after the founding of the state. Under that agreement, the education minister has no power to hire or fire teachers or principals in the religious schools, Rubinstein said.

“It is not easy, but we are trying to introduce into the religious schools . . . courses on the importance of abiding the law, on nonviolence, on the sanctity of law in civil society,” Rubinstein said.

Given the deterioration in civil life, Rubinstein said, it may be time for the government to rethink its granting of autonomy to religious schools.

Zvi Wolff, an activist with the pro-peace religious movement Meimad, said that such a rethinking was needed long ago.

The principal of the state religious school his daughters attend spoke openly of Rabin as an evil man, Wolff said.

“Words are thrown out, and they don’t disappear,” he said. “A radical fringe will pick up the extremist implications of these words.”

Rabin’s assassination, Wolff said, is an outcome of a process that began in 1967, after Israel captured the West Bank during the Arab-Israeli War. For the first time, Wolff said, there was a chance for the nationalist-religious parties to reclaim parts of the biblical Land of Israel.

“The National Religious Party became radicalized after the 1967 war and wrested control of the national religious Establishment, including the school system,” said Wolff, who teaches Jewish studies at the liberal Pardess Institute. Before the 1967 war, the NRP was both the largest religious party and moderate enough to serve as Labor’s key coalition partner for decades. After the war, the NRP both grew more hard-line and diminished in importance as many religious voters drifted toward smaller and even more right-wing parties.

“They began educating toward and activating among students a total commitment to the Land of Israel and to the sanctity of the Land of Israel,” Wolff said.

Inspired by the vision of building settlements across the occupied West Bank, Wolff said, youth movements connected with the National Religious Party became more convinced of the messianic imperative of reclaiming that land as a key step toward redeeming the Jewish people.

“It swept away almost everything else,” he said. “To be a true Zionist was to go out on some hillside and build a settlement.”

Successive governments either encouraged that behavior or turned a blind eye to it, Wolff said, until Rabin formed a coalition after national elections in 1992 and set about making peace with the Palestinians based on territorial compromise. Rabin then started talking about the settlements as a security burden and ridiculed the settlers for practicing what he said was a false sort of Zionism.

“This all came to a head when push began to come to shove after the September, 1993, signing ceremony at the White House,” Wolff said. “Suddenly, the threat of giving back some of this land that for 20 years was the raison d’etre of the national religious camp was real.”

For Jewish settlers and many of their supporters, Rabin posed a threat not only to their physical existence, by being willing to cede land to the Palestinians, but to the spiritual redemption of the Jewish people, Wolff said. It was not hard to make such a person an enemy, even an enemy who must be stopped.

“What would you think of a person who was standing as an obstacle in the path to your redemption?” Wolff asked.

In a recent survey of public opinion on the peace process, the Steinmetz Institute at Tel Aviv University found that 13% to 14% of Israeli Jews support using illegal, even violent, measures to protest, said sociology professor Ephraim Yaar.

“For some small groups of radical people, the distance between various acts of violence and murder is not great,” Yaar said. “If 13% of the general Jewish public supports some kind of violent measures, within the radical religious groups this reaches up to 25%.”

For members of radical religious groups, “the basis from which they draw their legitimization and justification is a theological system of values, and this is not the value system of the democratic society,” Yaar said.

Burg of the Jewish Agency agreed with that assessment and said the time has come for Israel to root out the radical fringe.

“We must increase our surveillance of these groups, we must infiltrate their cells, we must bring them to justice,” he said before leaving his office to attend Rabin’s funeral. “This is not about freedom of expression anymore. It is about the survival of Israel as a democratic state.”