Minister Yitzhak Rabin

JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is telling the Israeli Cabinet that the U.S. presidential election will put the Middle East peace talks on hold, possibly for several months, until the uncertainty that the campaign brings is ended.Although Israel had offered to resume in October the Washington-based negotiations, which are scheduled to adjourn this week, neither its Arab partners nor the Bush administration would agree, Mr. Rabin told the Cabinet yesterday."The Bush administration is totally preoccupied with the elections -- that is, with its own fate -- and the Arabs want to see whether this administration does, in fact, survive November," a senior Israeli official commented after the Cabinet meeting.

Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Israel's two most famous generals, are the candidates tomorrow in their country's election of a new prime minister, a contest Sharon is heavily favored to win. No two figures better embody Israel's political left and right: Barak, leader of the Labor Party and current prime minister, invested his political capital in failed peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon, leader of the Likud and a swashbuckling military commander, is better known as a fervent advocate of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

JERUSALEM -- In another gesture to improve the climate of the Mideast peace talks, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin revoked yesterday the expulsion orders against 11 Palestinians accused of inciting terrorism in Israeli-occupied territories.The action, which overturns orders issued in January by the previous government, came a day after Mr. Rabin announced the release of 800 Arab prisoners and a loosening of some restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip."We hope it sends a signal of good will and contributes to a further improvement of the atmosphere at the negotiating table," said Gad Ben-Ari, the prime minister's spokesman.

EHOVOT, Israel -- When Gadi Gvaryahu proposed naming a new synagogue for slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, members of his Orthodox congregation balked.The affable scientist thought the naming would be a fitting memorial to the legacy of Rabin, who was murdered by a religious Jew opposed to the land-for-peace deal he signed with the Palestinians.Gvaryahu worships at Ohel Rabin today, but it is a new congregation founded by himself and other like-minded religious Jews who resigned from their old synagogue over the naming.

WASHINGTON -- Manners have always acknowledged the fine line between amity and enmity, and so the world waited anxiously to see if the two sworn foes, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, would actually shake hands."

WASHINGTON -- Marc C. Ginsberg, a Washington lawyer who served as a campaign spokesman for President Clinton, has been nominated as ambassador to Morocco in what is believed to be the first appointment of a Jewish envoy to an Arab state.Mr. Ginsberg, 43, who lives in Bethesda, was born in New York but spent 1960 to 1968 in Israel, where his mother and two brothers still live. They hold dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship; he elected to hold only his U.S. citizenship.He was involved in the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt while working at the State Department and the White House under President Jimmy Carter.

JERUSALEM -- As hundreds of angry Jews clashed with police outside his office yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin defended the Mideast peace accord and accused his opponents of inciting violence with scare stories of a Palestinian-controlled Jerusalem."

WASHINGTON -- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was scheduled to meet Clinton administration officials today in an attempt to revive Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.But Israeli diplomats here expressed concern that the administration may expect Mr. Rabin to arrive with bold new plans for advancing stalled talks between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as ideas for moving talks forward between Israel and Syria.In fact, they said, Mr. Rabin hopes to spend much of his time here mapping out a new security relationship between Israel and the United States that will reflect the realities of a post-Cold War world, as well as a Middle East where the prospects of a multistate Arab war against Israel have faded.

AMMAN, Jordan -- The United States has decided to relax sanctions against Syria to allow the transfer of three American-made commercial aircraft to Syria from Kuwait, administration officials said yesterday.The officials said that Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher formally told Syria's President Hafez el Assad of the U.S. decision, which has not been publicly disclosed, in a meeting in Damascus on Sunday. The sanctions were originally imposed to punish Syria for what Washington regarded as its support for terrorism.

Hopes of rescuing the Middle East peace talks ride on Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's visit to Washington, which concludes in a meeting with President Clinton today. On Monday, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat hosted U.S. emissary Dennis Ross and high-level Israeli diplomats in Tunis but refused to resume the talks, which he suspended after the mass murder of Palestinians in Hebron by an Israeli-American settler on Feb. 25.In all likelihood, Mr. Arafat wants to resume the peace process if he is given enough to face down Arab critics of his policy.

Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof steps onto the stage at the Gordon Center in Owings Mills wearing a pair of silver-heeled, red-white-and-black striped boots. The ankle-high, Parisian footwear complements her black leather jacket, satin blouse and pants. A lock of red hair, inherited from her beloved grandpa, Yitzhak Rabin, falls in front of her face as she talks about the slain Israeli prime minister.She is an admiring granddaughter remembering a man others knew only as a soldier-statesman and a peacemaker.

TEL AVIV, Israel -- Investigators searching for a conspiracy behind the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin widened their net yesterday, rounding up two more suspects and saying that they had "found weapons in a quantity which would not disgrace a terror group" buried near the home of his confessed killer, Yigal Amir.With five suspects now in custody, yesterday's disclosures seemed to belie Mr. Amir's assertion that he had acted alone, although the government has yet to back its conspiracy theory with formal charges.

JERICHO, West Bank -- Two years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had the people of this small Arab town celebrating in the streets with a mere stroke of his pen. He had agreed to withdraw Israel's soldiers from Jericho, and residents happily marked the occasion by raising the red-and-black Palestinian flag from nearly every storefront.Now the flags are faded, tattered or gone altogether amid the sobriety of self-rule, but none is at half-staff after the Saturday assassination of Mr. Rabin.

JERUSALEM -- This is the nightmare for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: He returns from Washington where President Clinton and the world watched him sign the latest accord with the Palestinians, only to have his own parliament reject it.The scenario is a real possibility. Mr. Rabin's lieutenants scrambled yesterday to try to bolster the government's support for the agreement before Thursday's vote or parliament.Mr. Rabin can count on no more than a one- or two-vote margin of approval.

JERUSALEM -- In the midst of Israel's crucial peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Syria, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's political base is crumbling under charges of corruption high in his Labor Party.For Mr. Rabin, who lost the premiership in 1977 in another, smaller scandal and regained it only three years ago, this could become paralyzing, diverting his attention from the peace negotiations to domestic politics and making him even more cautious in calculating what risks he can take for a settlement.

JERUSALEM -- Reflecting the gloom that hangs over his nation one week after suicide bombers killed 21 Israelis, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave his Cabinet such a downbeat assessment of relations with the Palestinians that one minister accused him of sounding as if he wanted to abandon negotiations altogether."

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Arab foreign ministers are expected to decide here today to delay the next round of peace negotiations with Israel at least a week beyond the Tuesday date set by President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, according to Arab diplomats and sources close to the deliberations in Syria.Palestinian officials, who have been pushing for a delay in the Middle East peace talks until after Israel offers more concessions, said their Arab counterparts had agreed to a one-week delay in the resumption of the 18-month-old negotiations in Washington.

CAIRO, Egypt -- The honeymoon over the Great Handshake ended yesterday as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat stiffly got down to the nitty-gritty of negotiating coexistence under Palestinian self-rule.Meeting for 90 minutes at the presidential palace, the two former warriors agreed to set up four teams to work out the details of Arab autonomy, particularly in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho. The Israeli army is slated to start withdrawing from those two territories later this year.

JERUSALEM -- While his government approves new settlement construction in the West Bank, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has renewed his harsh attacks on settlers, denouncing them as "a burden" on the Israeli army and its fight against radical Palestinian terrorists."

JERUSALEM -- A fight between Palestinian villagers and Jewish settlers over a rocky West Bank hilltop grew into a full-blown crisis yesterday between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat demanded that work be halted immediately on the disputed land, which lies on the outskirts of El Khader village, south of Bethlehem. Mr. Arafat's call was echoed by left-wing members of Israel's coalition government.Mr. Arafat appealed to Western governments to intervene, sending a letter to consulates accusing Israel of violating the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.