Jewish Settler’s Mourners Rage at PLO Accord

The rabbis wept as they prayed, their voices high and hoarse. The keening of the women began softly, like the cooing of doves, then swelled into full-voiced sobbing. In the crowd, a dotted sea of yarmulkes, men’s tears slid down to mingle with their beards.

“May this evil murder of today raise a terrible, bitter cry,” intoned Rabbi Haim Druckman. “How long?”

The hundreds of settlers and Orthodox Jews who marched through Jerusalem on Sunday in the funeral procession of Ephraim Ayubi, 30, were participating in a ritual that was supposed to have become obsolete. When Israel signed a virtual peace pact with the Palestine Liberation Organization almost two months ago, that was supposed to have meant the end of terror against Israeli Jews.

Instead, Ayubi on Sunday became the 11th Israeli to be killed by Palestinian opponents of the pact in recent weeks. The continued violence fuels rage and a feeling of abandonment among the 125,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and heightens opposition to peace talks with the PLO.

The victims’ funerals have drawn up to hundreds of mourners. The ceremonies are more and more often followed by anti-government protests, attacks on innocent Palestinians and the blocking of West Bank roads with rocks and burning tires. And now the unrest is moving from remote settlements to central highways and the streets of Jerusalem.

On Sunday, mourners at the funeral distributed leaflets claiming that “the peace agreement equals an agreement to murder Jews” and calling everyone to a rally in downtown Jerusalem. Protesters blocked traffic at the busiest corner in the city and scuffled with police in the biggest such clash between settlers and authorities since the treaty was signed.

“This is only the beginning,” one settler warned.

Two Palestinian groups claimed responsibility for the killing--the military arm of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO offshoot--but for Ayubi’s mourners, it made no difference who really did it.

“The murderers who murdered you want to kill all of us,” Druckman, a former member of Parliament and founder of a right-wing settlers group, said, speaking to Ayubi’s body. “That’s the truth. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves. They want to kill all of us.”

Ayubi, Druckman’s driver for eight years, was the father of four children, and his widow is eight months pregnant with the fifth. He was driving Druckman near Hebron in the West Bank when gunmen opened fire on their car, wounding the rabbi and killing Ayubi.

Ayubi was a settler, living in the Gaza Strip, but “he was first of all a man of peace,” said Nurit Aronshtam, Ayubi’s friend since their army days together. “His position was that he loved the land of Israel. He didn’t hate anyone.

“I know they always say that it’s always the best people who get killed, but it’s not always true,” she said. “In this case it is.”

Government officials expressed their sorrow and sent condolences to Ayubi’s family, but they could not dispel the settlers’ belief that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin considers it a victory that attacks against Jews have been almost wholly confined to the occupied zones--as if blood spilled there is tolerable.

“If something happens here and Jews are hurt, that’s all right, that’s the security threshold,” said David Levy, head of the Jordan Valley Regional Council. “If these things continue to happen, I believe people will take the law into their own hands.”

Settlers ran amok in parts of Hebron on Sunday, burning Arab hothouses, breaking windows in Palestinian cars, wrecking stores and blocking roads. The Israeli army put Hebron under tight curfew.

Leaders of the settlers said they planned to block all roads in the territories to Arab traffic.

“If Jews can’t travel on these roads, Arabs won’t be able to travel on them either,” said Tsvi Katsover, a prominent settlers leader.

The Israeli military commander of the region pledged that the army would do everything it could to keep the roads open.

So the stage was set for a confrontation today, when settlers said they would begin blocking throughways at 4:30 a.m.

The attack on Druckman and Ayubi raised such outrage that even a normally staid newscaster on Israeli Television demanded of Economics Minister Shimon Shetreet, “What kind of agreement is this, that we have victims every week?”

Ayubi, the latest victim, had one main answer for all Israel’s troubles, Aronshtam said: “It will be all right, with God’s help.

“We have to honor him now, that’s what I feel,” she said at the funeral. “And we really have a problem in the state of Israel. Not a single member of the government has come to show that he cares.”