Dark Cloud of Anxiety Hangs Over West Bank Settlers : Israel: Terrorist attacks are increasing. But hilltop community’s residents fear abandonment by their government even more.

The rain-laden gray clouds of early spring envelop this hilltop community much these days, and the mood in the little Israeli settlement is often as dark.

“People are getting killed, day after day, and our government seems unable to protect us,” said Ronit Shoker, a nurse. “On the contrary, Prime Minister (Yitzhak) Rabin talks only about retreat, giving the Land of Israel to the Arabs and thus obtaining peace. But what peace do we get through weakness?”

That question preys more and more upon the minds of Shiloh residents and the other 125,000 Israelis living in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights as terrorist attacks increase--as much within Israel as in the occupied territories.

“I am afraid--we all are,” said Greta Kuznetsova, an artist who came from the former Soviet Union nearly three years ago. “We can’t go out (of Shiloh), take a bus or go to Jerusalem without worrying. All the time, we must think about security for we are surrounded by Arabs. What we really want is peace.”

Two Israeli men in their 20s were killed last week while waiting at a bus stop down the road from Shiloh in a hit-and-run by a Palestinian driving a delivery van. Police are still searching for the driver and have yet to classify the incident as a traffic accident or terrorist attack.

For residents of Shiloh and Eli, a neighboring settlement about 20 miles north of Jerusalem, the two men’s deaths were murder, a chilling reminder of their own vulnerability, and they count the victims among the dozen Israelis killed by terrorists in the last three months.

Two cairns of the muddy and rough sedimentary stones that cover the Judean Hills mark the spot where the men were hit by the speeding van; each pile has an Israeli flag, and two bunches of bright flowers have been placed between them.

“Will we be picked off, one, two or three at a time, until the others flee?” an Eli resident remarked bitterly, looking at the little roadside memorial. “That is the way it seems to many of us out here. . . . These two murders--how could this have been an accident?--sum up the fears we all have, both the fears of terrorism by the Arabs and of abandonment by our government.”

Angered by the recent surge in terrorism, scores of settlers attacked nearby Palestinian villages and towns over the past week, breaking windows, firing their guns in the air, stoning cars and burning a gas station, which proved to be Israeli-owned but Palestinian-managed.

“There is a lot of pain and thus a lot of anger,” Rabbi Michael Brom, the head of a religious school here, commented. “And it is very important for the government at this point to see our pain and our anger . . . and it must do something, sharp and immediate, in response.”

Each terrorist attack, Brom said, including the deaths of Ofer Cohen and Ya’akov Bracha, who had been visiting and working in the area, “brings terrible suffering that the nation as a whole feels and each person individually does too.”

Without such a response, Brom said, residents of Shiloh and other West Bank communities will feel abandoned by the government and this, in turn, will sap their ability to withstand the pressures of living here. “People really feel that our own government just wants us gone,” he said.

Many here favor far tougher measures in response to terrorist attacks; Shiloh residents note ominously that in the past some of them have joined vigilante actions against Palestinians when they felt the government was failing to protect the West Bank settlements.

“Our anger is at the boiling point,” said Avital Eldar, the community librarian and a mother of six. “We feel we have to do something, but burning down a gas station is not the way to do it. We need decisive action that makes it clear to the Palestinian Arabs that we are here to stay and that violence against us will not only fail but be repaid.”

Chaim Herzog, Israel’s president, warned Friday against yielding to the impulse to retaliate and counseled steadiness of purpose and patience.

“We feel the pain of the bereaved, we mourn the dead and we understand the fury of their families,” Herzog said in a radio address to the nation. “We are boiling with fury when it hits so indiscriminately. But that pain and fury must not be allowed to deprive us of our levelheadedness, because, in the war with terror, the winner is the one who finds comfort in patience, common sense, presence of mind, determination and persistence.”

The fundamental concern of Shiloh’s 150 families, in fact, is not physical security. More people have been injured and killed in ordinary traffic accidents than in terrorist attacks, they say, and residents are confident of their ability to protect themselves and to defend the settlement.

“I tell people I live in Shiloh, and their eyes roll,” said Batya Medad, a community activist and a mother of five, commenting on her family’s 11 years here. “We don’t feel it is more dangerous here than elsewhere in the country; actually, it is safer--and far safer than New York or Los Angeles.

“You get used to not knowing whether the bus will be stoned, and you value being able to raise children in an environment where they become strong and independent and loving,” she added. “Our children have a freedom to become themselves . . . that they would not have anywhere else. . . .

“What I worry about,” Medad continued, her New York accent softened only slightly by 23 years in Israel, “is this government--that it will give away what we have reclaimed for the Jewish people, that it has lost all of its Zionism, that it will retreat from the Land of Israel. . . . These are really the greatest dangers.”

At each new terrorist attack, Rabin tells Israelis that, regardless of whatever action the army or government take in response, the ultimate solution is a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that includes autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Killing a few more Arabs, in fact, will not help for it does not really signal commitment,” Brom said. “The Arabs are extremely sensitive to changes in mood and spirit. If they sense decisiveness, they change their own approach. We need government actions that show strength and resolve. If we show weakness, however, they will push harder, for negotiations are just a continuation of the armed struggle, and they will demand that Jews leave Judea and Samaria, that they get sovereignty over Jerusalem, that they return to Ramle and Lod in central Israel. Shiloh is Israel’s front line.”

But Brom argued that, if the Rabin government finds that it cannot reach a settlement with the Palestinians, then Israel might be able to halt the negotiations. “If a leftist government says there is no prospect of a deal, it will be believed where a rightist government would not,” he said. “That’s what I hope for.”

Brom, whose yeshiva educates young men in conjunction with their military service and prepares others to be rabbis or teachers, went further to call for a moral rearmament among Israelis as the ultimate basis for its security.

“The problem we face is a great internal weakness within our own country,” Brom argued. “Modernization, Westernization, instant gratification--all are taking their toll. We need to fight self-indulgence. We need to return to our roots in the Torah.”

Shiloh’s religious atmosphere, in fact, attracted many families to settle here. Founded near the site of ancient Shiloh, an early capital of biblical Israel, the community is a celebration of the modern return to Jewish roots.

“All my life, until I came here, I lived without knowing what it was to be Jewish, not even what the Sabbath is,” Kuznetsova said, recounting how her father, a longtime member of the Soviet Communist Party, had hidden his religion. “Finding all this has given me a new life and such joy.”

And, despite all the worry about the settlement’s long-term future and the fears over security as unrest increases in the West Bank, Shiloh’s sense of community is gaining in strength, its residents said.

“Despite all the concerns, people are still moving to Shiloh and they are still building here,” Eldar said.