Israeli Settlers

JERUSALEM -- Israeli settlers, enraged by the murder of a 23-year-old man by Islamic militants, blocked roads in the occupied West Bank today.The main settlers' group, Yesha, said it blockaded 48 sites, preventing Palestinian villagers from going to work, many to jobs in Israel, in a further escalation of the growing confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians.Yesterday, Israeli settlers stoned Palestinian cars, bringing warnings that the protests could turn into a full-fledged rebellion against the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and its agreement on Palestinian autonomy.

YITZHAR, West Bank - A pipe bomb that exploded late last night outside the Jerusalem home of Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor, left him slightly wounded and created only a minor stir in a nation that routinely experiences violence on a much larger scale. But Sternhell was noted for his impassioned criticism of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, once suggesting that Palestinians "would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements." And the authorities found fliers near his home offering nearly $300,000 to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli advocacy group, leading them to suspect that militant Israeli settlers or their supporters were behind the attack.

JERUSALEM -- While his government approves new settlement construction in the West Bank, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has renewed his harsh attacks on settlers, denouncing them as "a burden" on the Israeli army and its fight against radical Palestinian terrorists."

SAY THIS FOR the Israeli settlers who have been made to leave the Gaza Strip this month: few as they were compared to more than a million Palestinians inhabiting the most densely populated piece of real estate in the world, they actually wanted to be there. Most of the Palestinians living in Gaza would rather be somewhere else, somewhere closer to the ancestral homes that they and their grandparents and great-grandparents left behind in the wars between the Arabs and the Israelis. They were among the tides of refugees who went to Gaza because they had nowhere else to go, victims of conflicts whose chief protagonists were in Cairo, Damascus, Amman and Tel Aviv.

JERUSALEM -- While the more outspoken Israeli settlers on the West Bank dig in their heels and vow never to leave, even if they're gradually surrounded by a Palestinian state, a few tentative voices of accommodation have begun to speak up."I think the peace process is bigger than the settlements," says Viktor Yonah, who for a year has lived with his wife in Adam, a settlement of about 100 families a few miles northeast of Jerusalem. "I've spoken to other families here. We've talked about what we would do if there was Palestinian autonomy in the region, and I think at least 40 families would be willing to move if the proper arrangements and compensation could be provided.

EFRAT, Israeli-Occupied West Bank -- Denver lawyer Nathan Davidovich moved his family here one year ago. This week, he sat on a hillside to claim the land as his."Who gave me this country? God," he said of the West Bank. "God created the world and he gave it to whomever he wanted. He gave it to the Jews."And what of the Palestinians who live in the West Bank? "No part of [the land] should be returned. They can't have their own country within our country."Mr. Davidovich and hundreds of other Jewish settlers this week challenged the Israeli government by occupying several West Bank hilltops, forcing police and soldiers to remove the settlers by force.

Some people think the schools chief should be a teacher, others say business manager, still others politician, but the best resume would be a career wizard. We long ago opened our trade gates to China but a lot of congressmen are dead set against China opening its to us. Israeli settlers are too tough for the Palestinian Authority to throw out. That's a job for the Israel Defense Forces. Cheer up. Putin is in charge.

MANY DOUBTED it would ever happen. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shook hands with Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat yesterday. They conversed for an hour and committed themselves to implement agreements already reached. With that, the disputes between them, which they did not resolve, became susceptible to resolution. The Oslo peace process is up and running, with a Likud Party government that had been critical of it.Mr. Netanyahu is coming to see President Clinton on Monday.

Ten days before Israeli troops are scheduled to begin pulling out of Gaza and Jericho, the West Bank and Gaza are shambles if not battle zones. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat cannot even agree on whether the Dec. 13 date for starting the pull-out is sacred. They are scheduled to meet Dec. 12, which allows little time to sort out such disagreements.They can make their policy work only if they realize they are in it together. The Palestinian Hamas gunmen who kill Israeli settlers, and the extremist Israelis setting up armed zones in Gaza and disrupting the West Bank in hopes of derailing the settlement with the PLO, are secret allies.

JERUSALEM -- Pressing to conclude an agreement on Arab self-rule in Israeli-occupied territories in time for a signing ceremony in Washington this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat last night for a major effort to resolve the deadlock.On his way to the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba, where he has met Mr. Arafat twice in the last two months, Mr. Peres said he was carrying a new proposal on the West Bank city of Hebron, though he offered no details.

