Rabin Declares All Israelis Must Defend Territories

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin today said all Israelis, not just the army, must defend the occupied territories, and he said he was right to encourage civilians to open fire on Arabs armed with firebombs.

“We are in a prolonged war of independence . . . and everyone has to be aware, prepared, equipped,” Rabin said.

He also said that a Jewish farmer found stabbed and bludgeoned to death Monday should have carried a weapon.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed at the funeral of the murdered farmer that Jews will defeat their Arab foes if forced to fight to the end.

Police Maintain Order

Police stood guard to maintain order at the state funeral of Eliahu Cohen, 30, whose beating and stabbing in southern Israel the army laid to Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Shamir told 1,000 mourners at the somber ceremony: “He was murdered by immoral people who symbolize all that is low and cruel in man. If it comes to the dilemma of them or us, our answer is clear--it is us.”

He said Jews alone will always remain on the land.

A weeping man called for Israel to enact the death penalty for guerrillas who murder, shouting: “The death penalty, Prime Minister. How much can we take?”

Cohen’s body was found in his field on the Shekef Moshav farming collective on Monday a few hundred yards from an Arab West Bank village. He was the third Israeli killed in a six-month-old Palestinian uprising.

Nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed.

The funeral took place at Givat Ada in northern Israel where Cohen was reared, but police sent reinforcements into southern Israel near Shekef to avert Israeli reprisals against neighboring Palestinians.

The army maintained curfews on the nearby West Bank villages of Beit Awwa and Fuka while searching for Cohen’s killers, who stabbed the farmer several times and beat him on the head with a water pipe.

Arab Laborers Fired

The 30 families who formed the Shekef farming collective about eight years ago decided after the murder to fire the 60 Arab laborers who had worked for them and to deny West Bank Arabs passage through Shekef to Israel.

At the funeral, Maor Kadouri of Shekef said: “I don’t want to see them any more. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. They will try again to hurt us to show they are part of the uprising.”

In unrest today, West Bank Palestinian sources said a 10-year-old boy was shot in the legs in Nablus by a Jewish settler.

In Burqa village, northwest of Nablus, troops shot and wounded a Palestinian youth when they opened fire to disperse protesters who set up roadblocks and threw stones, the sources said.