Bombs’ Political Fallout Imperils Peres’ Support

Two suicide bombings that killed 25 people and wounded nearly 80 on Sunday threw Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ Labor Party on the defensive in an already bitter election battle with the rival Likud Party.

The political fallout from the attacks began even before ultra-Orthodox members of the burial society had finished collecting victims’ remains from a busy Jerusalem street and a soldier’s hitchhiking station in Ashkelon.

Surveying the grisly scene of the Jerusalem attack, a heavily guarded Peres was booed and jeered by an angry crowd. “Peres go home!” they shouted, and “Peres is next!”--a chilling reference to the last prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was slain Nov. 4 by a right-wing Jew who said he wanted to stop Rabin’s peacemaking efforts.

Militant Palestinians claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attacks, saying they were carried out to avenge the killing last month of Yehiya Ayash--a master bomb maker known as “The Engineer”--presumably by Israeli agents.

Sunday night, hundreds gathered at the bombing sites in Jerusalem and the coastal town of Ashkelon, reciting prayers for the dead, lighting memorial candles and weeping.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Peres’ chief rival in the race for the prime minister’s job, said he would make no political comment on a day when the nation was plunged into mourning.

“This is a day of unity of the ranks, and that’s what we’ll do,” Netanyahu said as he met with other leaders of Likud, which has stridently opposed Labor’s efforts to forge peace with the Palestinians.

But his partner, former Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, minced no words.

“It’s an illusion that the Palestinians will collaborate with us [to stop bombings],” said Eitan, leader of the far-right Tsomet Party, which recently teamed up with Likud for parliamentary elections on May 29. “They are all dancing on the blood. The peace process only weakens us.”

The bombings, carried out during the morning rush hour as the nation returned to work after the Sabbath, claimed more lives than any other attack on Israelis since the government signed a peace deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993. As in the past, the bombers chose targets likely to be crowded with soldiers returning to their bases after weekend leave.

In Ashkelon, police said they believe the attacker carried his bomb in a bag and wore an army uniform. He is believed to have mingled with the soldiers before detonating the explosives.

Twenty-three people, including the bomber, were killed in Jerusalem, and 50 were injured, more than a dozen critically. In Ashkelon, two were killed, including the bomber, and 29 injured. Among the dead in Jerusalem were two American students, identified as Mattityahu Eisenfeld, 25, of Hartford, Conn., and his girlfriend, Sarah Duker, 22, of Teaneck, N.J.

In Washington, President Clinton condemned the attacks, saying, “These brutal acts of terror . . . offend the conscience of the world. They must be condemned. They must be brought to an end.”

PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat called the bombings “a crime, not only against innocent people but the peace process in its entirety.” His advisor, Nabil abu Rudaineh, told Voice of Palestine Radio that Arafat called Peres to offer his condolences to the families.

Police said the 22-pound bomb carried onto the No. 18 bus in Jerusalem was packed with nails and ball bearings to make it more deadly when it exploded. The force of the explosion ripped the roof off the bus, and some body parts were found in nearby trees. Pathologist Yehuda Hiss said some of the bodies were being reconstructed through the use of DNA testing.

In a leaflet issued in Jerusalem, the Iziddin al-Qassam military unit of Hamas took responsibility for the bombings, saying they were meant to avenge the Jan. 5 slaying of Ayash in the Gaza Strip. Ayash, believed to have manufactured seven bombs used in suicide attacks on Israelis, died when a booby-trapped cellular phone exploded in his hand.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad blamed Israel for Ayash’s death, and no Israeli official ever denied responsibility.

Hamas officials reported Sunday that Palestinian police began arresting members of Iziddin al-Qassam in the Gaza Strip after the bombings. Israeli security officials said they believe one of the bombers was from Gaza and the other from Hebron, a West Bank town still under Israel’s control.

Sunday’s attacks came at a time when Peres and Labor are promising to push ahead in peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians and Arab states, and when the Likud is painting itself as more concerned with ensuring the security of Israelis than with making peace with Arabs.

Israelis on the right and left of the political spectrum said Sunday that the bombings will probably hurt Labor and Peres in the upcoming election.

“I’m afraid it will,” said Boaz Hadas, a 26-year-old Hebrew University student who voted for the left-wing Meretz Party in the last elections and is unsure whom to support this time. “I really hope that both the government and the Palestinian Authority will be wise enough to do the right things, to give the public the feeling that things are getting better.”

Standing at a bus stop, Hadas said that no Jerusalemite could help but be shaken by the ferocity of the attack.

“My wife takes the No. 18 every day,” he said. “I’ve been thinking all morning of my friends, thinking about which of them might have been on this bus. It creates a bad atmosphere toward the government. I heard people shouting things about Shimon Peres this morning that we haven’t heard since Rabin was killed.”

Down the street, at the vegetable stand he owns, Tsomet supporter Asher Bezalel, 30, said he feels certain that more voters will now swing their support to right-wing parties.

“We cannot live with animals. These are not people who do these bombings, these are animals,” said Bezalel.

Peres had worked hard to avoid just the sort of bloody spectacle that filled Israeli television screens and dominated state-run radio all day Sunday.

In recent meetings with Arafat, Peres said, he has urged a crackdown on Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad, and has provided specific information from Israel’s intelligence services on would-be attackers.

Political sources said the prime minister had repeatedly emphasized to his own aides his fears of the political damage a terrorist attack could do to him and to Labor. Housing Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer went so far as to suggest several weeks ago that the government simply ban Palestinians from entering Israel until after the elections, and pay compensation to the Palestinian Authority for lost wages during that period.

The idea was hooted down at the time by other party officials. But one of Peres’ first moves Sunday, in the wake of the double bombings, was to place a ban on the more than 50,000 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank who cross daily into Israel to work.

The army had lifted an 11-day closure Friday morning that it said was imposed because an attack was expected. About 30,000 workers who had gone to jobs inside Israel on Sunday morning began flooding back into the West Bank and Gaza as soon as the bombings were reported.

In an Israeli Cabinet meeting held after the bombings, several ministers demanded that the new closure be kept in place indefinitely.

“We cannot live with attacks coming from the territory held by the Palestinian Authority,” said Hagai Merom, a Labor Party member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “We cannot go on without providing security to the last Israeli citizen, even if this means closure from now until further notice. I’m against open borders.”

Riding high on a wave of public sympathy in the wake of Rabin’s assassination, Peres decided earlier this month to move up the elections from October to the end of May. Polls have consistently shown Peres leading Netanyahu by between 11 and 20 points in the race for the prime minister’s office. This will be the first election in which Israelis vote directly for prime minister in a ballot cast separately from the ballot for parliament.

Polls also show that Labor and its allies should capture enough seats to easily form the next government. But all that could change in the wake of Sunday’s carnage, the first bus bombing by Hamas since Aug. 21.

“The struggle against Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism is long, stubborn and painful, but I have no doubt that we shall win, even though--regrettably--there will be victims,” a grim-faced Peres told a news conference after Sunday’s Cabinet meeting.

Peres said the attacks will not stop his peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians. He said Israel’s scheduled March 26 withdrawal of most of its troops from Hebron, where about 400 Jewish settlers live in the heart of a Palestinian town, will take place on time. But he suspended ongoing talks on economic and other issues with the Palestinians.

“The question that we are putting forth is, who stands behind this incident and who benefits from this action when we are on the gates of Hebron, ready to take over?” said Rudaineh, Arafat’s advisor. “Who benefits from preventing 70,000 workers from going to work?”