A MURDER FORESHADOWED

By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

THOUGH THE ASSASSIN WHO KILLED YITZHAK RABIN was a stranger to me, I feel in some sense that I know him, know something of the ecstatic rage and false love that summoned him to try to become a savior of Israel.

As a teenager in Brooklyn in the early 1970s, raised on stories from my father about hiding from the Nazis in a hole in the earth, I was drawn to the extremist politics of Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense League. I felt certain I inhabited an anti-Semitic world whose true intentions toward the Jews were unmasked at Auschwitz. I divided all of non-Jewish humanity into only two categories: those who actively try to destroy the Jewish people and those who silently applaud them.

Most of all I despised the "traitors" among us, Jews who were trying to ingratiate themselves with "the goyim" through a fawning and potentially fatal moderation. If the Jewish people was indeed an endangered species, in a world as inhospitable to them as Pluto is to humans, then anyone within the fold who threatened to undermine the Jews' resolve to withstand eternal siege was an enemy far more dangerous than the foe waiting outside the gates.

Yitzhak Rabin was murdered precisely because he violated the far right's most cherished assumption of Jewish separatism, dared to tempt the Jewish people with a life outside the fortress. Beginning with his 1992 Inaugural speech, he demanded that Israelis stop regarding themselves as a permanently ghettoized people and repudiate the biblical prophecy--or curse--that decreed that the Jews as a "people shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations." By their presence, the dozens of foreign leaders who came as mourners to Rabin's funeral disproved that prophecy.

If the mainstream right is to avoid being tainted with the acts of a lunatic fringe, it must repudiate the ideological assumptions that motivated me as a young extremist and that animate the Israeli far right today--especially the notion that the Jews are a friendless people, opposed by the entire world. And it must re-examine the consequences of centralizing the Holocaust in Jewish identity. Both Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer, and Yigal Amir emerged from politically right-wing "religious Zionism"--the community in which I was raised and which, perhaps more than any other, has absorbed the Holocaust into its world view. Mainstream right-wing leaders must tell their followers that the Holocaust belongs to the past and offers no blueprint for our future; that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty and military power has changed forever the ground rules of Jewish history.

But while the soul searching among Israelis needs to begin on the right, it cannot end there. Since Oslo, the government hasn't made the slightest effort to reach out to its opponents, to express sympathy for their grief at the imminent loss of the biblical heartland for which Jews yearned for centuries. Instead, the 140,000 settlers--as diverse a group as the rest of the Israeli population from which they've been drawn--have been systematically stigmatized and ostracized, made to feel that they are no longer quite Israeli citizens. In recent months I have heard Israelis say with reference to ultra-Orthodox Jews that one can begin to understand the Nazis; that settlers killed in Palestinian terror attacks got what they asked for. Though few countries face such complex dilemmas as does Israel, we have become a nation of one-dimensional ideologues. Just as the left is raising key moral questions about the West Bank occupation, the right is raising valid security concerns about the West Bank withdrawal. Israelis questioning the wisdom of their government shouldn't be branded as accomplices of Yigal Amir.

For all the very real threats facing Israel from a West Bank withdrawal, the greatest danger by far is the breakdown of Israeli society into warring tribes. I want to believe that Israelis will recoil from that abyss. My own transformation owes itself, in part, to an incident that foreshadowed the Rabin assassination. It happened one night in 1983, shortly after I'd moved to Israel from New York and had begun working as a journalist. A right-winger threw a grenade at a left-wing "Peace Now" demonstration, killing one Israeli. I rushed to the scene. Dazed demonstrators held each other; on the ground were pools of blood, in which floated syringes left behind by medics. Nearby was a small group of right-wing counterdemonstrators who'd come before the attack to taunt the leftists. They were still chanting, as though nothing had happened. "A Jew was killed here tonight," I said to them. "Who sent you here," a teenage right-winger responded, "Shimon Peres?" His friends laughed.

That laughter in that place was for me the final wrenching, the moment when, after much soul searching, I severed my emotional ties with the right. Since then, I've become suspicious of any ideologues who promise me that their way will guarantee Israel's future. Being a centrist in today's Israel means feeling the country's debate raging inside yourself, and acknowledging conflicting truths; the Israeli center is becoming an increasingly lonely place.

Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, just published by Little, Brown and Co.