Students at Jerusalem’s largest high school are keenly aware of the cost, in human lives, of their government’s attempts to push ahead with the peace process.
Six graduates of the Rene Cassin High School have died since last July while on military duty.
Two of them were killed in the Jan. 22 double suicide bombing at Beit Lid Junction near Netanya that claimed the lives of 21 Israelis, all but one of them soldiers.
Another graduate is currently in the hospital after being critically wounded during a clash in southern Lebanon.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin addressed the school’s students this week and urged them to have faith in the peace process.
“We have known the pain of terror before,” Rabin said. “Only now, there is hope for peace as well. I am willing to live with the contradiction-of the pain of terror on the one hand and the chance for peace on the other.”
Rabin used the speech to defend the continuation of the peace process, despite growing misgivings among Israelis following a wave of terrorist bombing by Moslem fundamentalists.
Recent newspaper polls have indicated that 50 percent of Israelis favor suspending talks with the Palestinians because of the ongoing series of terror attacks. ..TX.-Rabin told the students that Israel had no practical alternative to negotiating with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat.
To bolster his argument, he said that although 96 Israelis died in attacks by Islamic militants in 1994, PLO supporters were not involved in any of the incidents.
Stopping the process would only serve to create more acts of terrorism, he added.
But the students, still mourning the loss of their former classmates, had mixed reactions to Rabin’s statements.
Rabin “didn’t answer our questions. He just spoke like a politician and said things we already knew,” said 12th grader Doron Succi.
Another student, standing beside the school gates where the death notices of the two graduates killed in the Beit Lid attack still hung, described the mood at school.
“Students are very sad. They are in a panic,” she said. “Now we’re going to go to the army, and I’m afraid of what might happen to my friends, to people I know.”
Her classmate, Guy, agreed.
“It’s scary,” he said. “The last two students were killed in a terrorist attack, and not while they were fighting. It’s just bad luck.
“We have to cope with it, and keep on living.”
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