Deaths harden settlers' anger

By PHIL REEVES

JERUSALEM - Sara Lisha had planned to come to west Jerusalem yesterday. She had a message for her Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, on a big banner that she was going to parade outside his office. "Our blood is not worthless!", it said in red and black letters.

On Tuesday she made it to the holy city, but as a corpse punctured by bullets, swaddled in blue cloth and carried on an open stretcher through the streets to a cemetery.

Hundreds of her fellow Jewish settlers - angry, frustrated religious people - came to mourn her death. And they came to show comfortable secular Israel - the country that exists behind the 1967 green line and cares little for their struggle - that they, too, support the message on her banner.

Lisha, aged 42, a sports teacher and mother of five, was shot dead when her car was fired on by Palestinian guerrillas in another vehicle as she drove along an Israeli-controlled road on the West Bank.

She was one of four Israelis, including two soldiers, to die in ambushes within a few hours. It was not only Israel's bloodiest day since the intifada started, but one which confirmed a marked change in Palestinian military tactics - a switch to guerrilla warfare.

Lisha, the fourth settler to be killed in this conflict, lived in Neve Tsuf, one of scores of small Jewish settlements scattered across the West Bank and Gaza, built in contravention of international law on land where the Palestinians aspire to build their state.

Some 200,000 Israelis live in the occupied territories - excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem - usually in hilltop communities protected by metal automatic gates, high fences, armed night-time settler patrols and their own sense of their divine, biblical right to be there.

For weeks, they have been demanding that Barak order the Israeli Army to do more to defend them and more to reduce the risk of attack from their unwanted, unloved Arab neighbours.

After Monday - a day on which four Palestinians also died - these calls have reached a deafening level. The mourners made a special point of routing the procession past Barak's office.

"This incident should never have happened, "said Yair Shalev, 31, an American-born settler from Shilo and a friend of the dead woman, "It should have been prevented.

"No one should have waited for someone to be killed."

Resentment and distrust was clear in the crowd of hundreds of mourners milling around him. Some of the children, Lisha's pupils from the West Bank schools in which she taught, wore blue baseball hats bearing the logo, "Barak is losing the country." Some of the men wore not only beards and skullcaps but also pistols at the hips, or M-16s slung over their shoulders.

All listened in sympathetic silence to a funeral eulogy by her local rabbi, American-born Yonaton Blass: "We want our leaders to fight them [the Arabs] with no compromise. The murderers will not win."

After the killings, the Israeli armed forces were swift to react by placing "internal closures" - in effect, blockades - on all Palestinian-run towns on the West Bank, trapping their residents within. These were still in force last night. But the Army knows this is a perilous issue, and the next step is far from clear.

"We really don't want to suffocate the Palestinians as a people," said one military source, "We know this is a very, very fragile task."

The majority of Israel's 6.2 million citizens do not much like the settlers, whom they tend to see as right-wing extremists and obstacles to securing a peace deal. Few, however, would now question their right to protection by the Army against Palestinian "terrorists."

Yet, with 24 Israelis killed over the past seven weeks and no prospect of peace talks, Barak is under growing pressure to take more draconian measures to secure the occupied territories.

Some steps are already clear. Israeli sources say that the military plans to target the Palestinian guerrilla groups responsible for attacking settlers.

There will be more, dubious hits like last week's assassination of a Tanzim leader by a helicopter rocket attack in Bethlehem which also killed two middle-aged women passers-by. But pressuring the Palestinian population carries the strong risk of hardening the popular determination to fight on.

So far, with more than 215 dead, this is precisely what has happened.

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