PERSPECTIVE ON ISRAEL : The Settlers’ Days of Grace Are Over : Jewish pioneering in the West Bank has lost its policy rationale. Peres has to stop the growth of this impediment to peace.

The succession of Shimon Peres to the position of prime minister is burdened by what the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin represents, both for Israel and for the prospects for peace in the Middle East. For, despite the accusations being leveled at opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and others, neither inciting words nor cruel effigies killed Rabin. He was assassinated because his reconciliation with the Palestinians threatened to redivide the Land of Israel by ceding some control in the West Bank to Palestinians, and thus upset what is for many Jews a divinely ordained program for the redemption of the Jewish people.

The assassin has been compared to Lee Harvey Oswald-- an isolated, marginal loner driven by some indecipherable ideological passion. In fact, Yigal Amir is Oswald’s exact opposite-- among the best and brightest of Israel’s “occupation generation,” an elite soldier imbued with a love for the Land of Israel and an intolerance of those who advocated its division.

Rabin knew better than most the costs of failing to challenge what he came to call in his last months “the hallucination of Greater Israel.” Twenty years ago, during his first term as prime minister, Rabin permitted extremists to establish the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh in defiance of government policy. The settlers were the vanguard of Gush Emmunim, “the Bloc of the Faithful,” who saw Israel’s victory in June, 1967, as a sign of God’s support for Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. They exploited the indecision and rivalries in the Rabin government and played on a basic Israeli identification with the “pioneering” spirit to create settlement facts on the ground.

For the next 20 years, during the stewardship of both Likud and Labor, settler activists took advantage of the combination of government exasperation tempered by sympathy to grow ever more successful and confident--so successful that today there are close to 150,000 Israelis living in 144 settlements scattered throughout the West Bank.

Likud governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars annually on settlement activity. The Rabin government continued this support. It is not the least of ironies that in the Oslo agreements with the Palestinians, Rabin won for West Bank settlements a measure of recognition and permanence that no other Israeli leader managed to achieve.

So confident are settlers of the government’s forbearance that they have grown used to breaking the law with virtual impunity, routinely assaulting Palestinians and encouraging rabbis who advise soldiers to refuse orders to dismantle settlements. Two prominent rabbis, including one considered a giant of religious law, have been accused by one of their own of sanctioning the murder of Rabin. In their view, Rabin’s “selling the Land of Israel” necessitated his death.

Rabin, until the day he died, was not prepared to invoke governmental authority or to mobilize the Israeli public to challenge the power of those for whom his policy of reconciliation with Palestinians was synonymous with treason. He viewed settlers, even the most extreme among them, as a problem limited to the context of relations with Palestinians, where their depredations, however repugnant, were tolerable. He made what sadly proved for him to be a fatal error by failing to understand the threat that devotees of Greater Israel pose to Israel itself.

The government of Shimon Peres has pledged a crackdown on the most extreme of the settlers and their rabbinical patrons. As the Israelis say, “we have been to this movie before,” most recently after the Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein in early 1994.

Peres has traditionally viewed settlements and settlers as a problem to be managed by negotiating a new relationship between them and the Palestinians. He believes that settlements can be permanently secured and expanded while satisfying Palestinian national aspirations. A close reading of the second Oslo agreement reflects that Yasser Arafat has accepted this seductive view.

Rabin’s assassination demands a different set of calculations by the new Israeli leader. Peres must stop coddling settlers and tolerating extremist rabbis, not because what they are doing is illegal, but because it is bad policy. He must stop subsidizing the expansion of settlements, because they undermine the possibility of peace with the Palestinians. And he must start to look at settlers not as instruments for Israel’s permanent control over the West Bank but as bearers of an ideology that cannot be appeased but must be fought and defeated.