Kibbutz Attack Threatens Ties to Arab Neighbors

The attacker who had infiltrated the kibbutz near the West Bank killed two other people before escaping, shattering the calm of this bucolic farming community and threatening the close ties it has formed over decades with neighboring Arab villages. Their representatives came today to pay their respects.

Ms. Ohayon, 34, was slain with her two sons, Matan, 5, and Noam, 4. Tirza Damari, 42, who was out walking with her boyfriend, had been gunned down on a path nearby. The boyfriend escaped unharmed. Yitzhak Drori, 44, the kibbutz secretary, was shot and killed in his car when he arrived on the scene.

At his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Mr. Arafat said a committee had been formed to look into the shooting. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant offshoot of his Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack. The Palestinian information minister, Yasir Abed Rabbo, called the attack a crime.

[Early on Tuesday, the Israeli Army swept into the Tulkarm refugee camp in the West Bank, Reuters reported, citing Palestinian witnesses. The army had no immediate comment, but had said earlier that it might hit Tulkarm and Nablus because of suspected links to the attack on the kibbutz.]

The attack that killed Ms. Ohayon and the others was also an assault on the relationships built over the years between the kibbutz and Arab communities around it. Founded in 1953 by immigrants from Argentina, the left-leaning kibbutz has a history of friendly relations with neighboring Arab villages in Israel and the West Bank. The ties have survived more than two years of surging violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Links are particularly strong with the Israeli Arab village of Meisir. Villagers work in Kibbutz Metzer's plastics factory, residents from each side visit the other to celebrate family events and the two communities sponsor joint youth activities.

Members of Kibbutz Metzer recently waged a public campaign on behalf of the neighboring village of Qafin in the West Bank. The kibbutz lobbied the Defense Ministry to change the location of a planned security fence separating Israel from the West Bank so it would not cut through Qafin's olive groves.

"We thought that if their groves would remain on this side of the fence, it would ignite hostility and create problems," said Danny Dovrat, a kibbutz member. The kibbutz insisted that the fence be built along the precise boundary that existed between the West Bank and Israel in 1967, and expressed willingness to cede some of its land for the project.

The fence did not go up soon enough to protect Kibbutz Metzer, which is situated in an area near the West Bank that is prone to infiltration by Palestinian militants.

At the funeral today of Mr. Drori, the kibbutz secretary, Arabs joined Jews in the procession behind his black-draped coffin.

"We are one family," said Abu Omar Abu Rakiya, 64, from Meisir. "For 50 years we've been eating and sharing with one another."

Muhammad Abu Obeid, 42, also from Meisir, said that on Sunday night he could hear the deadly gunfire from his home. "Every shot pierced our hearts," he said.

At Mr. Drori's grave, Doron Lieber, the kibbutz manager, mourned "reconciliation and coexistence that have been so profoundly murdered."

"We will not stop believing in coexistence, in compromise," he declared, "in giving life a chance."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/12/international/middleeast/12ISRA.html