Jewish Settlers See No Genuine Peace in Plan, Vow to Keep Hold on Land : Mideast: Many plan nonviolent protests against deal that would bring Palestinian rule to area.

HEBRON, Israeli-Occupied West Bank — The grenade sailed toward the tiny Jewish settlement of Beit Hadassah Friday morning from somewhere in the Arab city that surrounds it.

Pin pulled and fully armed, the grenade bounced off the leg of an Israeli soldier guarding the historic Jewish outpost and rolled toward the front gate. It landed near Noam Arnon’s doorstep, on the eve of what the Israeli government has billed as the historic beginning of a new era of peace in the Middle East.

“It’s a miracle,” Arnon said minutes later, when the grenade failed to explode.

But the message was clear, all the same.

“This is only the beginning,” Arnon said, shaking his head, as dozens of Israeli troops with submachine guns began rounding up scores of Palestinian youths in the neighborhood, which forms a hotbed of radical Islam all around him.

“This road to peace should not be paved with blood. But, as we can see now, this is the fact. This is not a peace process. It’s a balloon of illusions and empty declarations to justify the existence of the government.”

“This is the condition for civil war,” he added later, echoing the sentiments of many of the 120,000 Jewish settlers who have staked their lives and futures on lands equally claimed by the Palestinians.

The grenade attack on the small settlement, which rests on the site where 67 Jews were massacred in an Arab uprising 64 years ago, did appear to be part of an opening salvo of renewed extremist violence. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had warned that terrorism is to be expected in the coming weeks and months, as moderate Arab and Israeli negotiators try to put in place the first concrete step toward a comprehensive peace after 45 years of war.

The attack came less than 24 hours after an Israeli soldier was gunned down by Palestinian extremists just outside this ancient city, the burial place of the man the Jews honor as Abraham and the Muslims as Ibrahim. The city is claimed as a sacred shrine by both people and both religions.

Thursday’s fatal ambush was the first Israeli blood shed in the Israeli-occupied territories since Rabin’s government and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat stunned the world with their tentative agreement on a plan to establish Palestinian autonomy in the lands Israel conquered in 1967. In a speech just hours after the 19-year-old soldier was killed near Hebron, Rabin appealed for Israeli patience during a delicate and complex process toward a peace that a host of extremist factions wish to subvert.

Rabin’s government believes the majority of Israelis will support the phased autonomy plan that would begin with limited Palestinian rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, according to Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Under the plan, Palestinian autonomy would gradually expand to Hebron and the whole West Bank. A street demonstration of popular support for the proposal is scheduled for tonight in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli army that is likely to be the prime target of future extremist attacks has expressed far less enthusiasm for the plan. On Thursday, Deputy Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Amnon Shahak told Israeli Army Radio that, under the autonomy plan, “the fight against terror to ensure the peace of the Israelis will be a complicated, complex and difficult assignment to carry out.”

The same day, Shahak told the Parliament’s defense committee, “I don’t know how we can provide security for Israelis traveling on the roads (of the territories) if the Israeli Defense Forces won’t be there.”

But it was here in the West Bank frontier Friday that the settlers spoke with an unequivocal voice of anger, of fear and yet with the vow to stay their ground and fight their own government through civil disobedience.

And it was here amid Hebron’s opening round of violence Friday, in some of the oldest and most committed ideological Jewish settlements, that the voice of Israel’s political right wing was clearest and loudest.

For example, a thoughtful, elderly rabbi, Eliezer Waldman, said he would kill Yasser Arafat himself if he saw him drive by his house. Elyakim Haetzni, a former member of the Israeli Parliament, predicted, “Bosnia will be a paradise compared to what will happen here.” And, of course, there was Noam Arnon, still shaking with more immediate and personal anger after the morning grenade.

To the staccato blasts of concussion grenades launched in the background by Israeli soldiers clearing the streets, the settler said that the grenade attack a few minutes earlier had taken none of Hebron’s settlers by surprise.

“Look, this violence is all very logical,” said Arnon, who seven years ago moved into a modest flat in Beit Hadassah, a century-old former Jewish hospital. “When the government makes a treaty with one terror organization, the PLO, it’s very likely that other terror organizations want to achieve their objectives, too.

“That, of course, is why the policy of all Western countries is not to surrender to terrorism--never.

“But the PLO is the first terror organization that now actually has gotten recognition, political benefits and the beginnings of a legitimate state,” he continued. “So now, other terror organizations would like to make a public show, to get in on this new state. And this is why this bloodshed is taking place now.”

Like most settlers in the territories, Arnon insisted that his view of what he calls “an insane policy” by a government that will no longer protect him is shared “by the majority of the Jewish public in Israel and the world.”

But Arnon and the other Hebron settlers interviewed Friday insisted that they will confine their dissent to nonviolent protest--an anti-government crusade that will begin with a planned demonstration to blockade the government’s main office compound in Jerusalem next Tuesday. Moreover, they insisted that most of the settlers will remain in the territories.

“I think some will leave, but most will stay and others will come,” Arnon said of settlements with long waiting lists and active expansion programs. “But most of the people will not obey Palestinian authority. The Palestinian police force they are talking about are actually PLO killers. And the people are not ready to respect it.”

A few miles outside of town, in the Kiryat Arba settlement that is a centerpiece of the ideology that the Jews have an ancient and absolute right to the West Bank and Gaza, one of the movement’s most articulate spokesmen said the settlers are prepared to wage a militant fight against such a force.

If extremist attacks escalate in the territories during or after the peace process, “It’s only a matter of time before the Jews retaliate,” said Elyakim Haetzni, a former Parliament member whose settlers’ party was defeated in the elections that brought Rabin’s Labor Party to power in a ruling coalition. “The population here will have to defend itself.” If the Israeli army withdraws from the territories under a future peace agreement, “Eventually, there will be militias on both sides,” he continued. “And there is a name for this. It is Lebanon.”

In the meantime, Haetzni said, the settlers are focusing on their civil-disobedience campaign. In addition to Tuesday’s planned protest, Haetzni’s group has prepared a new line of Hebrew bumper stickers that declare, “You voted for Rabin, but you elected Arafat.”