Family Fears Peace Moves Could Cost Barak His Life

JERUSALEM —  Caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has broken so many taboos in peace talks with the Palestinians that both the Israeli security apparatus and his family fear he could become the target of a right-wing assassin, just like his mentor, slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Michal Barak Lotenberg, the prime minister’s daughter, says she’s terrified by signs she has seen recently at right-wing rallies. They show the upraised, bloodstained hands of one of the Palestinians who lynched two Israeli soldiers in October, with the caption “Barak’s partner.”

“This not only makes me shiver, but almost brings me to tears, to a horrible feeling, after what we’ve been through in this country, a prime minister assassinated, and no one has seemed to learn a thing,” she said in an interview published Friday in the newspaper Maariv. “The danger is personal too. As his daughter, I worry about my father.”

Navah Barak, the prime minister’s wife, has been assigned her own bodyguard since her husband returned from the failed Camp David peace summit in July. What outrages her most, she told Maariv, is when demonstrators call her husband a traitor.

“This reminds me of the late Yitzhak Rabin very much,” she said. “When I see the demonstrations and the hatred in people’s eyes and the signs, I worry about our democracy, and worry about Ehud very much. I sit here at home and hear the voices coming from outside the house shouting out at him, and I hurt.”

Her words were eerily similar to those spoken by an emotional Leah Rabin at a candlelight vigil days after her husband was killed in 1995. “It’s a pity that you all weren’t here when there were demonstrators on the other side of the street here calling him a traitor and murderer,” she told the mourners. “‘It’s too bad that you didn’t come then.”

Concerns for Barak’s safety increased this week after Palestinians gunned down Binyamin and Talia Kahane near their West Bank settlement. Binyamin Kahane, son of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, had assumed the mantle of leadership of the extremist, anti-Arab Kach movement. The far right turned the couple’s funeral into a protest march by thousands of Kahane’s followers through the streets of Jerusalem. Some in the crowd attacked police and Arabs and vowed to seek revenge.

Since then, the General Security Service, or Shin Bet, has been on high alert, worried that far-right activists--whose rabbis have vehemently condemned Barak for his peacemaking efforts and for failing to quell Palestinian violence--might attack the prime minister.

So charged is the atmosphere in Israel now, said Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, that special precautions are being taken to protect Barak, who is always heavily guarded, as every Israeli prime minister since Rabin has been. But “as always, one man with a handgun is enough,” Sneh told the Reuters news agency this week. “What some--not all--right-wing protagonists are doing is to call the prime minister names like traitor. . . . It’s just the same vocabulary that was used against Rabin.”

A right-wing yeshiva student named Yigal Amir stepped out of the crowd as Rabin left a peace rally in Tel Aviv and shot him. The assassination shocked Israeli society, both because it was assumed that no Jew would strike out at one of the nation’s elected leaders and because the highly respected Shin Bet had failed either to detect Amir’s plot or to protect Rabin from the assassin.

Amir told his interrogators after his arrest that he killed the prime minister because Rabin had betrayed the Jewish people by ceding the West Bank town of Jericho and most of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. Amir said he acted after hearing right-wing rabbis declare that anyone who cedes the Land of Israel to the Gentiles, or non-Jews, may be killed under a controversial, ancient Jewish law, din rodef.

Barak, Israel’s most decorated war hero, has shown a willingness to make far more painful concessions to the Palestinians than Rabin ever did.

He has offered to hand over about 95% of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip and the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. He has broached the possibility of evacuating thousands of Jewish settlers from their homes. And most important for religious Jews and many secular Israelis, Barak has considered surrendering Israeli sovereignty over Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Israel’s chief rabbinate declared Thursday that for Israel to relinquish sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians would violate Jewish religious law. In response, Barak issued a statement saying he would not sign any document turning over sovereignty of the site to the Palestinians.

Hard-liner Ariel Sharon, who is expected to defeat Barak in a special election for prime minister next month, has denounced Barak for “conducting a clearance sale of all the national security and strategic interests of the state of Israel.” But he also has rebuffed those who call Barak a traitor and said that “militant words should not be used” about the prime minister.

Nonetheless, emotions are high. Thousands of right-wing Jews left their West Bank settlements en masse this week, heading for Jerusalem. The marchers plan to hold a mass rally and a march around the walls of the Old City on Monday that they hope will attract tens of thousands of protesters to declare their opposition to any surrender of the Temple Mount.

“The Temple Mount is the holiest spot in Judaism, with levels upon levels of religious significance,” said Gershom Gorenberg, author of a recently published book on the Temple Mount and its significance to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

“Its significance stretches from the beginning of time until the end of time,” Gorenberg said. Even secular Israelis are having a hard time digesting the notion of giving up the Temple Mount, Gorenberg said. It has become the embodiment of the Zionist enterprise to many, he said.

“I heard one guy saying to another on the bus the other day, ‘If we give it back, then why didn’t we just go ahead and settle in Uganda?’ ” Gorenberg said. For many religious Jews, then, particularly those who identify with the political right wing, it is unthinkable that Israel would consider granting control of the site to another nation.

‘If, in fact, Barak made an agreement that relinquished the Temple Mount, the fury at him on the right would be immense,” Gorenberg said.

As it is, he said, the anger being directed at Barak already equals what surrounded Rabin in the days before his assassination. “Obviously, it is a very volatile situation,” he said.

The chances of extremist action against Barak are so high, said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist who has written extensively on Israeli society, that he recently contacted Barak’s office to urge that the caretaker prime minister appoint three people “to take over if he is disabled” by an attack before the Feb. 6 election for premier is held.

For many ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, Ezrahi said, “Barak now represents paganism, un-Jewishness, the willingness to sell out to the goyim” that they have long despised in secular Israelis. “He is touching the holiest place for them. His history as a war hero means nothing for them. They are apolitical. They are defending the icons of their faith.”