Scattered throughout the community are residents who have had a complicated relationship with the government. No one wants to take chances.

"You want to know what I think about the situation?" asks one prominent settler-activist with an unmistakable edge in his voice. "It's like Salem out there. Do you see the speed at which things are happening? One minute, you're offering your opinion and the next minute you' re in jail or living under a death threat. Everyone wants blood: the public, the press, the police."

Religious-nationalist leaders have also taken a vow of silence. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun became the Salman Rushdie of the settler movement for threatening to reveal the names of rabbis who condoned political violence, and then did so publicly. One name was that of the embattled Rabbi Nahum Rabinowitz, spiritual leader of the Birkat Moshe hesder yeshiva in Ma'aleh Adumim. These days, neither speaks to journalists - or hardly anyone - casually anymore.

One of the most provocative questions in the post-Rabin assassination debate concerns the question of just who is guilty of what. It left a democracy shaken and reeling from the slaying of its leader by one of its own citizens. It created spiraling confusion about how to contain multiple social crises which seem to be erupting everywhere. If Israelis believed that their free-speech doctrine was faithful to US justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' ideal of a beautifully deregulated "free trade of ideas," they were sadly mistaken. Israel of the 1990s is not the US of the 1920s.

Matti Dagan, the Education Ministry's director of state-religious schools, publicized a poll of religious high school students which revealed that a full 20 percent were afraid to don their kippot out of fear of being assaulted by secular teens. "I received numerous complaints from religious kids who claim to have been beaten up by non-religious kids," Dagan says.

A Jerusalem woman who wears a head covering relates that she arrived at a local theater performance, found her seat to be occupied and was told loudly by the occupant, "I don't get up for murderers." The woman who occupied the seat was later ejected from the theater.

SALEM, INDEED. Suddenly, there was talk of a witch-hunt being uncorked against the religious, or those who appeared to be. Witch-hunt theorists offered a catalog of objective realities as proof: Citizens who had made asinine comments in support of Rabin's killing were arrested and held without bail; indictments of approximately 70 "agitators" were supposedly being prepared by the police; the press was warned by District Attorney Michael Ben-Yair not to print interviews with extremists.

In truth no matter how far-fetched, all roads traveled by the national- religious camp suddenly led to Kikar Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv. A nuanced and carefully qualified reassessment of national-religious institutions, teachings and social mores was under way. Dry statistics suddenly became hot news items in the media marketplace.

For example, it was revealed that the curricula of 75% of the nation' s state-religious high schools lacked rudimentary courses in democracy. In an op-ed last week, Ma'ariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi also rummaged through statistics and made what he considered to be a frightening discovery: elite IDF units are filled with soldiers who wear kippot.

Calls were issued this week for the IDF to forbid its officers from studying at Bar-Ilan University, where Rabin's assassin was a law student.

Early this week, Meretz MK Dede Zucker called on the attorney-general to open a criminal investigation against Moshe Shamir, an Israel Prize winner and staunchly right-wing author, for remarks he had made two months ago likening Yitzhak Rabin's tactics against the opposition to those of Nazis.

"Religious Jews are being stopped, being blamed," Efrat's Rabbi Shlomo Riskin says. "And tragically, the government - instead of talking reconciliation - is talking retribution. That hurts me. It's horrible. " According to media reports, Riskin was to have been served with a summons for incitement in connection with political activities months ago; he says he never received it. "It's Orthodox-Jew-bating time. It reminds me of the McCarthy era."

The startling revelation last weekend that right-wing militant Avishai Raviv was a General Security Service mole fanned the witch-hunt flames. Some experts dismissed the notion of witch-hunt. Raviv, whose arrest had been trumpeted as a brilliant piece of police work, is now also believed to have acted as an agent provocateur, for example distributing leaflets with the grotesque caricature of Rabin in Gestapo garb.

DR. BEN Aronson, a social psychologist, understands the fears about a government campaign against the right wing, explaining that people in crisis tend to see things in absolute terms. But he takes those fears with a grain of salt. He notes that in Israel, "there are two very divided camps. So if there is a mini-witch-hunt going, it's a temporary one. It's not the witch-hunt which typified by the McCarthy period in the US, where an the entire country was galvanized for a sustained period of time against a dreaded minority - the communists.

"There are those who clearly feel they are being hunted and those who feel they are empowered by law to hunt down," says Aronson. " Neither emotion is mature. But considering the traumatic national event we've just experienced, it's to be expected. Everyone is flapping his wings.

"The so-called 'guilty' camp is trying to gain perspective and the so-called 'victim' camp is trying not to lose any further control. It's a very basic way of coming to grips with an unfathomable situation.

"After JFK's assassination, in Texas," adds Aronson, "Texans - particularly citizens of Dallas - took on the role of the guilty party even though they had nothing to do with the killing. And Americans 'punished' them for a long time. It took years for the stigma to wear off Dallas as the site of JFK's murder."

