News Analysis: Israelis’ Message to Clinton: Tell Assad Peace Must Be Secure

The audience at Tel Aviv’s glittering new opera house fell silent as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin mounted the conductor’s rostrum Sunday night to deliver a speech inaugurating the hall.

The tension was almost palpable, and Rabin, not always a great orator, rose to the occasion.

“The greatest privilege,” he said, “is to belong to this people, the people of Israel.”

Time after time, he continued, the Israeli people are struck by cruel blows; but each time they rise up to overcome adversity and protect the values of their Jewish and universal heritage.

Many people in the hall wept, as did many thousands around the country who watched the prime minister’s brief, unscripted speech on television. It seemed to encapsulate, somehow, the see-sawing emotions that affected the entire nation in the wake of last week’s devastating suicide bombing of a bus in the heart of Tel Aviv.

The nation at large, drawing on that same fund of resilience and indomitable optimism, settled back in its collective armchair midweek to watch the historic signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, to which no less a figure than President Clinton was lending his presence.

Israelis are slowly recovering from last week’s terror attack. But the visiting American president, along with his interlocutors in Damascus and elsewhere in the region, would be terribly wrong if he concluded that the much-tried Israeli public can take endless punishment, that there is no breaking point.

ISRAELIS CANNOT TAKE ALL THE RISKS

Indeed, perhaps the most central message that Israel’s leaders were preparing to deliver to Clinton, and through him to Syrian President Hafez Assad and other key Arab leaders, is that the Israeli people will not — indeed, cannot — move on toward new risks and sacrifices in the peace process as long as more and more innocent names are added to the decades-long list of terror victims.

Granted, terrorism is not a threat to national survival, in the way that an all-out war can be. The peace process is primarily designed to end the possibility that war will ever again threaten the existence of the Jewish state, or force it to consider “doomsday” scenarios to destroy its enemies.

Rabin himself, in persuading the Israeli public to support his peace policies, often sought to make this distinction between the strategic dimension and the tactical one embodied in terrorist attacks.

But as he advances along the road to peace, Rabin is learning — and with him the nation — that while terror cannot, arguably, destroy a powerful state, it can destroy a peace process.

Whatever the strategic arguments in favor of the process, politics and psychology will over-whelm those arguments if the streets of Tel Aviv run red with innocent civilian blood.

That is the message that Clinton has been hearing from his own advisers as he prepares for his trip to the Middle East. And that is the message he will be asked to convey — as the highest-ranking and therefore most authoritative emissary in the world — to Assad and the others.

The Israeli people want peace, long for peace, await the moment when they can touch and taste the fruits of peace. But they will draw back if those fruits can only be attained at the price of more and more random victims to terror.

The strength and significance of public opinion is always crucial in a democracy at times of major governmental decision-making. But in Israel at this time, the public and its sentiments play an even greater and more direct role in the evolution of policy than in other similar situations.

This is because Rabin has solemnly pledged to go to the nation, in a plebiscite or in elections, when and if a land-for-peace deal with Syria has been hammered out.

President Clinton’s prime diplomatic purpose in embarking on this week’s trip — apart from his domestic political aims — is to nudge Syria, and Israel, toward precisely such a deal.

ASSAD MUST REASSURE ISRAELI PUBLIC

To do so, Clinton will have to make Assad see that the peace must appeal to and reassure the people of Israel.

Only if ordinary Israeli civilians can get into their cars in Tel Aviv and drive, via Syria and Turkey, on into Europe, will they be convinced that this is indeed real peace — a peace worth trading the precious Golan Heights for.

In the case of Jordan, where the enmity was of an incomparably lower intensity, this message was thoroughly understood by King Hussein.

He has been assiduously wooing Israeli public opinion in his speeches and public gestures. In a show of tangible results that every Israeli can appreciate, Jordan’s borders will open to Israeli tourists within weeks of ratification of the treaty.

The Jordan peace will certainly earn points for Rabin and his government. But his real test, of course, still lies ahead: the Syrian track.

And when, eventually, the prime minister submits for the approval of the people an accord with Damascus, he will be submitting, in effect, a peace package incorporating the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the peace with Jordan, a settlement (with Syria) of the Lebanon border problem — and the prospect of providing reasonable personal security for every Israeli citizen.

Advocates of the accord with Syria will invoke all these other elements in order to “sell” it to the Israeli public. Opponents will criticize those same elements in order to argue against it. The public, battered and traumatized by the recent wave of terror attacks, will be asked to judge.

Ironically, it was the Arabs who over all the years of failed peace attempts insisted on the principle of “comprehensive peace.”

Now, Israel is the side stressing the comprehensive, interlinked nature of the various evolving agreements.

Above all, the Israeli government, together with all its Arab partners in peace, must find the way to convince a solid majority of ordinary Israelis, war-weary but still wary, suspicious and grieving, that peace can really mean an end to the killing.