Arab-Israeli Violence Puts Pressure on Rabin : Unrest: New Jerusalem government, mindful of peace talks, resists calls for retaliation in the territories.

The deaths of three Israelis in separate terrorist attacks in a week put the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin under intense pressure Sunday to take far tougher security measures--although this could undermine Arab-Israeli negotiations.

“Rabin, three dead in week--you’re weak!” said a sign carried by one demonstrator outside his Jerusalem residence Sunday. “Rabin, where is your ‘iron fist?’ ” another asked, recalling a Rabin pledge four months ago to deal “hard blows” to terrorists. “Has that ‘fist’ turned to Jell-O?”

An incendiary bomb set off Saturday night under a passing van on the West Bank killed one Israeli and injured nine others. Earlier, an Israeli farmer was killed in his West Bank fields and an Israeli agricultural technician was slain in the Gaza Strip.

Opposition politicians blamed the attacks on what they called Rabin’s “appeasement policies,” and rabbis from settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip said they will meet Tuesday to discuss “our security crisis.”

The opposition Likud Party linked the upsurge in violence to Rabin’s efforts to accelerate peace talks with Israel’s Arab neighbors and the Palestinians.

Moshe Katzav, the Likud’s leader in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, said the government must “make it unequivocally clear that by terrorist actions, (Arabs) will not receive any political concessions.” He called for a closed-door discussion with government officials this week on the security situation.

“What characterizes the 100 days of grace given the Rabin government is the strengthening of the intifada, “ said Yehoshua Matza, the Likud chairman of the Knesset’s interior affairs committee, referring to the Palestinian revolt begun five years ago against Israeli rule.

But Police Minister Moshe Shahal said after meeting with senior commanders Sunday that the security situation is better than a year ago and that terrorist attacks, in fact, are down. What is needed, Shahal said, are increased patrols by the country’s citizen militia and greater vigilance by farmers.

The government will not be provoked, Shahal said, into taking harsh, vindictive actions that would undercut the peace negotiations, scheduled to resume Wednesday in Washington, and thus impair Israel’s long-term security.

Over the last year, Palestinian guerrillas opposed to Arab-Israeli peace talks have killed Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza Strip before earlier rounds of the talks, apparently in hopes of causing the Israelis to pull out or of provoking them into a crackdown that would make it impossible for the Palestinian delegation to participate.

The low-key Israeli approach, clearly intended to preserve Jerusalem’s negotiating options, won support from Yossi Sarid, chairman of the leftist Meretz group, a partner in the governing coalition. “Extremists always strengthen extremists from the other side,” Sarid commented, cautioning against any overreaction.

Hanan Ashrawi, the spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the talks, condemned the slayings of the Israelis before she left Sunday for Washington.

The pain is shared, she said, because 11 Palestinians were killed in clashes last week with Israeli soldiers and one more died after a hunger strike with other so-called security prisoners.

“The (Israeli) occupation has to come to an end so that we can approach it as human beings and not as two parties in conflict,” Ashrawi said.

Israeli youths, angered by the three deaths, were nonetheless stoning Arab cars, attacking police stations and raiding Arab communities in parts of the West Bank over the weekend, arousing fears that the uneasy truce between Israelis and Palestinians in the region might be broken.

There was also a real danger, according to well-informed Israeli settlers, that heavily armed vigilante groups might move against radical Palestinian leaders, particularly Islamic fundamentalists, who have called frequently and publicly for the “elimination” of Israelis from the region.

“Either the army and the security forces take these people out, or there are people here who will,” a prominent member of the settlers’ movement said, asking not to be quoted by name. “We know who the extremists are, we have the ability to take them out, and, unlike the government, we have the resolve to do it if necessary.”

Police, meanwhile, urged farmers to go to their fields armed and in pairs. Many settlers had grown complacent about security, they said, because attacks were rare--more than 28,000 Palestinians work on Israeli settlements each day on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with virtually no security incidents.

Army units did seal off a number of Arab villages around the West Bank town of Ramallah on Sunday in an intensive search for the Palestinian guerrillas who placed the incendiary bomb outside the nearby Jewish settlement of Mattityahu. The bomb, connected to a trip wire, blew up as the Israeli van passed, setting the vehicle on fire.

Yehudit Oster, 57, burned to death in the van, police said.

Earlier in the week, farmer Shimon Avraham, 35, was stabbed to death while tending his cabbage patch near the West Bank town of Janin and Amatzia Ben Haim, 47, a computer technician and, ironically, a veteran of Israel’s crack counterterrorism forces, was murdered with a mattock while checking an automated irrigation system in a Gaza Strip hothouse.

“Next, will they be murdering us in our beds?” asked the sign held by another of the three dozen protesters at Rabin’s residence.

“Every day, we are burying someone,” said Aharon Dumav, a leader in the settlers’ movement Yesha. “Our security forces are terrific, but those who set policy are tying their hands.”

The depth of the settlers’ anger was evident in a pre-dawn attack by two dozen Israelis on the Palestinian village of Aboud near Ramallah. According to residents, Israelis from the nearby settlement of Halmish broke windows and smashed doors of houses in the village, set cars ablaze and fired their rifles and pistols randomly before being dispersed by soldiers.

But Police Inspector General Yaacov Terner urged Israelis to remain “cool-headed despite all the pain caused by the death of innocents.” He said extra police and army units have already been sent to troubled areas and that further reinforcements will be coming this week.