Hebrew University political science professor Peter Medding paints the picture in broad strokes and dismisses talk of a witch-hunt. The government's recent initiative in pursuing those suspected of incitement may appear improper, he says, but that's because laws covering such violations have heretofore gone unenforced. The government, in Medding's opinion, is doing what it should have done years ago; it's drawing coherent lines between public and private discourse.

"In a witch-hunt," says Medding, "the government might be arresting members of the Likud and pinning accusations on them. That's not what is gong on here. In fact, the right wing's delegitimation of the government should have been curtailed a long time ago. When there is an ideological split as deep as the one in this country and when the political temperatures are so high, maintaining legitimacy of the system is critical. All those epithets hurled at Rabin - 'traitor, ' 'Petain,' 'Nazi,' 'murderer' - and all those suggestions that the government is not a legitimate one because it's supported by the Israeli- Arab bloc were unacceptable in a parliamentary democracy.

"There are so many issues here," he observes, "but the real issue is one Israelis haven't faced up to: What are the limits of free speech, political assembly and criticism. And secondly, how and under what conditions should democracy defend itself? Where do you draw the line?"

But what about Rabin's disparaging remarks about the right wing and the settlement movement?

"Rabin," says Medding, "was not murdered because he offended his political opponents. He could have spoken like Abba Eban or Churchill. It wouldn't have mattered. There is a distinction. The demonization of the politicians is harsher from the right wing."

MEDDING ALSO points out that there was a sharp divergence between the laws Israel has on the books and police implementation of those laws. "Israel, which really does have draconian laws at its disposal, " says Medding, but the state has been lenient in allowing some hate speech to go unprosecuted. "Other countries have imposed prison sentences on people making racist remarks." Until Rabbi Ido Alba was jailed for two years in a case this year, the worst it did to someone preaching racism was prohibiting Meir Kahane from running for Knesset, Medding says.

"Israel," continues Medding, "is a highly politicized country where the government has always been careful not to stifle the opposition' s voice. In fact, members of Knesset have immunity in all matters relating to the performance of their parliamentary duties. In all democracies there is always a problem of relating words to deeds and in drawing the line between free speech and incitement. And it's not always clear when the democratic rules of the game have been overstepped. "

But Jerusalem attorney Joel Golovensky who practiced law in the US for 25 years before moving here in 1987 feels the perverse logic of the witch-hunt theory at this juncture makes sense.

"The time is ideal to have a witch-hunt because center-rightists like myself feel totally weakened and disoriented. Suddenly we have no answers. Here's a middle-class, do-the-right-thing guy who went to the best yeshivot, who got into law school, and who spent all his days thinking about murder? ! My secular colleagues ask me how this could happen, and I have no answers."

The entire era - says Golovensky - is analogous to the late 1960s "days of rage" when "American middle-class, do-the-right-thing kinds of people like Mark Rudd and the SDS [the radical Students for a Democratic Society] ... were filled with terrific vitriol and emotion. Some of them became very radical and started planting bombs and killing people. Even though they may have participated in breaking the government' s commitment to the war in Vietnam, they engendered a lot of contempt. "

Golovensky argues that the hostile feelings secular Israelis may have felt toward religious countrymen in the days before the assassination, "toward individuals like Baruch Goldstein and toward groups which kept them tied up in traffic and made them late for dinner like Zo Artzenu, crystalized sentiments and legitimized feelings against religious people. It brought everything to a head."

THE DUST had hardly settled on Rabin's grave before fingers pointed as by reflex. First - highlighted by Leah Rabin's anti-Likud musings and her refusal to shake hands with Bibi Netanyahu - there were accusations against the right-wing. Quickly, intellectuals and political pundits leveled serious criticism at the national-religious camp, which became an expansive, amorphous "them."

This thinking made sense to a lot of people. In fact, in the eyes of many secular Israelis, what happened three weeks ago on a clear Saturday night in Tel Aviv became a historical lesson whose message dawned in a split-second. And it carried with it a deep dread of religious Jews.

The flood of condemnatory editorials and op-ed articles was quick to explain why the cliche - "A Jew would never kill the prime minister" - was, in fact, as real as rain. The boundaries between "them" and "us" were clearly drawn. Rabbi Levinger. Bar-Ilan University. Kerem be'Yavne yeshiva. B'nei Akiva. Long denim skirts. Knitted kippot. The whole menu of religious Zionism was presented as one unhealthy, high-calorie smorgasbord which had given the country its first coronary.

"The terrible death of Yitzhak Rabin scattered in one stroke the ideological fog," says Haim Bar-Am, peace activist and columnist for the Jerusalem weekly, Kol Ha'ir.

