YITZHAK Rabin and Shimon Peres may have been partners on the road to peace. But their visions of the scene at the end of their treks were diametrically opposed.
Mr Rabin envisaged Israel relinquishing West Bank territory, and then erecting a fence to separate Palestine from sovereign Israel. Mr Peres dreamed of open borders, free trade, and full integration.
Yesterday, after a Hamas suicide bomber struck again in Jerusalem, killing 18 innocent passengers on another city bus, Mr Peres finally abandoned his vision in favour of Mr Rabin's.
Eyes blazing with anger at this latest calculated act of Hamas viciousness, Mr Peres announced that he had given his approval for an $80 million separation programmed the construction of a barrier between the West Bank and sovereign, Israel intended to exclude Palestinians from Israel on at least a semis permanent basis.
Some of the other measures be introduced simultaneously - including a hugely increased police deployment in Jerusalem, a resumed policy of sealing or demolishing the bombers' family homes, the veiled threat to send troops back into Gaza if Yasser Arafat did not now confront Hamas sounded more sensational. But the introduction of the separation plan was surely the most significant, because it marked recognition by Israel's greatest peace optimist that the hatreds on both sides of the Israeli Palestinian conflict are too deep for integration to be viable.
Equally significantly, approval of the plan underlines Mr Peres's fading trust in the partner with whom Mr Rabin embarked on what he called the "gamble for peace". No Israeli, and certainly not Mr Peres had ever expected Mr Yasser Arafat's security forces to thwart every attempt to attack targets inside Israel. But those Israelis who have backed the peace process, with Mr Peres at their fore, did expect, him to try. And to many of them yesterday's bombing of Egged bus No 18 near the main post office on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road showed that the Palestinian leader had not even been trying.
AT AN extraordinary, bad tempered meeting last Tuesday on the Israel Gaza border, Gen Amnon Shakak, the Israeli army chief of staff, gave Mr Arafat a list of more than a dozen names of alleged Hamas bombing organisers, and details of their hideouts. Track them down and imprison or extradite them, the Israeli general demanded of the Palestinian leader. But although Mr Arafat ordered literally" hundreds of arrests last week, none of those taken into custody were the hardcore militant activists whose names were on that Israeli list.
The suicide bombings of 1994 and 1995 reduced support for the peace process to barely 50 per cent. Revulsion prompted by last November's assassination of Mr Rabin pushed it back up to more than 70 per cent. But now it is plummeting rapidly, as Israelis lose their confidence in Mr Arafat and in the feasibility of the autonomy process.
The usual hot heads were out shouting at the bomb site in Jerusalem yesterday, chanting "Death to the Arabs" and "Peres, go home" even as the mangled bodies of the latest victims were being gingerly separated from the twisted metal strips of the bus frame. But there were other Israelis out there too - not shouting, not pushing, not waving placards. Ordinary, mainstream citizens, looking in horror at the smashed shop and office windows all along the street, at the burial squad members scratching bits of human flesh off of the road signs and drawing their own pessimistic conclusions.
Once again yesterday the opposition leader, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, gave his uncritical backing for Mr Peres's moves to improve security, and refrained from criticising the peace process he has, steadfastly opposed. He can afford to hold his fire. Mr Peres called elections for May 29th hoping the Rabin sympathy vote would lift him to victory. Now that sympathy has been wiped out, by Hamas bombers closer than ever before to achieving their goal of destroying the peace process.
