Can his peace survive?

There is joy as well as sorrow at Rabin's murder, says Robert Fisk

A THUNDER of gunfire swept over west Beirut last night as thousands of Muslims celebrated the act of an Israeli Jew. Even the newsreader on Hizbollah television's evening news was smiling slightly when he reported the death of Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Tel Aviv student. An old Palestinian leader who loathes Arafat almost as much as he hated Rabin - a man with two decades of "militant struggle" on his hands - perhaps summed up the mood of the Arab world when he coldly remarked that Rabin had died because of "the failure of the Israelis to stand up to their own terrorists".

The implications of Rabin's murder are almost as awesome as the inevitability of the coming hours. The "peace process", it seems, has as dark an enemy within the Israeli body politic as among the Arab rejectionists who have, from the start, opposed a PLO-Israeli agreement which does not guarantee a Palestinian state, which does not insist on the end of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, and which has in effect abandoned the 3 million- strong Palestinian diaspora. One of the triple pillars of the American- Israeli accord with the PLO has been struck down. What future can it have now?

There will be a funeral tomorrow. But can Yasser Arafat, who disliked Rabin almost as much as the Israeli prime minister detested him, be invited? Dare he attend if he is? The PLO leader, reviled now among so many tens of thousands of his former supporters outside "Palestine" and Jordan, must be looking to his own physical survival this morning. For if an Israeli can kill an Israeli prime minister, how much easier would it be for an Israeli or a Palestinian to kill the ageing PLO chairman in his grubby fiefdom of Gaza?

King Hussein will mourn Mr Rabin. They had become close friends. President Mubarak of Egypt will probably feel compelled to attend the funeral, along with the Jordanian monarch. The rest of the Arab world will watch in awe and, no doubt, some fear.

"This is going to unleash a bloody period in Israel - but also a bloody period in the Arab world, as usual when something bad happens to the Israelis," an official close to the pro-Iranian Hizbollah movement in Beirut said. "The first Palestinian car-bomb attack in Tel Aviv came after the Arafat- Rabin signature in Washington. Then came the Jewish massacre of Palestinians at Hebron. And now the Israeli killing of Rabin. This peace treaty is worthless. It has led only to blood."

There will be many statements - especially from Washington - in continued support of the Arab-Israeli accord. Mr Rabin himself had warned many times that more blood would be shed before peace was achieved. The Clinton administration will not abandon one of its pet projects so close to an election, however deep the concern being expressed about the process in private by American diplomats. But Rabin's murder means that the confidence so necessary to bring off an Israeli-Arab peace agreement may have been fatally undermined. What is the nature of the Israel with which they are encouraged to make peace, the Arabs will ask, when the Israeli prime minister can be killed by his own people?

In the past, Israeli murderers - the killer of the Palestinians at Richon Lezion and then the perpetrator of the Hebron massacre - have been explained away as lunatics, men who had gone temporarily insane, as opposed to the Arab "terrorists" who struck at Israelis. What description, the Arabs were asking last night, will be applied to Rabin's murderer? One Palestinian guerrilla leader in Beirut questioned whether this might mean the start of a small-scale Israeli civil war. It was a question asked in all seriousness, betraying his ignorance as well as his shock at what had happened in Tel Aviv. The truth is that the Middle East had not been at peace these past two years, that millions of Arabs as well as thousands of Israelis had not supported the "peace" accords, that the basic issues behind the Arab- Israeli dispute had not been resolved.

Islamic Jihad, for one, was still at war with Israel. And when its leader, Fathi Shkaki, was murdered in Malta last week - presumably by Israeli agents - it was Mr Rabin who gloatingly said he could not be sorry at the news. Islamic Jihad - whose new leader, Ramadan Shallah, promised at Shkaki's funeral four days ago that Rabin "will pay dearly" for the assassination - will be equally pleased today.

For all those Arab leaders tempted to join in the "peace process" - not least President Assad of Syria, who consistently refused to heed Mr Rabin's repeated appeals for talks - the killing of the Israeli prime minister will prove not just how fragile the Middle East peace is, but how fatal can be the consequences of participation in it.

Long after midnight last night, the Muslims of Beirut were still firing their Kalashnikovs over the suburbs of the capital. Motorists were racing down the seafront Corniche, sounding their horns in unison. Rabin was dead. Can the "peace" survive?