Israel Buries Dead; Barak Rules Out Escalation--for Now

With Jewish casualties mounting, Israel buried its newest dead Tuesday and debated growing demands for harsher reprisals against Palestinian gunmen who are fighting against Israeli occupation.

But Prime Minister Ehud Barak, returning from an abbreviated trip to Washington and Chicago, insisted that he won’t step up retaliation--for now.

As six more Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli troops or killed in other incidents Tuesday, funerals were held for four Israelis killed Monday--the deadliest day for Israeli Jews since fighting broke out nearly seven weeks ago.

Hundreds of Jewish settlers, religious schoolchildren and their supporters drove in a convoy through downtown Jerusalem with the body of Sara Lisha, a 41-year-old teacher and mother of five. Lisha, two soldiers and a truck driver were killed by Palestinian gunmen attacking Israeli-controlled roads in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Lisha cortege stopped outside Barak’s office for prayers and passed a protest tent that had been erected by settlers demanding that the army be given a free hand to attack Palestinian militias. “Let the army win,” posters read.

The time for negotiating is over, the mourners said. “Every normal person would try to protect himself, his family,” said one mourner from Tel Aviv, who gave only his first name, Zvi. “If this were Paris or Australia,” retaliation wouldn’t even be a matter of debate, he said.

Settlement leaders were among those who paid their respects, as were more than a dozen top officers of the army’s Central Command. Tellingly, it was the military, not political, leadership that attended: Settlers accuse Barak and other politicians of tying the hands of the army.

Lisha was killed as she drove to her settlement home to see her children before heading to the protest tent near Barak’s residence, family and friends said Tuesday.

“In the Middle East, only the strong survive,” said Menachem Posarino, another mourner and the principal of the school attended by Lisha’s two oldest daughters. “The weak simply do not make it. . . . This is the rule that the Israeli leadership must internalize and comprehend.”

A world away in the Gaza Strip, thousands of angry Palestinians--some waving Korans and guns and chanting for revenge--filled the streets for the funerals of three Palestinians who died the day before, including the nephew of Col. Mohammed Dahlan, the top security official in Gaza.

The Israeli clamor for tougher action was echoed all the way up to the president’s office. President Moshe Katzav said the “situation in which we are supposedly looking for ways to negotiate while maintaining a certain level of violence and bloodshed . . . cannot go on.”

Reporters traveling with Barak’s delegation as it returned to Tel Aviv on Tuesday night said the prime minister has decided not to order a stepped-up retaliation against the Palestinians because it would only play into Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s hands.

Barak and other Israeli officials believe that Arafat is trying to get Israel to retaliate with so much force that international condemnation would be swift. That, in turn, would boost Arafat’s campaign to have U.N. peacekeepers or a similar international monitoring force sent into the West Bank and Gaza, a move that Israel adamantly opposes.

“We cannot open an all-out war against the Palestinians,” Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said after facing irate residents of Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood just south of Jerusalem built on land claimed by Palestinians. “We have to be prudent and patient and choose our tools.”

Gilo has come under steady gunfire attack from the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Jala, and Ben-Ami visited the area to show support.

Although international human rights organizations have concluded that Israel has used excessive force in trying to quell the riots that began Sept. 28, Israeli authorities see themselves as having used restraint because they unleashed but a fraction of their awesome firepower.

Many of Israel’s peace activists blame the plight of the settlers on the settlers themselves. Eliminate the settlements, they say, and the main point of friction with the Palestinians is eliminated. Peace Now, for example, has started a campaign by taking out a huge ad in local newspapers demanding that many of the more than 140 Jewish settlements that split and divide the West Bank and Gaza be dismantled.

“Today, more than ever, it is clear that the settlements and bypass roads are the main obstacles to the achievement of an agreement with the Palestinians and security for Israelis,” the ad says.

Israeli commentators say Barak and his government are at a loss for how to end the bloodshed, which is steadily deteriorating into a guerrilla war that has destroyed once-promising peace negotiations. Palestinian militias have made it clear that they will continue to target settlers and soldiers, while Israeli forces have shown a willingness to target specific suspected Palestinian gunmen for assassination.

“Israel does not want to deal with the root of the problem, neither on the Israeli side (the settlements) nor on the Palestinian side (the hatred),” leading columnist Nahum Barnea wrote Tuesday. “Israel wants to bury its head in the sand.”

In response to Monday’s shootings, Israel also clamped a closure on all Palestinian towns and villages, blocking much travel and commerce, although many Palestinians were able to find back-route ways around the army checkpoints.

One Palestinian man was reported to have died Tuesday after the military would not let him cross a checkpoint for urgent medical care. The man, Jamal Elwan, 34, had inhaled tear gas and suffered heart trouble, his family said.