A Murder at Morning

By Matt Rees/Jerusalem

One of the last letters Mustafa Zibri wrote from his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah was to fellow leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "Unless we contribute militarily to the intifadeh," the P.F.L.P. chief wrote, "we will be marginalized and nobody will mention our name." Soon after, Zibri died in a helicopter rocket attack by Israel, which blamed him for a string of car bombs in the yearlong Palestinian uprising called the Aqsa intifadeh. Once the Muslim mourning period for Zibri ended last week, the P.F.L.P.'s military wing took its revenge in an unprecedented attack that has horrified Israelis. Now the P.F.L.P. is on everyone's lips.

P.F.L.P. gunmen stalked a corridor of the Jerusalem Hyatt hotel early last Wednesday morning. There they killed Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi with two bullets--one through the eye, the other in the neck. It was the first time in the country's history that Palestinians had assassinated an Israeli Cabinet minister. Ze'evi's enraged Cabinet colleagues accused Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of encouraging attacks on Israelis and sent Israeli troops deep into Palestinian towns, bombarding the neighborhoods gunmen use as cover and killing six Palestinians, including an 11-year-old girl.

The Israelis gave Arafat an ultimatum: either hand over Ze'evi's killers to Israel (a politically indigestible option for Arafat) or be officially designated the head of "an entity supporting and sponsoring terror." Israel was threatening Arafat's Palestinian Authority with the Taliban treatment. In the murderous story of the intifadeh, the most dreadful chapter may be about to unfold.

The deaths of Ze'evi and Zibri illustrate how the intifadeh has taken those who were on the fringes of political credibility and made them symbols capable of rallying entire populations. Before the Aqsa intifadeh, Zibri's P.F.L.P., a faction of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, was a powerless joke in the West Bank, a has-been group that clung to its Marxist ideology and its naysaying on peace with Israel. Ze'evi was a marginal right-wing extremist who often advocated the "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In death, both have become, to their own sides, evidence of the other side's cruelty and irredeemability.

Ze'evi and Zibri had gained relevance even before their murders. When Ze'evi died, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, working to preserve his national unity government, was trying to persuade Ze'evi to withdraw his resignation, tendered two days before. Under Zibri's leadership, P.F.L.P. activists had begun to sit on intifadeh action committees in each Palestinian town alongside leaders of the radical Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which don't share the P.F.L.P.'s secular ideology but do share the desire to kill Israelis. Despite this activity, Zibri, as the P.F.L.P. leader, continued to sit on the executive committee of Arafat's P.L.O. and to draw P.L.O. money to fund his political budget.

Before the intifadeh, when the peace process brought some benefits to ordinary Palestinians and seemed to be leading to an independent Palestinian state, the P.F.L.P.'s rejection of the Oslo peace agreements left it with little public support. But the intifadeh rescued the group. P.F.L.P. officials tell TIME there is now close coordination between them and Hamas in smuggling weapons into the Palestinian territories, training terrorists and attacking Israeli targets.

According to these sources, recent weeks have seen an angry debate within the P.F.L.P. over whether to start a campaign of suicide bombings like those committed by Hamas. That tactic would seem better suited to the fanatically religious groups, which tempt their operatives with the promise of a martyr's special place in heaven, than a secular organization like the P.F.L.P. Yet last week when Fouad Abu Serriya, 25, from Gaza City blew himself up near an Israeli army jeep in the Gaza Strip, the P.F.L.P. claimed responsibility, surprising Israelis and Palestinians alike. Abu Serriya's neighbors said he had been keeping company lately with Hamas activists.

Still, it was the killing of Ze'evi that most stunned Israel's political leadership. Ze'evi, 75, was one of the last handful of politicians who fought in Israel's 1948 War of Independence. As a general, he kept two pet lions in the foyer of the Central Command headquarters outside Jerusalem. He wore dog tags outside his shirt bearing the names of Israeli soldiers still missing in action. He refused a bodyguard because he wanted to show that he was not afraid. But his rogue image belied an expertise in security issues that made him a confidant to a series of Israeli Prime Ministers, including Yitzhak Rabin, the man who signed the original peace deal with Arafat.

Ze'evi's hard line on security had put him on a collision course with moderates recently, even with tough-guy Prime Minister Sharon. Ze'evi had announced he was quitting the government because he believed Sharon was giving dovish Foreign Minister Shimon Peres too much leeway in negotiations with Arafat. Indeed, Israel had begun to ease travel restrictions in and out of Palestinian towns; correspondingly, there were signs Arafat wanted to keep his extremists quiet, at least while the U.S. built its antiterror coalition. Ze'evi's killing changed that. At Ze'evi's Mount Herzl funeral, his son Yiftach-Palmach implored the dead man's friend Sharon to "avenge, as [he] would have avenged you."

If some Israelis wanted Arafat's head in retribution, Cabinet ministers at least kept the public discussion of reprisal more civil. "Arafat's the main problem. We have to get rid of him," said Finance Minister Silvan Shalom, suggesting that Israel bar the Palestinian leader from re-entering the Gaza Strip after the next of his frequent diplomatic jaunts abroad. "Things won't be the same as they were before," Sharon promised at the Cabinet meeting. "We will raise the level of reaction against the Palestinian Authority." After Ze'evi's death, Arafat told Peres he would rein in the P.F.L.P. But the Palestinian leader arrested fewer than 10 P.F.L.P. activists, none among them the five that Israel has accused in the killing of Ze'evi.

In any case, Israel was not waiting for Arafat to move. It continued its assassinations Thursday, killing Atef Abayat, the leader of the Palestinian militia Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, whom Israel blames for killing at least five Israelis. Abayat's booby-trapped car exploded in Bethlehem. In response, Palestinian gunmen in nearby Beit Jala fired on the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo in Jerusalem throughout the night. Israel moved its tanks deep into Bethlehem and Beit Jala by Friday. Israeli tanks were on the move around other Palestinian towns too.

It won't be with tanks and invasions alone that Israel avenges Ze'evi's death. Beyond the five cell members it connects to the hit, Israel holds responsible Zibri's replacement as P.F.L.P. chief, Ahmed Saadat, and the man it believes is the head of P.F.L.P. military operations, Shadi

Shurfeh. Both men live in Ramallah and have gone underground since the assassination. "They're living on borrowed time," says an Israeli intelligence officer. So are hopes for peace.

--With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem