News Analysis: Rabin Pushes `separation’ Concept After Attack Leaves Government Reeling

The suicide bomb that took at least 19 young lives at the Beit Lid Junction on Sunday has left the nation with an overwhelming sense of bereavement and despair, and has brought the Rabin government closer than ever to collapse.

“If I were an insurance company,” columnist Yoel Markus wrote in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz this week, “I wouldn’t issue this government a life-insurance policy.”

Despite Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Knesset majority, the veteran journalist predicted, something will happen to bring him down. He has lost both the public’s confidence and the confidence of his own party.

Yet this latest Islamic fundamentalist terror outrage, while further sapping the government’s political strength, may be providing Rabin and his ministers with the opportunity – perhaps their last – to take momentous and confidence- restoring decisions.

According to Cabinet sources midweek, the prime minister, together with senior ministers and defence aides, is actively considering proposals to build a border fence between Israel proper and the West Bank.

This idea is replete, of course, with complex political and practical ramifications.

Inevitably, it would be seen as an Israeli move to delineate unilaterally its vision of the “permanent status” of Israel’s borders.

And it would catapult to front and center the issues of the settlements and Jerusalem — the very issues that Israel and the Palestinians, in their 1993 agreement, agreed to defer to the last stage of their negotiated peace process.

Rabin himself, in a rare and not wholly successful television address to the nation Monday night, spoke of the need for “separation” between Israelis and Palestinians.

“I am convinced that the course which this government is steering, the course that seeks to bring to an end our forcible rule over another nation – and the Palestinians in the territories are another nation, different from us religiously, politically and nationally this course must lead to separation, though not along the lines of the 1967 order,” Rabin said.

“Jerusalem will remain united forever, and the defense border of Israel will be situated on the Jordan River.

“We want to bring about separation between you and us,” the premier continued, addressing the Palestinian people. “We do not wish that the great bulk of the Jewish populace, 98 percent of whom live within the Green Line, be prone to terror attacks. In the short term and in the longer term, we will reach separation between us.”

Rabin’s words were less than specific. Where precisely will the separation be? And when? And how?

Informed sources say the premier was reflecting an ongoing debate in his highest policy-making circles, a debate that has been greatly accelerated and intensified by the mass murder perpetrated Sunday at Beit Lid.

These sources say the scheme, in principle, has the strong support of the army, the police and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency.

The concept of a physical division between, on the one hand – sovereign Israel greater Jerusalem and the bloc of settlements just across the Green Line near Kfar Saba – and, on the other hand – the rest of the West Bank is tenable, of course, only in the context of an eventual elimination of Palestinian “guest workers” in Israel.

But both the idea of a fence and the idea of banning Palestinian workers contravene the vision of a regional common market, with a free flow of people and goods, that underlies the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles and much of the subsequent negotiations.

For this reason, the scheme has encountered reservations from such a die-hard dove as Foreign Minister Shimon Peres – despite the fact that its implementation would catalyze the peace process. ..TX.-The Cabinet, in an initial discussion of the “separation” idea in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s bombing, found itself divided along unfamiliar lines.

While many of the most dovish ministers – including Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni and her colleague Amnon Rubinstein – broadly favored the idea (as did some of the more hawkish ministers), other soft-liners like Peres were circumspect.

In the absence of a specific and detailed proposal from the prime minister on a long-term separation, the debate among the ministers focused on whether the closure of territories, imposed almost immediately after the Beit Lid attack, should be of short or long duration.

Those favoring the “separation” concept also supported an open-ended closure – despite the economic hardship this would inevitably bring upon Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank who work in Israel.

Their support also comes despite the fact that a closure can be seen – and indeed has already been defined by the Palestinian Authority – as a violation of the Declaration of Principles.

Informed sources say Rabin and his advisers will continue their secret deliberations in the days ahead, with the premier having to decide whether to put up a comprehensive, long-term separation proposal for Cabinet approved.

Meanwhile, the Cabinet has approved a series of measures intended to intensify the war against the fundamentalists:

Widespread arrests of known Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists throughout the territories;

Closure by the army of religious and social centers run by these two movements – marking the hrst time action is being taken against these institutions;

Cancellation of budget cuts affecting Shin Bet and the police that had been agreed upon just a week earlier in the context of overall spending reductions by the government;

A forceful demand to the Palestinian Authority to take its own tough measures against the fundamentalist movements inside the autonomous areas.

The prime minister, in his televised address, sought to comfort the nation and at the same time instill it with a renewed faith in the overall movement of the region toward peace.

He spoke of the century-long struggle between Jews and Arabs and assured the public that the army would eventually destroy the fundamentalist terror apparatus.

But the effect of his appearance was weakened because of the uncertainty over the implications of his “separation” concept and because he refused to take questions from reporters waiting outside his office.

The Likud opposition taunted him for this, and for his decision not to make the statement in the Knesset – where he would doubtless have faced a barrage of heckling from opposition benches.

Government sources maintain, though, that the “separation” concept presents the opposition, too, with awkward choices.

The rightist and religious parties are ideologically committed to a Greater Israel and are also committed in practice to preserving all of the settlements.

Yet, as Rabin pointedly mentioned, most Israelis live inside Israel proper – and their chief concern is personal security.

If “separation” can enhance that security for the majority – the Likud and Orthodox parties would be hard put to oppose it,