Israeli Authorities Try to Stem Revenge Attacks : Violence: Two Palestinians are gunned down following the Kahane slaying. Forces are dispatched to possible flash points.

Israeli authorities moved to head off revenge attacks following news of the assassination of anti-Arab firebrand Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York, but early Tuesday two elderly Palestinians were gunned down along a West Bank highway in what were widely viewed as retaliatory killings.

In reaction to Kahane’s death, members of his Kach movement, which proposes the expulsion of Arabs from both Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, read a statement that pledged: “The Lord will avenge his blood.”

“I promise you there will be a river of Arab blood. Kahane will take more Arab blood with him in his death that when he was alive,” said Yoel Ben-David, a Kach activist.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir appealed for calm. “Even those, and they are a great majority in Israel, who do not agree with the political views of the late Rabbi Kahane deplore and condemn this further act of Arab terrorism. We have to show restraint and responsibility,” advised the official, Avi Pazner. “Israel will do its utmost to prevent an outbreak of violence after the murder.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry described Kahane’s murder as an “unprecedented assault on an Israeli political figure on American soil” and called for an international campaign against terrorism.

For the past month, Israel has been jolted by a incidents of revenge violence and counterviolence that followed the suppression of a riot in Jerusalem’s Old City in which police shot and killed 20 Palestinians. There was clear concern that Kahane’s death would ignite another round of violence.

Police took up positions at corners in Jerusalem where Palestinian laborers stand to wait for day jobs and are vulnerable to passing ambush. Armed border police patrols kept watch on the homes of Palestinian nationalist leaders. Six policemen patrolled on a rise above the neighborhood of Faisal Husseini, a chief contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization and a frequent target of verbal attacks from Kahane.

“He who lived by the sword dies by the sword,” said Husseini in reaction to word of Kahane’s death.

Army reinforcements were sent to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to prevent clashes between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Troop concentrations were reported centered in the West Bank town of Hebron, site of several militant Jewish nationalist settlements, and Nablus, the main town near the scene of Tuesday’s killing of two Palestinians.

According to reports on Israel radio, a motorist in civilian clothes who drove a white car with yellow Israeli license plates gunned down a 65-year-old Palestinian man as he rode his donkey to the olive harvest and a 60-year-old woman as she stood in a nearby doorway. The army sealed off Luban Arbiyeh, the village where the double shooting took place, and searched for the gunman on nearby roads. No arrest was made.

Police suspect that the killings were vengeance for the Kahane assassination, Israel radio said. Before news of the early morning assault was aired, an anonymous caller phoned the station advising it “to check in one of the villages near Nablus; two Arabs were killed there,” the broadcast reported.

When told of the Palestinian deaths, Kach spokesman Noam Federman responded: “It was to be expected.”

Husseini, the local Arab leader, concurred that the killings were linked and repeated the Palestinian demand for United Nations protection.

Liberal Israeli politicians warned of a possible spiral of political assassinations while rightists viewed the killing of Kahane as a sign that the government must crack down harder on Palestinians.

Shimon Peres, leader of the Labor Party, the chief opposition group, expressed shock at the assassination. “We must never permit the gun to replace reason,” he said.

Elyakim Haetzneh of the right-wing Tehiya Party demanded that the government “put an end to the presence of the PLO in Jerusalem,” an apparent reference to the prominence of nationalist Palestinian spokesmen in the capital.

The mood at Kahane’s headquarters near Jerusalem’s large vegetable market was grim and hostile. Some of the late rabbi’s supporters threw chairs at gathering reporters to clear them from a room. A Kach activist--Kach means “Thus” in Hebrew--sprayed tear gas on an Israeli television employee.

Vegetable stall owners in the surrounding working-class district spoke of the need to take revenge on Palestinian leaders. Some complained that Kahane had been barred from running for parliament while Arab politicians were permitted to serve as legislators. Passers-by yelled “Death to the Arabs” to reporters on the street.

At Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, meanwhile, Kahane’s father-in-law, Rabbi Jacob Blum, died Tuesday after a long illness, Israel radio reported.

Family members denied rumors that Blum died of a heart attack after hearing about Kahane’s shooting. Blum was not aware of Kahane’s assassination because he had been unconscious for days, the radio said.

In 1988, Israel’s supreme court barred Kahane from running in national elections on grounds that his Kach movement was racist. The Brooklyn-born rabbi had won a seat in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 1984 on a virulently anti-Arab platform. He routinely referred to Palestinians as “dogs.”

Kach members linked Kahane’s rejection by the Israeli Establishment to his death. The assassination was “the execution of the death sentence of the Knesset, the courts and the media,” the statement by the group said.

In recent months, Kach was prominent mainly as an instant avenger of Arab attacks on Jews. Following the recent fatal stabbings of three Jerusalem residents by a Palestinian laborer, Kach activists stormed construction sites, trying to assault Arab workers and beat photojournalists. Kahane had also been campaigning for a mass evacuation of American Jews from the United States on grounds that the country was seething with anti-Semitism.

In Amman, Jordan, an Islamic offshoot of the PLO expressed joy at Kahane’s death. “We cannot but rejoice over the killing of Kahane. All humanity should rejoice over the death of someone who believed that all non-Jews were animals,” said Nader al-Tamimi, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, a group which has emerged as a prime proponent of armed attack on Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Islamic Jihad had put a $20,000 bounty on Kahane’s head, but Tamimi claimed that the organization was not involved in his slaying.

In late October, the PLO issued a leaflet in the West Bank threatening the lives of Kahane and other extreme right-wing Israelis, charging them with provoking the Old City riot. “We will take revenge,” the leaflet warned. “We are setting an ambush.”