Mideast Killings Bring Escalating Cries for Revenge

The separate killings Sunday of the son of the late Jewish extremist Meir Kahane and a top Palestinian activist threatened to escalate into a wave of revenge and all but destroy President Clinton’s eleventh-hour efforts to revive Middle East peace talks.

To mournful cries demanding an eye for an eye, Binyamin Kahane and his wife, Talia, were buried Sunday evening by several thousand fellow Jewish settlers and ultra-Orthodox Jews. In an ensuing melee, 10 Arabs were beaten, 10 Israeli police officers injured and five Kahane followers arrested.

The couple were killed when Palestinian gunmen ambushed their white van as they traveled from Jerusalem through the West Bank to Tappuah, a radical Jewish settlement where the Kahanes lived. Five of their children, ages 2 months to 10 years, were also riding in the van and suffered serious injury.

Three hours later, also in the West Bank, a leader of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement was shot to death in what Palestinians labeled an Israeli military assassination. Thabet Thabet was apparently the highest-ranking Fatah militant killed since Israel began targeting such leaders in recent weeks.

Thabet’s counterpart in Ramallah, militia commander Marwan Barghouti, blamed caretaker Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Barak specifically for the killing and vowed revenge. “The Israelis will have to pay the price,” he said.

Israelis and Palestinians alike braced for retaliation, and the army and police stepped up security in the region as tensions soared.

The Kahane funeral pushed through the streets of downtown Jerusalem after dusk. Right-wing settlers--some with rifles slung across their backs--escorted the cortege. Many chanted “Death to Arabs” as they went, smashed Palestinian car windows and waved posters saying “The God of Vengeance Has Appeared.”

They accused Barak of having blood on his hands because of his insistence on continuing to negotiate with Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president.

“Be shocked!” settler leader Noam Federman screamed at the funeral. “Take revenge! If we do not take action, we are all sitting ducks in a shooting gallery.”

Baruch Kahane, a rabbi and brother of the dead man, told the mourners, “Nothing can free us from the obligation to avenge their blood.”

Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was slain by an Egyptian-born Muslim 10 years ago in Manhattan, founded the virulently anti-Arab Kach movement, which Israel outlawed in 1994 after the massacre by a Jewish extremist of 29 Palestinians praying in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Kach advocated the eviction of Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the use of violence against Arabs and Jewish leaders who it believed posed a threat to Israel.

After his father’s death, Binyamin Kahane founded a new movement called Kahane Chai--”Kahane lives”--and ran a yeshiva in his settlement to promulgate his late father’s teachings. Members frequently appeared to heckle Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at rallies in the months leading up to his assassination in November 1995 by an extremist Jew.

The U.S.-born Binyamin, 34, had numerous run-ins with the law. Israeli authorities said his rhetoric often escalated into incitement. He was acquitted of sedition in 1998, but the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal in November.

It wasn’t clear if Kahane’s assailants knew who he was. Gunmen in the West Bank are familiar with settlers’ movements and usually observe their victims before attacking, according to Palestinian sources, so it was possible that they had identified Kahane. On the other hand, gunmen routinely target settlers and had already killed more than a dozen in similar ambushes since the start of the bloody intifada in late September.

On Saturday, Fatah had vowed to step up the targeting of settlers and soldiers in an intensification of the uprising that has claimed more than 350 lives, more than 85% of them Palestinian.

Shortly after the Kahanes were attacked, Fatah leader Thabet, a dentist, was killed as he emerged from his home in the West Bank town of Tulkarm. Thabet, 40, died in a hail of bullets apparently fired from a truck parked nearby in what Palestinians said was a special operation by Israeli undercover forces.

Israeli army radio said Thabet died in an exchange of gunfire.

Israel has made no secret of its policy to hunt down gunmen who attack Israelis, and the officials who give them their orders. Palestinians say that policy has left about 20 activists dead in recent weeks.

Today is the anniversary of the founding of Fatah and seems a propitious day for trouble. There were reports early today that Israeli troops and Palestinians were clashing. Gunmen marched Sunday through Gaza City and the West Bank city of Ramallah and fired submachine guns in a show of force and to protest the Clinton peace plan.

Even before Sunday’s bloodshed, the prospects of reaching any kind of agreement were already fading fast. A plan proposed by Clinton would require Israel to cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, while Palestinians would be required to relinquish their demand that more than 2 million refugees be allowed to return to what is today Israel.

Israel had initially accepted the plan as a basis for further negotiation, while Arafat balked and asked for further clarifications. But over the weekend, Barak backtracked and told television interviewers that he would not agree to Palestinian control of the Temple Mount, which contains Judaism’s holiest site but is also revered by Muslims.

Facing a tough election in less than six weeks, Barak may have changed his tune after seeing polls late last week that showed him losing by more than 20 points to right-wing hawk Ariel Sharon. Barak’s calculation had always been that his hopes for reelection lay with securing a peace deal. But the kind of peace deal that was emerging appeared to be hurting rather than helping his electoral chances.

Barak’s aides said Sunday that he remains receptive to Clinton’s ideas but is looking for creative solutions. Sovereignty over the Temple Mount, for example, might be handed to an international body.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the Palestinians continued to study the proposals, seek counsel from other Arab states and ask for clarification from Clinton’s advisors. But Palestinian newspapers reported that the Clinton administration said no additional clarifications will be coming.

For Barak, his efforts to promote the peace deal took another blow from pointed criticism by his senior military staff, which warned that he would be exposing Israelis to terrorism. All in all, Clinton’s efforts appear doomed, given that he has less than three weeks to make it work.

“Clinton is trying to bring this baby into the world through a Caesarean operation,” the top-selling Yediot Aharonot said in an editorial Sunday. “Such an unnatural birth endangers the newborn and harms the future commitment of the sides.”