On other occasions, Zeevi called President George H.W. Bush a liar and an anti-Semite (when the U.S. asked Israel to stop building settlements in the occupied West Bank in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War). He also referred to former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk as a "Jew boy."

In April this year, shortly after Zeevi was appointed tourism minister in Sharon's government, he publicly urged the Israeli army to bomb Arafat's house in Gaza -- a statement which other government officials subsequently had to apologize for.

And in July he made the headlines again when he compared Arabs who come to Israel to look for work to "lice." More than a million Arabs are citizens of Israel; in addition, he contended in an interview on Israel army radio, about 180,000 Palestinians live in Israel illegally. "They arrived here and are trying to become citizens because they want social security and welfare payments," Zeevi told the radio. "We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us."

Despite his extreme views, many Israelis hailed Zeevi as a man of integrity who stood by his beliefs. "He was convinced that his political views were the views of the founding fathers," said Moshe Arens, a Likud member and a former defense minister. "For him, Ben-Gurion had not finished the job. His whole mentality was pre-1948," said Daniel Ben-Simon, an Israeli journalist for the leftwing Ha'aretz newspaper. For Sharon, who opened the special Knesset session Wednesday with a personal eulogy, Zeevi was "a Zionist in every limb of his body."

Zeevi was such an ardent believer in the Zionist cause, the return of Jews to what they see as their biblical homeland, that he named one of his two sons "Palmach" (after the vanguard force that fought for Israel's independence) and one of his three daughters "Massada" (after the plateau near the Dead Sea where Jews staged a heroic last stand against Roman armies).

In his Knesset speech Sharon vowed, "We will fulfill his legacy. May God avenge his blood." But Israel's thirst for both security and revenge is problematic, as even small-scale retaliatory actions have shown recently.

When Palestinian gunmen shot and wounded Jewish visitors to the Cave of the Patriarchs, a religious site in Hebron two weeks ago, Sharon ordered that the Israeli army seize two Palestinian-controlled neighborhoods from which the gunfire originated, killing at least six Palestinians in the process and severely affecting the lives of thousands of residents. When 10 days later, under pressure from Western governments, Sharon ordered troops to withdraw, he caused an uproar among his right-wing followers (it was this decision that prompted Zeevi's resignation), and a mini-putsch in the army (in an unprecedented move, the chief of staff publicly criticized the government and said the troops should have stayed).

Sharon has also come under fire from the United States for his policy of "targeted killings," a polite word for the assassination of Palestinian militants, which Israel resumed this weekend, killing at least one and possibly two Hamas members in separate attacks. At a time when Americans are themselves on a busy search-and-destroy mission for the culprits of the Sept. 11 attacks, many Israelis feel their assassination policy is justified and a matter of self-defense -- and find American criticism grossly hypocritical. The revenge killing of Zeevi, however, shows that it can have deadly consequences.

"We tell Sharon and his gangs that the blood of our people is not cheap and if he continues targeting the figures of our people, his political and military figures will be targets for us," warned the Popular Front in a statement distributed to news agencies.

In the past year of fighting, Israel has killed roughly 50 Palestinian fighters and bystanders in such attacks. Zibri, who took control of the Popular Front, a group famous for airplane hijackings in the 1970s but which was fairly low-profile until the current Intifada, was the most prominent Palestinian eliminated by Israel. Israeli officials say the Palestinian Authority's unwillingness to arrest terrorists and prevent attacks forces them to take matters in their own hands. Since terrorists roam in Palestinian-controlled territories where Israeli troops in theory have no business and would not be able to conduct legal arrests, they argue that proven terrorists and "ticking bombs" must be eliminated -- preferably in missile strikes delivered from helicopter gunships.

Necessary or not, these assassinations have not deterred other Palestinians from attacking Israel. Indeed, it is a staple of Hamas propaganda that every militant that Israel murders gives birth to 10 new terrorist vocations among Palestinian young men. A fringe left-wing Israeli group commented Wednesday on the perverse effects of assassinations that can turn even a figure as controversial as Zeevi into a national hero: "Today Israeli society is in shock because of the murder of its Minister of Tourism Reha'am Ze'evi," wrote Gush Shalom in a press release. "Never before was it more clear than now that even a leader of a relatively small extremist group becomes a national hero and martyr when he is assassinated."

Yossi Sarid, the head of the left-wing Meretz opposition party, warned that tit-for-tat killings could drag Israel into a bloodbath: "We have to be careful not to be drawn into a sea of blood." The best outcome, he said, would be for Arafat to arrest terrorists himself. "If [the Palestinians] fail the test," he said, "the land will burn, the fire will rage, and no one will be able to put it out."

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