Israelis

BURGAS, Bulgaria - He looked like any other impatient tourist checking the big board at airport arrivals: a lanky, long-haired man in a baseball cap with his hands in the pockets of his plaid Bermuda shorts, a bulky backpack hanging from his shoulders. Minutes later, authorities say, the man, filmed by security cameras at the Burgas airport, would board a bus filled with young Israeli tourists and blow himself up, killing six others as well. Authorities looked Thursday for clues as to who he was, using his fingerprints, his DNA and his fake Michigan driver's license.

JERUSALEM - An Israeli protester set himself alight during a rally Saturday night marking the anniversary of a wave of demonstrations that swept the country to protest the high cost of living and other social issues, authorities said. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the man in his 40s poured flammable liquid over himself at a protest in Tel Aviv and set himself on fire. He was later rushed to a hospital, where he was being treated for serious burns, Rosenfeld said. Israel's Channel 10 TV showed footage of the man on fire.

"I'm afraid to let my children ride the bus or go to the mall," an Israeli computer engineer confided on the flight from New York to Tel Aviv, as he traveled home to vote in tomorrow's elections. The politics of fear is defining this ballot. Suicide bombs have shrunk Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres' big lead to a margin so thin that today no one can call the election with any confidence. Now opposition politicians are appealing to voters' anxiety that a relative might be killed by Islamist fanatics.

The unthinkable is being thought, the unspeakable is being spoken. Increasingly, Israelis are coming to terms with the possibility, if not the inevitability, of a Palestinian state. It is almost a revolution in the Israeli mindset, considering how taboo the very topic was only a few years ago. Quietly and subtly, the debate has shifted from whether there will be a Palestinian entity to negotiations over its dimensions, character and borders. Moved along by the peace process, the notion that Palestinians will eventually have their own state is gaining currency in some unlikely quarters.

His parents named him Israel, so proud were they. He was 2 months old when the family migrated from Iraq to the new Jewish state. The man and the nation practically grew up together. Then Israel Zakai met an American woman who had traveled to Jerusalem for a year of study at the Hebrew University. They were married and came to live in the United States. He never intended to stay long, Zakai said. But that was 10 years ago. "For the first five years, I sat on my suitcase, always ready to go back," Zakai said recently.

After an outpouring of Palestinian support for besieged leader Yasir Arafat, Israel yesterday appeared to escalate its threats against him when the deputy prime minister said killing him was a possibility. "Arafat can no longer be a factor in what happens here," Ehud Olmert told Israel Radio. "Expulsion is certainly one of the options; killing is also one of the options. " Israel's cabinet on Wednesday voted to "remove" Arafat from his compound in Ramallah, where he has lived in virtual isolation under Israeli accusations that he abets terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis.

A schoolgirl, perhaps 8 years old and all nervous giggles, stands before a television camera and sings in a squeaky voice: I am a daughter of Palestine . . . Koran in my right hand, in my left - a knife. A slightly older girl with her ponytail wrapped in a checkered kaffiyeh gives an emotional recitation of a poem for Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat: I am finished practicing on the submachine gun of return . . . We swear to take vengeful blood from our enemies for our killed and wounded.

The road that runs past the el-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza is clear and well-protected, but when a middle-aged Israeli reservist mistakenly turned off it into the camp's squalor last week he entered a nightmarish world that cost him his life. His grisly death when a Palestinian mob stoned him and then set his car afire has sparked anew a debate as ancient as this land, a debate over vengeance and proper retaliation for Arab violence against Jews. The Israeli Defense Forces is planning to "widen the road" where the killing took place, involving the demolition of many houses of families who had nothing to do with the incident.

On Thursday, Sept. 4, three Israeli men newly released from jail piled into a borrowed car and headed east from Jerusalem into the scorched landscape of the Judean desert. "As though guided by the hand of God," they would later say, the three Israelis drove 15 miles through the desert before turning off the road into Jericho. Disoriented by the blinding sunshine and by their own desperation, they approached a Palestinian policeman with a plea: Could they be granted political asylum in the West Bank?

In three months, if political winds in Israel blow steady, the peace process will be put into the political freezer - cold, hard-edged, slowly stiffening, grounded in distrust. With elections scheduled for May, Israelis are looking to see what they might get from Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Likud Party leader who is opposing Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Many speculate that under a Netanyahu government, a greater Jerusalem would be ringed by West Bank settlements annexed to the capital.