Exactly ten months after Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign against Yitzhak Rabin's recognition of the Palestinians resulted in the old general's murder, Netanyahu shook hands with Yasser Arafat.

Call it hypocrisy, call it farce, the meeting between the Palestinian leader and the leader of the right wing of Israeli politics was nonetheless a significant moment in the history of this small sad land that doesn't deserve what human beings have done to it in the name of the combination of nationalism and religion.

As a political leader of the right wing, Netanyahu's own handshake confirmed that the vast majority of Jews in Israel want to make peace, even if on the Israeli side as on the Arab, there are those who prefer religious war to a civil peace.

The limp handshake, the sour expression, the patronizing sloganeering at the press conference were to be expected. It took several meetings with Arafat for Rabin to get over his upset stomach whenever he met with the man he had called a terrorist for so many years. But he did, and by the time they shared the Nobel Peace Prize, they knew each other well enough to be share a joke, proving that they had come to regard each other as human -- something Netanyahu, and perhaps Arafat, still can't do with each other.

But they will. They must, if they intend to live up to their promises to their people, to each other, to the world.

Meanwhile, if Netanyahu was was half the man Rabin was, he would have gone to Mt. Herzl, straight from the meeting at Erez junction on the border between the State of Israel and what will eventually become the Palestinian State's Gaza District. There, at the black and gray stones that mark Rabin's grave on top of the fir and eucalyptus covered hilltop in west Jerusalem, he would have asked the dead general -- and the half of the Israeli public that voted for Rabin's natural successor, Shimon Peres -- for forgiveness.R.R.