"The peace camp wiped off its collective face the spit which right wingers had been smearing on it for the past three years. If [National Religious Party MK] Hanan Porat and Rabbi [Haim] Druckman dreamt once upon a time about convincing this enlightened society of their own important values, it would be better for them to be cured of this sweet delusion. I never believed in the values of the settlers and their friends, their anti-humanistic idealism which typifies them. I prefer the empty-headedness of the yuppies to the agrarian fascism of the settlers."

Rabinovitch, in the meantime, had been through a witch-hunt purgatory of his own, and eventually by one of his own. Prompted by the Bin- Nun declaration, Rabinovitch had been identified by an unknown source as one of the rabbis who taught his students that, according to Maimonides' view, Yitzhak Rabin had the status of an "informer." Rabinovitch added that in modern times the mandated punishment for an informer - death - could not be carried out.

By early this week, rummaging through Rabinovitch's tapes and lectures had become a national journalistic pastime.

Rabinovitch later found himself confronted on a radio station by religious peace activist Rabbi Yitzhak Frankental, whose son Arik had been brutally slain by Hamas terrorists.

While on the air, a highly agitated Frankental announced that he had a tape which would unmask Rabinovitch's true feelings on a range of controversial subjects, including a theoretical willingness to endanger the lives of IDF soldiers by mining settlements in the event of a forced evacuation. Rabinovitch said the statements were being taken out of context, but Frankental shouted for him to confess.

THE GOVERNMENT - particularly the Justice Ministry and Attorney-General Ben-Yair - was arguably on the defensive itself. Critics maintained that those in law enforcement evinced a cavalier attitude toward " inciters." They had turned a blind eye toward the right wing's slurs and rhetorical hyperbole.

The Justice Ministry, in its traumatic reaction to criticism of its failure to pursue extremists, threw itself into action. It couldn' t fall back on such balmy excuses as the time-consuming Deri trial.

Regardless of the seriousness of the situation, connoisseurs of reign- of-terror camp could not help but make comparisons between the unfolding spectacle and previous witch-hunts. Never have the "politically incorrect" in Israel had their heads handed to them faster.

On the day of Yitzhak Rabin's funeral, David Balashan, 46, of the Hebron Hills settlement of Shani, revealed his feelings on the subject of Rabin's assassination to a foreign TV news crew on the prowl for a story.

With his oversize knitted kippa and unkempt beard, Balashan was fussed over until he obliged in English with a few frothy remarks expressing "happiness" that Rabin was safely dead. He also expressed the hope that Arafat and Peres would suffer the same fate.

Nothing happened to him for a few days, prompting calls for his arrest. Suddenly, the TV news showed a stunned and handcuffed Balashan being escorted by police.

After his arrest, Balashan told Petah Tikva Magistrates Court Judge Nira Diskin, "I thought I lived in a free, democratic country where a person could express his views, even views which are extreme and go against the flow."

Diskin rejected Balashan's argument. Just the opposite, she told him. His statement was "the sort of expression which [can] cause the collapse of democracy." Earlier this week, in an unprecedented legal action against someone charged with "a crime of words," Balashan was denied bail and remanded to custody until the end of proceedings against him. The maximum prison sentence in a case like Balashan' s is 10 years.

The day Balashan was arrested, Kitan, the textile manufacturer, summarily fired Ya'acov Avraham, 40, a worker in its Beit She'an factory for allegedly making statements in support of the assassination. Coworkers had reported the matter to an official at the plant. A weepy and sorrowful Avraham, who expressed remorse for the statement, insisted, "I hurt just like everyone else. This is no way to treat a father of eight children." But regardless of his pitiful plea, the die was cast.

Kitan officials promptly consulted Pinni Kabbalo, a secretary of the local labor union who himself consulted with none other than MK and Histadrut secretary-general Haim Ramon. Initially, Ramon replied: "If Avraham spoke in favor of the murder, the Labor Council authorized to refuse to defend him and not object to his immediate firing," according to a report in the Hebrew daily, Ha'aretz.

However, Kabbalo - who had helped organize the peace rally at which Rabin was shot - later told reporters that the Histadrut would represent Avraham in his bid to keep his job.

NOT ALL innuendo led to a confession or an arrest. It didn't have to; if it contained a pro-assassination ripple, that was plenty to whet the media's appetite. For example, Uri Pelech, a National Religious Party member of the Broadcasting Authority plenum, agitatedly reported that at a plenum meeting a "very senior" IBA official found some sort of silver lining in the killing.

Though he didn't identify his source, Pelech said, "This person said that the assassination of Rabin prevented a civil war in this country. " IBA spokesman Zvi Lidar dismissed the contention. "I can't believe any of the officials here would express themselves in that manner; I am sure it was taken out of context."

