ROAD TO MIDEAST PEACE : Whether For or Against Talks, Israelis Are Concerned : Mood: Peace has not come quickly or, on some days, looked all that different from war. The nation is split over path to take.

By MARJORIE MILLER

Sept. 28, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TEL AVIV — When Tamar Einav saw Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reach across half a century of animosity to shake hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat two years ago, the 27-year-old artist believed it would bring a quick end to Israel’s bloodshed and a lasting peace.

Today, after prolonged negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, bitter public debate and eight lethal bus bombings by Islamic extremists in the course of those two years, Einav feels far less sanguine sitting down to watch Rabin and Arafat shake hands again.

“I still think this is the right thing to do, but it will take much more time than I had thought in the beginning. There is resistance here from the right wing and a fear of civil war between Jew and Jew,” Einav said. “Even among those who support the peace process, the bus bombings bring back all the fears of Arabs.”

Certainly, peace has not come quickly to Israel or, on some terrible days, looked all that different from war. Scores of Israelis have died during the process of ending the decades-old conflict with the Palestinians, and the September, 1993, Rabin-Arafat accord has deepened political schisms in Israel between liberal and conservative, secular and religious, dove and hawk.

Nearly two-thirds of Israelis live around Tel Aviv and along the developed Mediterranean coast, a Western world that often seems far from the deep hatreds of the West Bank land occupied by Israel in 1967. But according to most opinion polls, the country is evenly split over whether Rabin is on the right track, and one need not travel to Jerusalem to find opposition.

Down the street from where Einav sells her papier-mache crafts in an open-air market, contractor Moshe Sharvit, 56, sips espresso at an outdoor cafe and shakes his head in disgust over what he sees happening.

“I feel the land of Israel is slipping through my fingers with what they plan for us. I am absolutely against the next stage of this accord. I don’t trust the Palestinian people or their leaders,” Sharvit said.

“I would gladly return every major city in the West Bank if it guaranteed real peace and if Israelis could walk safely there. I don’t believe that is the case,” he said.

Security is the main issue for opponents and supporters alike.

Many Israelis worry that the government will give Arafat control over much of the West Bank under this second stage of the accord without gaining any ironclad assurances on security.

They believe that Arafat cannot control extremists bent on killing Jews--or may not want to. Instead, they say, his West Bank pseudo-state will serve as a haven for murderers fleeing after an attack.

Many also fear losing the West Bank as a buffer zone between Israel’s population centers and a hostile Arab world that could one day use Jordan as a staging ground to march on Israel. In their view, military strength is the only means of survival in the Middle East.

Supporters of the peace accord say might has never brought Israel peace and that Israelis will never be able to stop looking over their shoulders as long as they remain an occupation force. Seven years of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, demonstrated that.

No one, they add, is offering a viable alternative to the Rabin-Arafat accord for ending the bloodshed.

“I don’t know if this is working or not, but I know that we must try,” said Hana Goren, 37, a computer programmer. “I am sure that war does not work. Now at least we can tell our children and grandchildren that we tried.”

Her quiet hesitation is common among supporters of the unfinished peace process, while opponents generally have been louder in their firm convictions. Many of the 120,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank have occupied hilltops and taken to the streets to protest giving Palestinians control over lands that the settlers believe were deeded to Jews in the Bible.

A large number of settlers moved to the West Bank with a Zionist dream and government subsidies--from administrations that included Rabin as a member--to create “facts on the ground,” or a Jewish archipelago in a sea of Arabs. They set up communities in scattered, strategic locations and served as a front line in the country’s defense.

Now they are furious at what they view as a wrongheaded retreat. Calling the government illegitimate and Rabin a “traitor,” they are confronting Jewish police and their own army in a passionate drive to hold on to the area they refer to as Judea and Samaria. They are more radical in their tactics--even potentially violent--but they represent the views of many devout Jews.

“I was against this from the beginning,” said Miriam Metoudi, a 19-year-old mother wearing the modest dress and head cover of a religious woman in downtown Jerusalem.

“I know many things from the Torah. It is wrong to sign with Arabs or give them land. . . . We gave them several pieces--Gaza, Jericho--but they want more and more. It is our country,” Metoudi said.

In their own effort to sabotage the accords, the militant Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have planted human bombers on crowded public buses--young fanatics willing to tie explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up in a crowd of Jews.

That random tactic, which makes any citizen of Israel a potential target, has been horribly effective in raising Israeli fears.

“I knew there would be terrorist attacks from the Arab side because of the religious fanatics,” said Gideon Kertes, 40, a salesman in Tel Aviv. “They have gotten a lot stronger in this region. But the suicide attacks, they defy the reason, the logic, the understanding of someone who wants to live.”

Despite their fears, many Israelis support Rabin’s continuing negotiations with the Palestinians--even though they are not convinced the process will put a stop to terrorism.

A Haifa University “peace index” poll conducted a week after an August bus bombing in Jerusalem showed 53.4% of Israelis still supported the peace process. That was down from 54.4% in July, after a bombing in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, and 59.8% in June.

Almost 90% of respondents in the poll--a series of questions measuring sentiments on the peace process--said they did not believe the peace accords would end terrorism, but at the same time a majority believed attacks would continue at the same level or increase if negotiations were broken off.

Rabin has minimized political damage from terrorism, blaming the violence on enemies of peace. But the government has been less effective at communicating the benefits the accord has brought Israel even before there is full peace.

Health Minister Ephraim Sneh, a strong advocate of the peace process, ticks off the list with pride.

“We have peace with Jordan that is a direct outcome of the Palestinian peace agreement. There is a general opening to Israel in the world. We have more relations. There is new investment here. The famous handshake changed the atmosphere in the region,” Sneh said. “ . . . But I am not sure we have succeeded in making these results clear to Israelis.”

Some Israelis do see the change in the country’s booming economy, which has grown 5.5% each year for the past two years and is expected to increase by $15 billion this year alone.

Downtown Tel Aviv’s cafes and artisans’ market are bustling. Yet even Israelis supporting and benefiting from the peace process cannot agree on whether the objective is to see Arabs mingling peacefully with Jews on Israeli streets, or to separate and never see Arab faces again.

Miki Kehati, 31, selling picture frames and books at the market, believes the government’s program to separate Arabs and Jews with bypass roads through the West Bank is the wrong approach. “You can’t say, ‘I want to be at peace with you, but I don’t want to see you,’ ” Kehati said. “It’s wrong. It’s building walls.”

Up the block, in a plaza on Tel Aviv’s fashionable Sheinkin Street, musician Ephraim Shamir played with his 4-year-old son by a fountain and argued the opposite, that Israelis and Palestinians could arrive at a normal relationship only through separation.

Palestinians, he said, must have enough land to build an independent state with an independent economy that allows them to quit working for Israelis and depending on the enemy for their livelihood.

He compared the current situation to an adult who is forced to take money from parents he resents. “They feed you, and every time you eat, you hate yourself,” Shamir said.

Like some other Tel Aviv residents, he expressed disappointment that the peace process has not progressed faster. But realism has replaced the euphoria of two years ago, and he says that with time, peace will eventually become a reality.

“Negotiations are the drawing of the map, but on the ground life is full of hostilities and people of all kinds who have suffered and want revenge,” Shamir said. “I didn’t expect so much violence when this started, but we live in an area that has been very violent for thousands of years.

“Sometimes it has looked easier, and at other times it has looked like the process was going to die. But I think we will find a way.”

Times researcher Batsheva Sobelman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.