Israel: security vs. peace.

Israeli politics has an edge and a capacity for going over the edge which undermine its steady fix on security for the people and the land of Israel. By an extremely close vote (50.4 percent) in May, the security issue made Benjamin Netanyahu Israel's new prime minister and gave the Knesset a distinctly right-leaning group of legislators strongly flavored with Orthodox members, whose religious agenda is already renewing dissension within the Jewish community.

But it was politics as usual--over the edge--immediately after the election, as Mr. Netanyahu bargained to form a cabinet from this conservative coalition divided by competing religious, economic, and political outlooks. Without doubt, the most troubling appointment was that of Ariel Sharon to head a new infrastructure ministry. Mr. Sharon was defense minister during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which included the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and is an adamant opponent of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. He has quickly seized his new authority and ordered the expansion of roads and bridges to Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the Golan Heights. His initiative along with Mr. Netanyahu's decision to lift the ban on new construction in the settlements is likely to provoke renewed hostilities with the Palestinians.

Israeli opinion polls and Mr. Netanyahu's narrow victory suggest that the electorate was not primarily voting against the peace process, but against the pace at which Labor Prime Minister Simon Peres was pursuing it and out fear that the Palestinians were not truly committed to peace. What an irony if a bad case of nerves ushers in a self-fulfilling prophecy. How soon before Israel finds itself facing the opposite dilemma: a Netanyahu government so fixed on security that the peace process will be destroyed?

During his July visit to Washington, the American-educated Mr. Netanyahu was warmly received in Congress, but did little to assure President Bill Clinton or anyone else on how the peace process would survive. Netanyahu has said that there are no preconditions for peace; he also says that the Golan Heights will never be returned to Syria; that there will be no Palestinian capital in Jerusalem nor an autonomous Palestinian entity in Gaza and on the West Bank. The Israeli army's long-delayed withdrawal from Hebron is yet again postponed and the confiscation of Palestinian property in Jerusalem continues.

What does he mean then by no preconditions? New construction in West Bank settlements along with Sharon's road-building schemes will steadily remove the incentives and the ability of Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to abide by the Oslo Accords. Mr. Arafat may not have done everything necessary to reassure Israelis that he understood their security interests, but recall that the most egregious breach of Israeli security this past year was the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli who probably voted for Mr. Netanyahu.

The failure of the peace accords would be a fateful tragedy certainly for the Israelis and the Palestinians. But other nations too have a vital interest in peace, if for no other reason than that the malignant terrorism nurtured in the Middle East continues to claim so many victims.

Though Mr. Netanyahu declares himself a pragmatist, he is a pragmatist playing with fire. Mr. Sharon has previously shown himself to be uncontrollable; West Bank settlers have previously parlayed their irredentist program into government policy; the Palestinians have shown that though they cannot win neither will they be defeated. Mr. Netanyahu's fellow-pragmatist President Bill Clinton cannot be counted on in an election year to firmly resist these moves and threatened moves. But he should. Though every nation has an interest in a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, the United States, with its billions of dollars in subventions to Israel, is the only one with real leverage. Those levers should be pulled before rather than after the Oslo Accords have been subverted.

In the meantime, the 49.6 percent of Israelis who did not vote for Mr. Netanyahu must force his government to recognize an essential truth: Real security will be destroyed by making it an absolute.