Killings of Settler, Palestinian Test Mideast Accord

In precisely the kind of violence that could derail the region’s newly revived peace process, a Jewish settler was shot to death Monday in the West Bank, and an elderly Palestinian man was later killed in an apparent revenge attack.

The slayings came as irate Israeli lawmakers took the first step toward early elections aimed at replacing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who weathered another round of noisy street protests and survived a long-shot no-confidence vote in parliament.

Three days after he and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat entered into an interim land-for-security deal that was long overdue under the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Netanyahu is under attack from a growing number of once-loyal right-wing supporters outraged that he agreed to relinquish an additional 13% of the West Bank to the Palestinians.

Although opposition from Israeli and Palestinian hard-liners had been expected, resistance quickly turned ugly Monday and triggered fears that the violence could be used by Israelis or Palestinians to renege on the agreement signed Friday at the White House after a torturous nine-day summit.

A Jewish settler near the West Bank city of Hebron was ambushed as he drove home from his security-guard job, shot several times and dumped on the side of the road, authorities said.

Hebron is the site of a small, heavily guarded enclave of about 500 Jewish settlers that is surrounded by about 100,000 Palestinians. The city is holy to both Jews and Muslims and was divided into its current configuration by another interim peace deal in January 1997.

Israeli authorities blamed the settler’s slaying on Palestinian guerrillas who are believed to have fled into Palestinian-controlled territory after dumping the body just inside the Israeli-held portion of the city.

For settler leaders, the killing illustrates the danger they believe the new peace deal poses for Jewish enclaves.

“The prime minister has a different definition of security and peace than anyone else,” settler leader David Wilder said. “At all costs, we must prevent this agreement from being implemented.”

Settlers and other right-wing activists later protested outside Netanyahu’s suburban home. They waved placards branding the prime minister a traitor and picturing him with Arafat and splattered symbolically with blood.

Monday evening, an anonymous telephone call to police directed them to the body of a Palestinian man in his late 60s or early 70s, found amid the olive groves near the Jewish settlement of Itamar, outside the West Bank city of Nablus. He also had been shot.

Police and a reporter for Israel’s Channel One television, who also received an anonymous call, said the caller claimed the killing was in retaliation for the Hebron slaying. Any future killings of Jews would be similarly avenged, the caller said.

And in the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip, the militant Hamas organization and five other radical Islamic groups urged all Palestinians to resist the U.S.-brokered peace agreement, saying it was a trap set by Americans and Israelis to ensnare Palestinians, deprive them of their rights and unleash internal division among them.

On the political front, Netanyahu suffered a setback when a legislative committee voted to put forward a law dissolving the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and forcing new elections.

Netanyahu’s opponents on the left, from the Labor Party, and on the right, from within his own governing coalition, joined to move the bill. It must be approved three times in the full Knesset before elections can be held, probably in March, lawmakers said.

Both Labor and many of Netanyahu’s erstwhile allies want to remove him from office--Labor because it wants to return to power, rightists because they oppose the West Bank withdrawal.

Labor, however, supports the peace deal and consequently refused to go along with a no-confidence vote Monday that was sponsored by a small ultranationalist party. The motion failed, but it was a preview of the many political battles to come.

In the session, Rehavam Zeevi, a right-wing Knesset member, donned a skullcap and used the Book of Samuel to explain why Netanyahu had to go:

“Thou hast rejected the word of the Lord,” Zeevi said, “and the Lord hath rejected thee from being king over Israel.”