Between City Hall and Dizengoff Center

At the place Rabin fell, on a narrow parking lot's sidewalk below the main entrance to City Hall, beside the highest-rent mall in Tel Aviv (as much as $75 a square meter) the grafitti says "the people are with Peres," who should carry on Rabin's legacy of peace. The walls of the parking lot and the fountain in the plaza are covered with a pattern that from far away has the feel of a dark vision by an abstract expressionist, but as one draws closer across the cement flagstone flatland of the mid-town field now named for Rabin, the most prominent message appears clearly: "In his death he will us peace."

A few blocks away at Dizengoff Center, where a suicide bomber struck a few months after Rabin's murder, the construction workers are almost done with the last of the cleanup -- the plate glass is back.

Like at City Hall, there's a memorial monument spontaneously made from yahrzeit candles and rocks, bits of poetry carved into metal or stone, fading posters propped against the last bit of plywood wall remaining in place of the blasted plate glass. The remining grafitti is no less rhetorical than that at City Hall.

"Is this peace?" cry out many of the handwritten messages, while calls for revenge too ugly to deserve reprint, dominates much of the tone. Someone tried to be witty in a crayoned scrawl on a cement bannister overlooking the scene from one of the pedestrian overpasses between the two sides of the mall on Dizengoff Boulevard: "We took care of many Persians, we can take care of one Peres." It's a play on the three-letter root of a Hebrew word that refers to the Purim story, in which a Jewish Holocaust was prevented in Persia. With different vowels it can mean a Middle Eastern bird of prey, from which Peres chose to Hebraicize his family name, Persky.

Two days before Pessah, a month after the bombing, both Dizengoff center and Gan Ha'Ir next to City Hall were full of shoppers. Life is stronger than death. Tourists stop at both places, perhaps pondering for a few moments the similarity of the two spontaneously created monuments, probably unaware of the difference in the texts.

On the face of it, therefore, a suicide bomber can tilt this election. But so could another Yigal Amir.