ISRAEL EXCLUSIVE . . . SEVERE LABOR PAINS

A poll secretly commissioned by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's ruling Labor Party has found that his government would be trounced were general elections held now, Labor and other government sources have told TIME. According to the poll, Labor's share of the 120-seat Knesset would shrink from 44 seats to only 27. The opposition Likud Party, on the other hand, would leap from 32 seats to 47. "There is a great deal of alarm in the party," one Labor official admits. The clandestine poll, unlike far more optimistic recent public surveys, had an unusually large sample size of 10,000 respondents. TIME Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer says Laborites expected a popularity bubble after Israel's new peace treaty with Jordan, the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and an optimistic economic outlook. Instead, she says, public opinion is dwelling on drawn-out negotiations with Syria, growing tension with an old ally, Egypt, and failures of the peace process with the PLO While there is still time for Labor to recover before the scheduled 1996 elections, Beyer says "party members fear the polls reflect a to-the-dogs reality about the current regime."