Right-Wing Israeli Cabinet Member Is Shot at Hotel

Israel’s right-wing, anti-Arab tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi, was the target of an assassination attempt this morning at a hotel in mostly Arab East Jerusalem. Zeevi, who has long advocated the expulsion of Israeli Arab citizens and of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was shot at least twice, police said.

In a leaflet faxed to the Agence France-Presse office in Jerusalem, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, claimed responsibility for the attack. The leaflet said that Zeevi, known here by his nickname, Gandhi, was shot to avenge the death of the PFLP’s leader--Mustafa Zibri, better known as Abu Ali Mustafa--whom the Israeli army assassinated Aug. 28 in his West Bank office.

Israel Radio reported that all Cabinet ministers had been ordered to stay in their homes or report to a secure place after the wounded Zeevi was discovered in the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

The shooting may have delivered a fatal blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to shore up a shaky cease-fire and bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. The administration has been pushing both sides to stop more than a year of fighting and resume talks. That effort took on new urgency after Sept. 11, when the U.S. began seeking the support of moderate Arab and Muslim states for its war on terrorism.

“I call upon [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to regard this as a red line,” said Yisrael Katz, a member of Sharon’s Likud Party. “Not that Gandhi’s blood is redder than that of any other civilian, but the Palestinian Authority must be declared a terrorist-supporting organization, with all the implications that come from that.”

The attack came just hours before Zeevi’s resignation from the Cabinet was to take effect. He led a bloc of two anti-Arab parties out of the government after Sharon ordered Israeli troops and tanks to pull out of a Palestinian neighborhood of the West Bank city of Hebron on Monday morning. The pullout infuriated Jewish settlers, who are the mainstay of support for Zeevi’s National Union Party.

As doctors battled to save Zeevi’s life at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, police said they had no suspects. After the minister’s wife discovered him on the eighth floor of the Hyatt--where the coupled stayed when the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, was in session in Jerusalem--the hotel was sealed off, and a police swat team was deployed inside, searching for gunmen. Zeevi was said to have been shot in the head and the neck. A hospital spokesman said that Zeevi had no pulse when he arrived at Hadassah, and that a medical team was attempting to resuscitate him.

Palestinian militants have repeatedly threatened to target Israeli political leaders in retaliation for Israel’s policy of hunting down suspected Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel has killed dozens of men--most of them leaders of the military wings of the Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad and of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement--in the past year. Zeevi, the head of the PFLP, was the highest-ranking Palestinian killed in years.

The so-called targeted killings have been condemned by much of the international community as illegal, but Israel says they are carried out in self-defense. The government briefly suspended the shootings last month after both sides declared a cease-fire, but it resumed the killings last week, saying the Palestinian Authority had refused to arrest men whom Israel suspected of planning and carrying out attacks on Israelis.

Zeevi, a retired general, joined the Knesset in 1988 on the anti-Arab platform that at the time was considered outside the bounds of respectable politics.

He won his first Cabinet appointment in 1991, from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who brought him into his coalition over the objections of his own Likud Party. A longtime friend of Sharon, with whom he served in the army, Zeevi was named minister of tourism when Sharon formed his coalition seven months ago. Zeevi also became a member of the Security Cabinet, where he consistently argued for the government to step up its battle against the Palestinian Authority and to include the homes of Arafat and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, on its target list.

Zeevi’s decision to pull out of the government was a blow to Sharon, who told his old friend in a speech from the Knesset’s podium Monday that he had “made Arafat’s day” by triggering the first defections from the mostly right-wing government, a move that commentators here said could eventually lead to the collapse of the government.