As violence spirals and calls for peace talks grow, extremists say they
will build a new West Bank settlement for each of the eight students
killed 

Israel’s far-right settler movement has set itself on a renewed
collision course with the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,
declaring that last week’s massacre in a Jewish religious school had
targeted them directly and vowing to build a new illegal outpost in the
West Bank for every one of the killed students.

Amid a sense of
spiralling crisis in Israeli and the Occupied Territories – which has
stemmed from the impression that both Olmert and Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas are rudderless amid the climbing violence – Abbas
performed yet another policy U-turn, calling for new talks with Israel
after having earlier appeared to back away from peace talks.

The
latest moves follow the killing on Thursday by a Palestinian gunmen of
eight Jewish seminary students, the bloodiest attack in Israel in two
years. Hamas, which had vowed to avenge the more than 125 Palestinians
killed in a recent Gaza offensive by Israel, at first claimed
responsibility, then backtracked.

Hamas’s claim came as the
spokesman for Israel’s right-wing settlement movement said that he
believed the attack on the religious college was aimed at his movement.
Dani Dayan, the chairman of the Yesha Council, said yesterday that the
attacker deliberately targeted Mercaz Herav yeshiva, known for its
messianic, national religious Zionism. ‘Of course it wasn’t a
coincidence or by chance,’ Dayan said.

Israel has been under
increasing pressure from the United States, its main ally, to stop
building settlements in the occupied West Bank but the government has
struggled to curtail the expansion because the settlers wield
considerable electoral power.

Olmert needs the religious right in his governing coalition to maintain his fragile grip on power.

The
religious right opposes the US-backed Annapolis peace talks and this
latest attack will further undermine Olmert’s authority. Dayan said the
peace talks were ‘leading nowhere’. ‘They have raised expectations that
everyone knows can’t be fulfilled by Olmert or Abbas,’ Dayan said. ‘In
this part of the world, when your raise expectations and can’t fulfil
them, you get violence.’

But even secular Israelis have been
angered by the attack. Professor Ephraim Yaar at the Tami Steinmetz
Center for Peace Research, who conducts a monthly peace poll, said:
‘There certainly will be a very adverse, strong effect.’ However, Yaar
said the anger among secular Israelis would recede within a month,
assuming there are no more similar attacks.

Despite confusion
about who carried out the attack, there is speculation that Hamas and
Hizbollah colluded to avenge the alleged Israeli assassination of a
senior Hizbollah commander in Damascus last month and Israel’s
incursion into Gaza last week which killed more than 100, many of them
civilians.

The conflict between Hamas and Israel intensified
after Hamas ousted its main political rival, Fatah, from the Gaza Strip
in the middle of last year. Abbas, who leads Fatah, condemned the
attack on the seminary and insisted that the Annapolis peace process
was the only way to settle the 60-year conflict. ‘Despite all the
circumstances we are living through and all the attacks we are
experiencing we insist on peace,’ Abbas said.

While Olmert is
also expected to continue peace negotiations, his government will come
under intensified pressure to retaliate with a strong military response
in Gaza. But last Tuesday, two days before the Jerusalem shooting, US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to step in and prop up
the shaky talks after Abbas suspended contact in the wake of Israeli’s
military operation in Gaza.