Israeli Foes of Peace Process Now Face an Uphill Battle : Mideast: After Rabin’s assassination, Jewish settlers acknowledge that they are on the defensive.

Zeev Sharon looked out his living room window over the land that he believes the son of Isaac declared “the house of God” and shook his head at the crazy logic of secular Israelis.

The government is going to hold on to the part of Israel won in 1948 during the historic War of Independence, Sharon said in wonder. But it is willing to give Palestinians control of the land where the Jewish forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked millennia before?

“To give up the land of God, Beit El, Bethlehem, Hebron, the roots of the entire Jewish culture, the land God gave to us. . . ,” Sharon said. “Well, they aren’t going to be able to do it. It is going to be very hard, but we are going to win.”

Winning, to Sharon and to most of the 120,000 to 140,000 Jewish settlers like him in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, means bringing a halt to the peace process that slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin began with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1993. It means stopping the hand-over of land to Palestinians in the region the settlers call by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria, and preventing the evacuation of their Jewish enclaves.

But after the assassination of Rabin by a religious Jew who shares their views, the settlers acknowledge that they are on the defensive and casting about for a new political strategy.

With the assassination, the Green Line, which marks the border between the West Bank and Israel before the 1967 Mideast War, has become Israel’s Continental Divide--and the schism between religious and secular Israelis is deeper than ever.

The settlers have always viewed themselves as the true flag-bearers of Judaism and Zionism against a secular Israel that has lost its way.

Since Rabin’s slaying, instead of focusing solely on the issues involved in making peace with the Palestinians, settler leaders say they are stuck trying to persuade their fellow Israelis that they are not a breed apart.

“We don’t have horns and don’t walk around with grenades in our pockets,” said Josh Adler, a resident of Efrat, a well-to-do Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

“And it’s not like we’re squatters,” said his wife, Marilyn. “We came here under the auspices of many governments back to the 1960s. [Then-Prime Minister] Golda Meir signed the order for Efrat.”

*

To try to bridge the chasm, West Bank settlers are holding meetings with leftist kibbutzniks from the northern Galilee and organizing tours of the West Bank for secular Israelis, many of whom have not set foot across the Green Line since the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began in 1987. Kiryat Arba, a settlement outside the contested city of Hebron, is hosting a meeting of secular Scouts for Hanukkah.

“The key is to find the common denominator, the things that unite us as a Jewish people,” said Pinchas Wallerstein, one of the leaders of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, an umbrella organization that acts as a lobbying group for the settlers. “No one has changed their ideology, but now more than ever it is important that everyone understand we are the same people, the same nation.”

He said the council is now trying to distance itself from rightist extremists who challenge the legitimacy of the government.

Clearly shaken by Rabin’s assassination, he goes further than most of his fellow settlers in suggesting that he might be willing to recognize the peace agreement if certain compromises are worked out with the government.

But most settler activists acknowledge that they do not really know where to go from here.

Before the assassination, they were engaging in frequent demonstrations against the peace accord.

Last summer, they began illegally occupying barren West Bank hilltops, forcing soldiers to drag them off and the government to arrest them. Some were blocking highways and demonstrating each week outside Rabin’s house, often calling him a “traitor” and “murderer.”

Now they recognize that such tactics helped polarize the nation and did not further their cause. But they have yet to find a replacement plan.

What is the strategy against the peace accord today?

“That is a good question,” Efrat Councilwoman Eve Harow, who helped organize illegal demonstrations this summer, said with a sigh of frustration.

Although many settlers moved to the West Bank in the 1970s and 1980s primarily to take advantage of cheap housing and low-cost government loans, most mention religious reasons for undertaking the risks of living there and exposing their children to the threats of stoning and terrorist attacks from the Palestinian majority that wants them out.

Most settlers believe that the land captured from Jordan in 1967 was given to Jews by God and must stay under the control of Israeli soldiers rather than in the hands of 2 million Palestinians, who the settlers believe should acquiesce to Jewish rule or leave.

The settlers believe that the government does not have a big enough majority in parliament for the peace agreement, which cedes control over portions of that territory.

Their position has not changed with the killing of Rabin, but the political climate has.

*

Whereas a few months ago they felt confident that they could topple Rabin and his peace policy in next year’s election, they are less certain about their prospects against his successor, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a man whom they see as far savvier who is running his campaign in a nation in shock.

Beginning with Rabin’s widow, Leah, much of secular Israel has blamed the settlers and their political kin on the right for creating the climate of violence that led to Rabin’s killing.

As the government has arrested friends of confessed assassin Yigal Amir, rounded up right-wing extremists on outstanding charges and interrogated rabbis suspected of providing religious justification for the killing, the settlers have come to view themselves as victims of a witch hunt.

“It’s like the Christians who say the Jews killed Jesus Christ,” said Sharon’s wife, Osnat. “I didn’t kill Jesus Christ, and the same goes for Rabin. They blame all the settlers and all of the right.”

Which is not to say the religious mother of six children mourns the death of Rabin. Rather, she said she fears that if she expresses her real feelings, she will be jailed too.

Like many settlers’, her view of Rabin was set two years ago when Palestinians fatally stabbed Beit El resident Haim Mizrachi at a chicken farm across the road, and the prime minister criticized the dead settler for having sought cheap eggs on the Arab side.