JERUSALEM -- Days before Israel is set to begin moving thousands of settlers from the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's chief political rival, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, resigned yesterday to protest the withdrawal plan, saying the government was acting with "complete blindness." His resignation is unlikely to disrupt the withdrawal that is scheduled to begin Aug. 15. But it underscores the dissension Sharon's plan has created among hawkish members of the Cabinet, including many in Sharon's Likud Party.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - No planes take off or land at Gaza International Airport, but that hasn't discouraged Palestinian air traffic controller Lina Ghareeb from showing up for work. Each morning she walks under the terminal's archways to join dozens of baggage handlers, security officials and ticket takers lounging in the ghostly silent building. They have little or nothing do. There hasn't been a flight to or from Gaza International for nearly four years, ever since Israel bombed the airport's radar station and sent in armored bulldozers to plow up the runway, part of its effort to destroy Palestinian infrastructure at the peak of the Palestinian uprising.

JERUSALEM - Palestinian gunmen shot and killed an Israeli settler and wounded his pregnant wife in the West Bank yesterday, as Israeli forces raided the northern Gaza Strip for a second day, bulldozing orchards and brush after Palestinian rockets were fired from the area. The United States promised millions of dollars to help rebuild the town of Beit Hanoun, where many homes were demolished and whole orchards were razed during the Israeli operation. Israeli forces were again on the outskirts of Beit Hanoun yesterday.

TAPUAH, West Bank - Two Israeli brothers from this settlement were shot dead by masked Palestinian gunmen yesterday morning when they stepped out of their tanker truck to sell diesel fuel in a neighboring Palestinian village, Israeli officials said. Later, at a falafel stand in Jerusalem, a suicide bomber blew himself up, wounding five other people, none seriously. It was the first such attack inside Jerusalem in more than a month, since back-to-back bombings killed 26 people and prompted Israel to begin its latest West Bank military offensive.

HEBRON, West Bank - Barely a block from each other but worlds apart, Naziha Abu Daoud and Miriam Levinger live conflicting versions of a nightmare that recurs daily in the ancient alleys and markets of this legendary city. Abu Daoud, 42, describes two episodes in recent months of her stepdaughter's being pelted by stones, bottles and cans from the Avraham Avinu Jewish settlement that hugs her family's stone-walled, Ottoman-style house. Then she opens a trash bag, spreading Hebrew-labeled wrappings and containers onto her clean-swept floor - all discarded, she says, by Israeli soldiers posted permanently on her roof to protect the settlers.

Some people think the schools chief should be a teacher, others say business manager, still others politician, but the best resume would be a career wizard. We long ago opened our trade gates to China but a lot of congressmen are dead set against China opening its to us. Israeli settlers are too tough for the Palestinian Authority to throw out. That's a job for the Israel Defense Forces. Cheer up. Putin is in charge.

TAPUAH, West Bank - Two Israeli brothers from this settlement were shot dead by masked Palestinian gunmen yesterday morning when they stepped out of their tanker truck to sell diesel fuel in a neighboring Palestinian village, Israeli officials said. Later, at a falafel stand in Jerusalem, a suicide bomber blew himself up, wounding five other people, none seriously. It was the first such attack inside Jerusalem in more than a month, since back-to-back bombings killed 26 people and prompted Israel to begin its latest West Bank military offensive.

Washington. -- After the tragic Hebron massacre, television showed us the portraits of two Israeli settlements. Arab spokesmen say that Israeli settlers must be disarmed, that the settlements are the paramount issue, and that the settlements must now be put on the negotiating agenda immediately instead of later, as originally planned.Because the settlements on display are vastly atypical, this argument is dubious.One of the settlements in the camera's eye is a small one, composed of ultra-religious Jews in the old Jewish quarter of Hebron, an otherwise all-Arab city.

BEIT HAGGAI, Occupied West Bank -- When the day-care center at this tiny settlement of Orthodox Jews needed repairs, the community sought help from a group of Americans.But not Jewish Americans.This help came from Evangelical Christians whose historic ties to the most determined Jewish settlers of the ancient land of Israel are driven by the belief that the Messiah will not come until Jews reclaim the land God gave them.The $5,000 raised by Judy Campbell and members of the New Life Church of Colorado Springs, Colo.

JERUSALEM -- The wounds of Mike Raz and Mustafa Barghouthi heal slowly.Two men caught in the cross-fire of their two peoples, an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian doctor, they survived the deadly clashes of their volatile coexistence. And now they and their countrymen face an uncertain future circumscribed by the polarities of peace.Today, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators reopen talks on outstanding aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.The redeployment of Israeli troops from Hebron heads the list.