NEWS ANALYSIS : Israel Tries to Remove 7 Killings, Reaction From Context of Hatred : Unrest: It was work of a madman, officials say. The poisoned atmosphere feeds madness, critics say.

The colonel gave his press conference at an isolated intersection flanked by an orange grove and an empty warehouse. The nearest residences stood 300 yards away and over a hill.

On a busy day, there probably wouldn’t be much traffic anyway, but the colonel chose the spot to illustrate the success of Israeli efforts to quiet three days of Palestinian disturbances in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank.

“As you can see,” he said to the television cameras as he turned to point at the empty expanse of road, “everything here is completely normal.”

It was a message undermined by the fact that a few moments earlier, a convoy of reporters was forced to change course in downtown Gaza because rampaging youths had blocked the way with burning tires and stones at the ready. During the day, two youths were shot to death by Israeli troops in Gaza and more than 20 were wounded.

But in its own way, the colonel’s performance was the epitome of a subtly contradictory official reaction to the week’s violence. An impression was created that, while shocking, the bloodshed was not to be seen as out of the ordinary. Neither the unprovoked shooting deaths of seven day-laborers at Rishon le Zion nor the subsequent deaths of 11 enraged Palestinian protesters at the hands of Israeli troops indicated a wider social condition.

The Rishon le Zion killings were officially designated the act of a madman, the kind of thing that can happen anywhere. Palestinian protests were just the response of a justifiably angry population. The message: Everything here is completely normal.

This seeming attempt to isolate the events from any context alarmed some Israeli observers who view it as a poison for the political culture. Was Israel being told to ignore an intensifying climate of hate?

“We seem to be saying that when such things happen, it is not us, we Israelis--it is just madness,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at Hebrew University.

Government critics directly charged right-wing politicians with creating, through word and action, a climate in which anti-Arab feelings can be--and are--translated into action.

“The potential for violence is always there. It’s a question of human nature,” said Jewish philosopher David Hartman. “But once people are degraded and demonized, the madman in us is set in motion. An environment is created that inspires brutality.”

During the past few days, officials in the rightist government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir have worked to deflect accusations that it is somehow responsible for the violence both because it has resisted peace talks and because it is viewed as anti-Arab.

Top officials are especially sensitive on these points. Shamir is trying to build a new coalition government and extend its hold on power. Opponents predict that a renewed Shamir term will bring on new waves of conflict with the Palestinians.

Almost from the moment that the news of the Rishon le Zion shootings became public, officials insisted that the gunman who shot the Palestinian laborers was “deranged,” “unbalanced” and “crazy.” The army has been releasing details of a history of suicide attempts and desertions from his truncated military service, from which he was discharged as unsuitable.

The government was quick to point out that all countries harbor demented people who at any moment may commit an atrocity; in this, Israel is like any other nation.

“A man simply went berserk,” Foreign Minister Moshe Arens said Tuesday. “We’ve seen this happen in other places around the world, but I fear we will see some people try to use this to incite additional violence.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian rage over the Rishon le Zion incident was dismissed as having no other context but the despair of the moment. Leaders of the uprising were trying to “exploit” it, Israeli officials said. The colonel at the Gaza intersection said he understood that the Arabs were upset, but he declined to link the protests to continuing anti-Israeli violence or the Palestinian quest for independence.

Even as Palestinian casualties mounted, Shamir took the approach that Israel is the main victim of violence.

“In the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is always the Jews who have had to defend themselves from attacks by Arabs,” he said.

In contrast, critics focused on the public atmosphere building up to the Rishon le Zion killings. Violence against Arabs was being legitimized by official action, they charge.

Not long ago, the Shamir government sponsored the opening of a new settlement in the West Bank city of Nablus in which militant settlement leader Moshe Levinger was a guest of honor, hoisted aloft on the shoulders of revelers. Levinger had just been convicted of negligence in the shooting death of a Palestinian in Hebron.

Last year, early pardons were granted to soldiers who beat a Palestinian man to death near the beginning of the Arab uprising, now almost 2 1/2 years old. Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department have criticized Israel for treating the military abuse of Palestinians lightly.

Amnesty, the London-based human rights group, Tuesday renewed its criticism of the force used by Israelis to quell the Palestinian uprising, and in Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler repeated comments made Monday that “in the absence of a peace process, continuing violence is inevitable.”

“(There is) no doubt that (the Rishon le Zion gunman) acted within a society in which the norm exists that Arab life is cheap. Light punishments, treating Levinger like a hero, have created this norm,” said Ephraim Sneh, a former general and administrator in the West Bank. “The process whereby Arabs have been dehumanized has to be brought to an end.”

Susan Hattis Rolef, editor of a magazine for the left-center Labor Party, accused Israel’s right wing of inspiring acts of madness through nationalist ideology. She included in her list the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Haifa last week by two Jews who wanted to “unite the Jewish people around hatred of the Arabs.”

“What is unacceptable is the spreading of ideologies which mock universal values while turning the national rights of the Jews into a supreme value,” she wrote in the Jerusalem Post. “Unacceptable are statements that can be interpreted as permission to harm Arabs because they are Arabs and (criticism of) Jews who are perceived as being ‘too partial’ to Arabs.

“This is the food on which ‘eccentrics’ and madmen thrive.”

It is unusual for these issues to be raised by Israelis against Israelis. Demonization, for instance, is usually a complaint lodged against the Arab world, where the foundation of anti-Israeli hatred is set by Arab governments that caricature Jews as bloodthirsty and compare Israel to Nazi Germany.

Not long ago, when a Palestinian shot up a bus of Israeli tourists, Israeli officials protested to Cairo about inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric that often fills the Egyptian press.

Palestinians, while rarely attributing their own anti-Israeli violence to pure madness, sometimes defend terror by pointing out that Palestinians are suffering too and cannot be expected to control themselves. Last July, a Palestinian steered an Israeli passenger bus off a highway and killed 16 passengers. Palestinian leaders said that such acts are understandable because the toll of Arab dead in the uprising is mounting.

On Tuesday, Palestinian protests over the Rishon le Zion shooting wound down, but incidents persisted not only in Gaza but also Jerusalem, where police used tear gas to break up a demonstration by Palestinians who were trying to reach the U.S. Consulate in the Arab-dominated half of the city. The protesters were led by three Arab members of Parliament plus Lutfi Laham, Greek Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem, and Sheik Hamad Jamal, a Muslim leader.

Youths threw stones at police near the walls of the Old City, provoking more tear gas.

A curfew over the West Bank held for a third day.

In Jordan, for the second day in a row, Palestinians erupted in protest over the killings in Israel. Police killed two demonstrators, including a 14-year-old boy, according to reports from Amman.