Apprehension Follows Shock Among Israelis

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has left Israelis feeling vulnerable and exposed, convinced that the slaying is a turning point in the nation’s history, uncertain of what the future holds.

In the past, crises drew Israelis together because they were triggered by external foes--Arab armies or Arab terrorists. Murderous attacks would at least momentarily dissolve the nation’s many internal differences as its citizens united to face the common threat.

But this time, the enemy came from within. The gunman was a right-wing Jewish fanatic, a law student educated in the elite institutions of the nation’s religious school system. Rabin’s killing is a national watershed. But no one knows whether it will lead to further strife or bring about some sort of national reconciliation.

Even before the slaying, the nation was engaged in a bitter internal exchange of recriminations and accusations. There is no consensus on who is to blame for Rabin’s killing. And there is no consensus on how to ensure that there will be no more political violence.

Some politicians have compared the shock of Rabin’s slaying to the shock Israel felt when the October, 1973, Yom Kippur War erupted. In the aftermath of the surprise attack by the Syrian and Egyptian armies that initially overwhelmed Israel’s defenses, Israelis turned their wrath on the Labor government that had allowed the nation to be caught off guard.

“After the Yom Kippur War, the people felt that they had been lied to and deceived by their government. It was the beginning of disillusionment with the army, with the Labor Party, with the contact between ruled and rulers,” said Galia Golan, a political scientist at Hebrew University and an activist in the Peace Now movement.

But the public anger over the Yom Kippur War could be directed toward forcing officials to resign and, ultimately, toward ousting the Labor Party in 1977 parliamentary elections.

This time, Golan said, the shock comes from the realization that there is something seriously wrong with a society that has allowed its political life to become so violent that assassinating the prime minister became an option. This time, it is harder to figure out where to direct the anger and how to purge the corruption.

“People of all ages are saying: What have we done? What kind of society are we? How did we create these monsters?” Golan said. “This time, there is bewilderment.”

“What is going on now is not just a mourning for Rabin. People are mourning for national solidarity, which they feel is gone,” said Ephraim Yaar, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University and head of the university’s Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research. The center conducts monthly surveys of the public’s attitude toward the peace process.

The thousands who continue to gather at Rabin’s home and at his burial site “are looking at least as much for themselves and each other as they are looking to mourn Rabin,” Yaar said. “They want to pull the people together and enhance social solidarity.”

Uppermost in people’s minds now is the fear that confessed assassin Yigal Amir’s attack may not be the last act of political violence as the nation continues to move toward peace with its neighbors. Some political analysts say those fears are well grounded.

“The greatest danger right now is not of civil war,” said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a senior lecturer in political science at Hebrew University and a specialist on political violence. “It is that these groups--these small, right-wing groups that believe that political violence is justified--will kill others.”

A political subculture exists in Israel that has for years viewed violence as an acceptable political option, Wolfsfeld said.

“There has been a lot of tolerance in this society for such groups,” he said. “Even after Baruch Goldstein, people said that he was a crazy man and went on about their business.” Goldstein killed about 30 Palestinians in February, 1994, as they prayed in the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron.

“If they do that again now, it is a tragic mistake,” Wolfsfeld said. “The government has to get serious about dealing with these criminal groups. The more desperate they become, the more acts they will try to carry out against Arabs and Jews.”

Both the left-wing parties and the mainstream opposition parties are making a mistake by engaging in mutual recrimination over Rabin’s killing, Wolfsfeld said.

“They should join together and both pledge to fight fundamentalism,” he said.

But right-wing politicians insist that Amir, the confessed assassin, acted on his own and represents no one. And left-wing politicians--led by Leah Rabin, the slain prime minister’s widow--are holding the entire right half of the political spectrum accountable for her husband’s slaying.

“One thing must be made clear. The first political assassination in the country’s history is not the doing of one man,” said Zeev Sternal, a Hebrew University political scientist. “This is the horrid offspring of an intellectual, moral and political climate.”

“Even before the assassination, at the peace rally that Rabin was attending in Tel Aviv, where 100,000 people turned out, the left displayed a newfound sense of confidence,” said David Clayman, Jerusalem director of the American Jewish Congress.

The mass turnout for the pro-peace rally restored the left’s political self-confidence, Clayman said. Rabin’s assassination restored a sense of moral superiority that for so long had belonged to the right, he said.

“The right liked to portray the left in this country as decadent,” Clayman said. “The right was seen as somehow morally pure, the true Zionists.

“But since the assassination, we have seen on our television screens night after night young people from the left speaking sensitively and with great understanding and great patriotism about their concern for the nation. It is the right that is looking morally bankrupt now.”

Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres is under pressure from his party to call early elections to take advantage of the public outrage at the right, but he has already said, publicly and privately, that he will use the last year of this government’s mandate to push the peace process forward and will neither hold early elections nor try to create a broad-based government of national unity.

“At my age, I am not thinking 30 or 40 years ahead,” the septuagenarian Peres is said to have told senior government officials in a closed-door meeting Monday. “I have a year to speed things up, and there is no reason why I shouldn’t use it.”

But Peres heads a government that exists by the slimmest of margins--it has only 61 votes in the 120-seat Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. So he is already quietly making overtures, through intermediaries, to small ultra-Orthodox parties and even to the National Religious Party, bastion of the religious nationalist camp, in an effort to widen his majority.

Times staff writer Marjorie Miller contributed to this report.

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