Security Around Barak Is Boosted After Threats

JERUSALEM — Israel’s secret service has beefed up security around Prime Minister Ehud Barak in light of threats by Jewish settlers over his plans to transfer land to the Palestinians, reports said Sunday.

Settlers on Sunday used harsh words to denounce the potential uprooting of Jewish settlements to secure a peace accord with the Palestinians.

“This is a civil war when he takes me out of my home,” far-right settler Eliyakim Haetzni told military radio. “That’s a civil war. A brother is taking his brother out of his home, fighting with him.”

Barak said any successful attempts at assassination would boomerang and “be a shot in the foot to the work” of settlers fighting against the transfer of land to the Palestinians.

“Just the nature of such acts kills the legitimacy of the settlement movement’s struggle,” Barak told a Cabinet meeting, according to minutes released by his office.

The angry atmosphere is reminiscent of that leading up to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Communications Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

“They should take this very seriously,” the minister told military radio. “Dear friends, there will be a murder. . . . I am warning the security services and everyone; don’t put your heads in the sand.”

Rabin’s killer, ultranationalist Yigal Amir, said he carried out the assassination to derail Rabin’s plans to turn over areas that nationalist Jews consider part of the biblical land of Israel to the Palestinians.

Barak’s office would not comment on the increased security, widely reported in Israeli media in recent days.

He suggested Friday that a final peace plan could result in the uprooting of about 20% of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--about 40,000 people.

The Palestinians hope to establish a state in all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, areas that Israel captured in 1967.