After 10 days in hell, Prime Minister Shimon Peres is not politically dead yet. On the contrary, the 73-year-old Peres seemed to be bouncing back from the political nadir that followed the Feb. 25 and March 3 and 4 suicide bombings that rocked Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon, killing 58 innocent people and wounding more than 200 others.
Before the four suicide attacks, Peres had more than a 10-point lead over Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud rival in the race for the prime ministership.
But that lead eroded after the bombings, with some polls showing Netanyahu taking the lead.
But by last weekend, the polls put both candidates at a more or less equal level after Peres has bottomed out in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks.
Clearly, the political fight is far from over – despite the backlash against Peres that accompanied the enormous public trauma and anguish at the wave of terror.
Peres himself, according to close insiders, is in a fighting mood, assuring all those around him that the election battle is “far from over” and directing the massive Israeli crackdown against Hamas in the territories with vigor and confidence.
The opposition Likud attributed Peres’ comeback to the boost being given him by the anti-terrorism summit some 30 foreign leaders, including President Clinton, are expected to attend this week in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik.
But the state of Israeli politics – after two weeks of terror and some 2 1/ 2 months from the May 29 national elections – is more complex.
One reason for Peres’ strong standing, in the view of seasoned observers, is the pervasive sense of national crisis that engulfed the country after the bomb blasts.
Of the current gallery of political leaders, Peres is seen, even by many non- Laborites, as the most capable and experienced to handle such a situation.
Netanyahu, 46, suffers, in comparison, from his youth and lack of Cabinet experience.
This assessment of Peres seems even to be compatible, for some, with the belief that his policies brought on or exacerbated the recent terrorist assaults.
However, the question uppermost in everyone’s thoughts in the wake of the multiple disasters is what to do next rather than how Israel got to this point.
The answer, embraced by 85 percent of the public in recent polls, is “separation.”
Desperate to regain a basic sense of personal security in their own streets, the vast majority of Israelis now say they want, above all, to see their country physically separated from the Palestinian entity.
Whether that entity becomes an independent state is, increasingly, a matter of indifference.
Peres, like his late predecessor Yitzhak Rabin, was never attracted by the arguments of the separationists.
But now, Peres has been persuaded by his younger ministers that this is the way forward, both to reconstruct the shattered peace process and to win the May 29 election.
“Separation,” Peres mused Sunday night, “is paradoxical: when you fail [to live together], you need it; if it succeeds, you won’t need it any more.”
For the moment, most Israelis feel they need it.
And the government, in the context of its all-out war against Hamas terrorism, is flooding the West Bank border zone with army, police and helicopter patrols.
The purpose of this massive effort is to keep the Palestinians out.
To the same end, Israeli officials granted licenses this week for thousands more foreign workers to be brought in to work at low-paying Israeli construction and agricultural jobs in place of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The number of authorized foreign workers in Israel now exceeds 100,000; informed sources say the real total is much higher.
For Labor, with its essentially pragmatic approach to the question of the territories, separation is a policy and an electoral platform that can be adopted without difficulty.
All that is needed to capture the mood of the moment is to secure the money, workers and other required resources for separation projects so that the electorate can be convinced that now, at last, the government means business.
For the Likud and its allies on the right, however, the public yearning for separation poses problems.
Ideologically, Likud is still committed to a Greater Israel – and specifically, to the Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank.
Minister Yossi Beilin is touting a draft agreement with the Palestinian Authority’s Abu Mazen calling for the final border to run east of Ariel and the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank.
But the Likud is not prepared to forgo the rest of the areas of Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
The anti-terrorism summit also presented the Likud this week with a challenging situation.
Netanyahu could hardly come out publicly against President Clinton – or against the leaders of some 30 other countries – for “meddling” in Israel’s pre- election politics.
Such an attack would not be a good basis for diplomatic relationships if Netanyahu wins May 29.
Thus, the Likud leader left the grumbling over the conference to lesser lights in his party, men such as Knesset members Uzi Landau and Tzachi Hanegbi.
Netanyahu himself preferred to take a more detached stance, recalling that during the 1980s, when he was a diplomat in the United States and at the United Nations, he had urged international action against Arab terror.
But the Likud’s concerns – and hence Labor’s hopes – in connection with the Sharm el-Sheik conference do not focus solely on what may be no more than a photo-op in the sun.
More important to both parties is the fact that the conference reflects the body of world opinion, which is siding with the peace process that Peres and the late Rabin launched with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
That same message is hammered into Israeli heads and homes, night after night, on dozens of capable channels from the world over.
Israel is very much an open, cosmopolitan society.
The opening of ties, however modest, with Arab and North African states in the wake of the peace agreements has caught the imagination of ordinary Israelis and the business interest of the growing entrepreneurial sector.
Many people, who are far from being doctrinaire supporters of Peres or Labor, are loath to contemplate a return to isolation, to “fortress Israel,” to international cold-shouldering.
Labor, in its electoral campaign, will be pressing these points in an effort to counteract the aftershock of despondency and anger – at the Palestinians but also at the Peres government – that shook Israel after the terrorist bombings.
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