The most recent example of a head which has already rolled is maverick historian and onetime Bar-Ilan University guest lecturer Dr. Uri Milstein, who gave a number of uncouth press interviews last weekend. Among other things, Milstein revealed that his book, The Rabin File, and his lectures on what he regarded as Rabin's disingenuous character, may have contributed to his erstwhile student Yigal Amir's decision to commit the deed.

By Sunday morning of this week, Labor MK Yoram Lass asked the attorney- general to launch a criminal investigation of Milstein under the pretext that he may have "laid the ideological groundwork for the killing of Yitzhak Rabin." Lass, also asked that the attorney-general to " close the doors of the university to him permanently."

Meanwhile, the hunt is being pursued from the other side of the forest, and one of the hunters - who won praise from across the political spectrum for his outspokenness - is now the prey. Bin-Nun was initially hailed by the religious-centrist Meimad party and NRP participants in their "soul searching" assembly after the assassination. But now he has been decried as a traitor to the national-religious cause, has received death threats and is living under police guard in Ofra.

Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau recently joined Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi Doron in the chorus of condemnation against Bin- Nun. The chief rabbis were prompted after the outer walls of Jerusalem' s Hechal Shlomo, home of the Chief Rabbinate, were defaced with graffiti reading, "Rabbis are murderers and the rabbinate is hiding."

"If one of us [rabbis] starts to attack the other in this manner, that lends legitimacy to the extremists," Bakshi-Doron said.

"I FEAR for the freedom of speech, among other things," says Shlomo Riskin. "I'm still not over the shock of my arrest a few months ago, which was a real brutal lesson in civics."

Prof. Medding is less pessimistic. He argues that one realistic outcome of the affair will be better regulation of incendiary language. " Who bears responsibility for Rabin's assassaination is likely to become a major issue of contention between political parties. This is a country where blame for historical events, such as the [194-] sinking of the Altalena and the [1932] assassination of [Labor movement leader Haim] Arlosoroff are still hotly debated, deeply felt and engender considerable political heat."

"I don't think this witch-hunt will be sustained," attorney Golovensky says. "But a lot of this depends on the findings of the [Shamgar] commission of inquiry. The last thing this country needs is another rushed Warren Commission, whose quick findings in [investigating] JFK's assassination gave rise to the conspiracy theories which are still haunting Americans."

(Box) FOR THE SIN OF REPORTING

The news media were doing their job, scrutinizing every aspect of the assassination and its aftermath when they found themselves being scrutinized. Closely.

It turns out that merely reporting the private ardor of the fey few who hailed Rabin's death was, according to Attorney-General Michael Ben-Yair, a criminal offense.

Ben-Yair perceived the media's determination to cover the more egregious examples of incitement as sensationalism.

Four days after the assassination, Ben-Yair asked newspaper editors to refrain from interviewing anyone who fell under the general category of "inciter" or from printing hate-mongering remarks those individuals might make. Whoever published interviews with such individuals, Ben- Yair warned, would be punished under the penal code which forbids the publication of seditious material and under the laws for the prevention of terror.

According to the pronouncement, praising the killing of the prime minister was tantamount to encouraging violence which could itself cause the death of an individual.

SARAH FRIEDMAN, the chairwoman of the National Federation of Israel Journalists, was quick to condemn Ben-Yair's opinion. Given the centrality of free speech to the mission of reporting the news, Friedman said she found the ruling untenable. The federation threatened to go on strike and then filed a petition to the High Court of justice for relief.

Ironically, it was the media which supplied the Justice Ministry and police with an almost daily report on speech-code violations and it was hardly likely to relinquish its new-found role as high-minded moral snitch. For example, the Hebrew daily Ha'aretz steadily monitored Ben-Yair's pulse in response to its own relentless reports on the content of the vitriolic haredi newspaper, Hashavu'a.

"Last week," Ha'aretz noted this week, "[we] printed an article which reviewed the campaign of vitriol launched by Hashavu'a against Rabin. Several times, Hashavu'a debated whether or not Rabin should die. And it concluded that both Rabin and Peres, 'will have to choose between the gallows and the insane asylum.' "

Then, according to the Ha'aretz account, Hashavu'a editor Asher Zuckerman promised Ha'aretz to "publish a soul-searching piece".

But according to Ha'aretz, this too was a disappointment; Hashavu' a, in Ha'aretz's opinion, clearly maintained a cavalier attitude toward the assassination and encouraged, well, if not violence than at least no great remorse either. "Hashavu'a," Ha'aretz observed, "came to the conclusion that 'the leftist extremists,' who denied the right wing the freedom of speech, caused [Rabin's] murder.' From these words, it's obvious that the expression 'leftist extremists' refers to the Labor and Meretz parties."

Copyright 1995 Jerusalem Post. All Rights Reserved

Rodan, Steve, THE HUNT IS ON., Jerusalem Post, 11-24-1995.