When Revenge Comes First

By Kevin Fedarko

Perhaps the most significant thing about Mordechai Lapid's death was not who ^ killed him, but where they did it. A Jewish settler from the West Bank town of Hebron, Lapid was standing at a bus stop with four of his 15 children last Monday night when several Palestinian gunmen opened fire from a passing car, cutting down Lapid and his eldest son. Just a few yards from where their bodies lay, bloodstains marked the spot where 48 hours earlier a group of Lapid's fellow settlers had stopped a car for no reason and shot into the passenger seat, killing Talal al-Bakri, a Palestinian vegetable seller and himself the father of 13 children. The eye-for-an-eye vengeance is making a mockery of what is supposed to be a new era of peaceful coexistence.

The sight of Jews killed by Palestinians is always guaranteed to provoke outrage in Israel. But many Israelis have little sympathy for extremist settlers in the occupied territories, a minority whose vigilantism has done as much as their fanatical counterparts on the Palestinian side to threaten the peace process. For two groups who can't work together on anything else, their collaboration at keeping violence alive has been remarkably successful: five days before Israel was scheduled to begin pulling its forces out of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was forced to pour 5,000 more soldiers into the region to control the cycle of murder and reprisal that has killed 41 Palestinians and 14 Israelis since the signing of the Sept. 13 pact.

Benumbed at first by the suddenness of the peace accord, the settlers became increasingly restive. But their noisy protests had little impact on the rest of the population until last week, when the killings pushed the government to treat their demands for protection with fresh urgency. At the same time, Rabin knows he must tame his own rampaging citizens if he is to work out security arrangements with the Palestinians.

Once a powerful force under Likud governments, the settlers have seen their leverage weaken since Labor's rise to power last year. Rabin made it clear that the settlers represented only 4% of the population, and he cared more about the other 96%. Although many Jews in the occupied territories are young married couples originally drawn by tax breaks and cheaper housing to the bedroom communities outside Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, a core of hard-liners are fired by a messianic fervor that charges them with settling the biblical lands where the Jews once lived.

Among the most ardent are thousands of Americans, many of whom have found solace for the dislocation that plagued them in the U.S. in the uncompromising faith of the settler movement. Virtually all the hard-liners consider the September agreement to be the first step toward a de facto dismantling of the 144 Jewish towns built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the 1967 Six-Day War. And nearly all of them are armed to the teeth: an estimated 30,000 own rifles and handguns, and several settlements boast depots stocked with mines and hand grenades.

At no place in the territories are the two sides locked in a struggle as savage as the one in Hebron, a merchant town south of Jerusalem where 6,000 settlers have entrenched themselves in the midst of 90,000 Palestinians. Although Jewish life came to an end there in 1929 when an Arab band massacred 60 Jews, the community experienced a controversial rebirth in 1968 when Rabbi Moshe Levinger defied government policy to lead 32 Jewish families into the city, ostensibly for the purpose of celebrating Passover. They never left.

Two weeks ago, Levinger, who once served 10 weeks in jail for gunning down a Palestinian shoe-store owner, again put Hebron in the news. Israeli television showed pictures of his compatriots swaggering through the streets firing their weapons into a crowd of stone-throwing Palestinians, while Israeli soldiers declined to intervene. Six people were wounded.

On Tuesday night, as the Lapids' cross-country funeral wound through Bethlehem en route to Hebron, mourners called for revenge and rebellion against the government. When Palestinians began throwing rocks, the settlers retaliated by smashing the windows of Arab homes along the road. As the cortege neared Hebron's Jewish cemetery, Palestinians again pelted the procession with rocks, and the mourners responded, this time with machine-gun fire.

By Wednesday morning, Hebron had become a tense ghost town, the highway nearly empty, the Palestinian shops closed under a 24-hour curfew. The only signs of life stirred in the courtyard of the Jewish quarter downtown, where Shalom Sharabi, 32, an Uzi submachine gun slung over his shoulder, was watching over a group of toddlers. Suddenly, word arrived of an assault on a Jewish settler in Bethlehem. The victim, Yair Cohen, was about to buy a bathroom faucet at a local store when a Palestinian gunman pumped two bullets into his stomach. Enraged by the news, Sharabi declared, "If Rabin came here today, I believe he'd be shot because he's a traitor."

The settlers blame Rabin for doing too little to protect them. But their real ire is directed at the peace agreement they believe contains nothing but "gifts" for the Palestinians: the impending release of 4,000 Palestinian prisoners, an "army" of their own (the 15,000-man Palestinian police) and what the settlers denounce as a hands-off policy toward Arab violence. "This has created a situation where the terrorists feel secure driving up and shooting one of us," says Yechiel Leiter, a Pennsylvania-born spokesman for the settlers. "They now feel more brazen."

Amid such attitudes, the hardest thing to keep alive may be the peace process. Last week the negotiations had become so strained that Yasser Arafat flew to Spain to meet with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and then to Cairo on Sunday for a meeting with Rabin. They need to resolve disputes over the size of the new Jericho zone, control of the border crossings and the rules of engagement for Israeli troops deployed around Jewish settlements before Rabin will begin pulling his army units out of the new Palestinian zones.

So destabilizing has the cycle of violence become that even the conservative Likud Party has publicly criticized Jewish vigilantism. "I told the settlers three weeks ago that they would lose the public and lose us if they created vigilante groups. They had the view that if they took action on their own, they would change public opinion," said Likud's party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. "They were wrong."

But the prospect of being wrong does nothing to deter those who are more interested in vengeance than cooperation. On Friday, the bodies of two Palestinian brothers and their cousin were found in a car six miles from Hebron. An anonymous phone call announced that the slayings were in revenge for the Lapid murders. For people who are unwilling to consider compromise, the equation is simple: "If I can't live in Hebron," says settler David Yisraeli, "you can't have peace."

With reporting by David Aikman/Tel Aviv and Robert Slater/Hebron