That was just the latest confrontation by right-wing Israelis in recent weeks. Jewish settlers in the West Bank - and their political allies - have awakened to the prospect that the current peace talks could end their dream of eternal Israeli control of the West Bank.
Israel occupied this predominantly Palestinian area in 1967 and has held it ever since. A major goal of the peace talks is to negotiate an Israeli withdrawal.
Israelis living in the West Bank "are feeling more and more desperate," said Mark Heller, of Tel Aviv University's strategic studies center. "That climate drives them to more extreme actions. We're moving to some kind of climax."
A year ago, when the current peace process was still relatively young, placards calling Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a traitor began to appear at right-wing rallies. They were few in number and they seemed to make many of the demonstrators uncomfortable. Now, the chants "Rabin is a traitor" and ''Rabin is a murderer" are common at antigovernment protests.
Israeli soldiers and police, once universally hailed by Jews as the country's heroes, are now jeered and insulted by demonstrators. On occasion, police have been pelted with rocks and bottles. On Monday, Police Minister Moshe Shahal was himself stoned by Israeli citizens when he rushed to a Jerusalem street where a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown up a bus, killing five people.
Such confrontations are without precedent here. In 1982, when Israel evacuated its Yamit settlement in the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Camp David agreement with Egypt, right-wing protesters holed up in the settlement and prayed until soldiers forcibly removed them. But protesters have "never before negated the legitimacy of the forces of law and enforcement," Samuel Peleg, an expert on protest movements at Tel Aviv University, said this week. ''They no longer feel the officers are their people."
