New Radicalization Seen in Arab Unrest; 2 Slain

The Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories appeared to be growing increasingly radicalized Tuesday as two more Arabs died and three Israeli victims of Monday’s bus hijacking were buried with military honors in Beersheba.

The body of a Palestinian policeman, bound hand and foot and apparently stabbed to death overnight, was discovered in a refugee camp near Jericho, according to the army. Palestinian sources said he was killed by fellow Arabs because he worked with the Israeli authorities. His killing was seen here as a warning to thousands of other Palestinians serving in the police and military administration in the occupied territories.

Another Palestinian was killed and one was wounded by Israeli settlers in separate incidents near Ramallah and Nablus, according to Arab and hospital sources.

Clash Near Nablus

Israel Television reported that residents of the big Jewish settlement of Ariel, southwest of Nablus, engaged Tuesday night in a car-burning and rock-throwing battle with their neighbors from the nearby Palestinian village of Kifl Harith.

The latest deaths, which brought to at least 86 the number of Palestinians killed in the three months of unrest, occurred on a day of scattered protests throughout the occupied territories and followed the deaths Monday of the first Israelis killed in connection with the disturbances.

The three terrorists who seized the bus, demanding freedom for Palestinians arrested in connection with the unrest, were also killed. A special police unit stormed the vehicle after the terrorists executed a hostage. Fatah, the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by Yasser Arafat, later claimed responsibility for the hijacking.

“The Israeli people know more today than yesterday that the war against the Jews will not end,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told about 1,000 mourners attending the state funeral of the Israeli victims in Beersheba. “There are still people who want our blood and that of our children. Those who sent these murderers don’t care that they were being sent to their death. The main thing is the Nazi hate and annihilation.”

Among Israelis, the hijacking was seen as serving to delegitimize the Palestinian uprising and as damaging the position of the political left. Israeli security officials have said almost from the beginning of the trouble last December that the unrest was indigenous and that it took the PLO as much by surprise as it did the army. Nevertheless, the demonstrators assert allegiance to the PLO, which has taken a progressively larger role in the protests since early this year.

“Return To Terror May Undercut Uprising,” said the headline on a front-page article Tuesday by the Jerusalem Post’s respected Middle East editor, Yehuda Litani.

“As long as the rioters limit their arsenal to stones, crowbars and even petrol bombs, they can maintain the image of the underdog, the occupied, the David who rises up against the Israeli Goliath,” Litani wrote. “But when atrocities start, the Palestinians may reassume the old terrorist image and rapidly lose the support they have won all over the world.”

Rejects PLO Role

The independent newspaper Maariv said in an editorial: “In Israel, and particularly throughout the world, there were any number of good people with pure intentions who thought that perhaps the time has come to bring the PLO into political negotiations. It is nearly gratuitous to now state that such a move is simply unacceptable. It would be a serious mistake to allow the PLO to join the political process, even from a distance.”

Israel’s “Peace Now” movement, which in the wake of the Palestinian uprising has already organized one major rally in favor of trading occupied land for peace, “seriously considered” calling off a second large demonstration planned for this weekend after the hijacking, spokeswoman Galia Golan said in an interview.

“That does not help!” she said of the incident. However, she added, organizers decided to go ahead with their weekend rally anyway, since “it doesn’t in fact substantially change anything.”

“We never built our case on the PLO loving us,” she said. “We built our case on starting a negotiating process and getting rid of the territories.”

While some Palestinians here also condemned the hijacking, the reaction among Arabs on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip appeared in general to be ambivalent.

Several defended the killings as an understandable response to the scores of Arab victims of the uprising, most of whom have died from army gunfire.

“I would not consider this any more of a terrorist act than the killing of young men and children also as a terrorist act,” Birzeit University’s President Gabi Baramki said in an interview with Israel Radio.

A Palestinian activist close to the PLO, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear his remarks could lead to arrest, was ebullient about the attack, saying that it would give new impetus to the uprising.

He rejected the suggestion that the action had undermined the Palestinian gains from three months of unrest and argued that the hijacking promotes the cause by demonstrating that there can be no meaningful Middle East peace dialogue without including the PLO.

Israeli security sources described the hijacking as part of a trend toward increasing violence in the territories. They noted that a car bomb had been discovered near the hotel where Secretary of State George P. Shultz was staying last week, and another earlier in suburban Tel Aviv.

On Monday, someone in a crowd of Palestinian demonstrators in the West Bank village of Idna threw a hand grenade at an Israeli patrol, wounding a soldier. The patrol responded with gunfire, wounding seven in what the security sources described as a dangerous pattern that is almost sure to be repeated given the radicalization of the uprising.

In further fallout from the hijacking incident, the army said Tuesday that four officers who abandoned their car to the gunmen and fled when they were attacked had been sentenced summarily to 35 days in prison for failing to carry their weapons outside their base.

The unarmed soldiers were on their way to a training exercise when accosted by the terrorists, who took their car and used it to travel about 30 miles north to the place where they seized the bus.

The army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, said that if the four had been armed the bus hijacking might have been prevented.