“Rabin hated us,” Osnat Sharon said. “Why should I say I am sad [about his death]? He deserved it.”

Despite their personal dislike for Rabin, most settlers, including Zeev Sharon, an author and trained rabbi, emphatically condemn his assassination. They see it as a black mark on Jewish history and an ominous sign of a house divided. Moreover, it is a setback for their cause.

“Rabin’s assassination is a horrible disaster in all respects,” said Councilwoman Harow, a Los Angeles native with six children. “But the government is using this to get rid of opposition to an agreement that is still a lousy agreement in the eyes of half the people.”

Polls taken before the assassination showed that Israel was divided over the peace accord. Since the killing, support has risen dramatically.

Supporters generally believe that giving up the West Bank is a reasonable price to pay for peace with the Palestinians and a stable state of Israel. Opponents cite security concerns rather than religious ones for their reservations. They fear that Israel will give up the West Bank and still not have peace; instead, they fear that Arab terrorists will use Palestinian-controlled territory as a base from which to organize an attack, then flee to safety there.

The settlers’ position--that West Bank land must remain in Jewish hands--is a minority view.

Still, Rabin won parliamentary approval for the interim agreement he signed with Arafat in Washington in September by just one vote, with 61 of 120 members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, agreeing.

Five of the yes votes were from members of small parties representing Israel’s 800,000 Arab citizens. This is what settlers refer to when they say opponents of the peace accord have the Jewish majority--59 votes. Because of the Arab votes, they used to call the government peace accord “illegitimate.”

But now, in a concession to the times, they call it “technically legal but immoral.”

“The Arab Knesset members get their orders from Arafat,” said Beit El resident Tova Frankel, an American-born English teacher and the mother of six children. “They are anti-Israeli for all intents and purposes. Israel is supposed to be a Jewish country. The problem with democracy, if you have non-Jews living and getting full civil rights, is there’s a basic conflict of interest. . . . I don’t think pure democracy and a Jewish state can go together. They’re sort of mutually exclusive.”

*

Frankel views the government as a “a dictatorship dressed up as democracy, out to get everyone who does not agree” with it.

She points to what she considers the unfair arrest of fellow Beit El resident Margalit Harshefi, a friend of Amir’s who was detained on suspicion of complicity in the plot to kill Rabin.

After revelations that Amir’s friend Avishai Raviv was an informant for the Shin Bet secret service, many settlers have subscribed to conspiracy theories--that the government knew of plans to kill Rabin but allowed them to go forward, assuming that they could foil Amir and smear the right with the attempt. Some also believe that Amir had help from security agents who wanted a change of leadership.

Unlike Rabin, who had written off the settlers, Peres has tried to extend a hand.

He has visited the West Bank since taking office and is negotiating with the conservative National Religious Party, trying to win broader backing for the peace accord.

In an effort to reach out to the religious and settler communities, Peres appointed to his Cabinet the dovish Rabbi Yehuda Amital of Alon Shvut in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank.

But Frankel dismisses Amital as “the court Jew” who will be powerless and used by the government to win approval.

Settlers view such moves by Peres as proof that he is a more formidable opponent than Rabin was, cleverly trying to divide the opposition.

“Peres is smarter, and, for us, that is not good,” said Tsuriel Popovitch, a spokesman for the governing council in Kiryat Arba. “He isn’t going to call us names.”

Shifra Blass, a translator and mother of eight children in the settlement of Neve Tsuf, agreed: “We have 11 months until elections. Before that seemed too long. Now it doesn’t seem long enough.”

Settlers note that Peres is the intellectual architect of the peace agreement with Arafat and that he has hastened Israeli troop withdrawal from West Bank cities since the assassination.

Peres, they say, does not have the military experience that Rabin had and is even more willing than Rabin to bend over backward for peace with the Palestinians.

Six of the seven West Bank cities and most of about 400 Arab villages are to be under Palestinian control by the end of the month, so Palestinian elections may take place Jan. 20.

Israeli troops are to pull back from most of Hebron, the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, by the end of March. This amounts to 30% of the West Bank.

But under the accord, Israeli troops will continue to withdraw from open areas if Palestinian leaders show that they can control Palestinian terrorism against Jews.

In final-status negotiations with the Palestinians, which are to begin next year, a Peres government could be expected to annex some of the larger settlements to Israel, such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, and to give up many of the smaller ones.

Some settlers say they will abide by the will of the majority and move out of their enclaves if the government determines they must do so. Others say they are no more inclined to follow a government that tells its people to give up Jewish land than they would be to follow a rabbi who told them to eat pork.

For some, that means peacefully resisting evacuation, even if that requires going to jail for their beliefs. Settlers such as Councilwoman Harow in Efrat maintain their right to engage in civil disobedience and say they want to be able to tell their children that, when it came to protecting the settlements, “‘we tried.”

*

In Kiryat Arba, residents are organizing an armed civil guard that they say will act legally and help protect them after the Israeli army withdraws from surrounding areas.

But some Israelis fear that groups like this one could turn into a vigilante or organized resistance.

And in Kfar Tapuach, a stronghold of supporters of the outlawed, anti-Arab Kach movement that was expelled from the settlers’ council for publicly celebrating Rabin’s murder, residents vowed to keep on struggling against the “Bolshevik government.”

Rabbi Nachum Shifren, originally of Los Angeles, said, “We will keep on fighting as long as we live.”