By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 27, 1998; Page A04

HEBRON, West Bank, Oct. 26—Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu fought a rear guard battle today against the growing likelihood of early elections as an odd alliance of liberals, security hawks and religious parties aimed to topple his government in the fallout from the Middle East peace accord.

The noise generated by Israel's political upheaval nearly drowned out the latest spasm of sectarian violence -- the killing of a Jewish settler in Hebron and, hours later, the slaying of a Palestinian man near a Jewish settlement outside Nablus. This evening, the Israeli army clamped a general closure on Hebron, preventing Palestinians from leaving or entering the West Bank city.

Having renounced Netanyahu as their champion, Jewish West Bank settlers, including friends of the man shot dead in Hebron, protested noisily tonight against the land-for-security deal outside the premier's office in Jerusalem. Slamming Netanyahu as a traitor and brandishing posters of him shaking hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the 200 or so protesters resembled those who railed against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for making territorial compromises with the Palestinians in the months before his 1995 assassination.

Netanyahu spent much of the day trying to assuage elements in his fracturing coalition opposed to the peace deal, which they believe hands the Palestinians a sizable chunk of land in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in return for empty promises.

He held lengthy meetings with disaffected members of his conservative coalition cabinet and with representatives of the settlers' council, insisting the pact he signed Friday in Washington is the best possible deal under the circumstances. He also assured them he would continue expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank in spite of fierce Palestinian opposition and a standing appeal by the United States that he suspend such activity for the sake of the peace process.

Netanyahu's 17-member cabinet is expected to approve the peace deal, perhaps as early as Thursday, and the pact is also likely to sail through the Knesset, Israel's parliament, with the support of the opposition Labor Party next week. Today, he easily survived a no-confidence motion on which few lawmakers bothered to vote.

But even as Netanyahu lobbied for his political future, the Knesset's law and constitution committee, by a 9-to-7 vote, passed a bill to dissolve parliament and call new elections early next year. The bill is expected to come before the full parliament within two weeks, and analysts said it stands a good chance of winning a majority of the 120 members -- not least because the Labor Party says its support for the peace deal does not extend to a general safety net for Netanyahu.

Dissidents within Netanyahu's coalition were discussing a mid-March election date, more than a year before his term is scheduled to expire. Hard-liners were also hopeful that the turmoil of an electoral campaign might derail implementation of the peace agreement, which calls for a withdrawal from a further 13 percent of the West Bank in three phases over 12 weeks.

Although Netanyahu's political future looks tumultuous it is by no means finished. Having moved toward the center by signing the accord, he could well win fresh elections if he is forced into them. Netanyahu himself points out that the Israeli right would still back him in a pinch, especially if the alternative is Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, whom the right regards as too dovish.

"Everybody is very angry and wants to change [the prime minister]," Nissan Slomiansky, a hard-line lawmaker from the National Religious Party, told Voice of Israel Radio. "But in the end we'll get to the point when we have to choose between Bibi and Barak, and again we will decide on Bibi Netanyahu, so what should we do?"

Meanwhile, Arafat, who is scheduled to return to Gaza Wednesday from a tour of Arab capitals, faces problems of his own. In the bustling West Bank city of Ramallah today, several hundred activists of Arafat's Fatah political movement marched through town demanding that he punish security officials in the Palestinian Authority, which Arafat also heads.

The march followed a bizarre sequence of events starting around midnight Saturday, when the Authority's security forces raided Fatah's Ramallah headquarters, seizing files and papers. When Fatah marched on the security headquarters Sunday to protest the raid, shots fired from inside the compound killed a young activist from a prominent Ramallah family.

Sources in Ramallah traced the events to a personal rivalry that got out of hand, but the actions of the security officials reinforced the common Palestinian view that they are out of control and accountable to no one.

Israeli officials were also waiting to hear whether Arafat would condemn the slaying of the Jewish settler. In the past, Arafat has said little when settlers were killed, which Israelis say sent a signal of tacit approval.

The settler, Danny Vargas, 29, was a security guard at an electricity station in Hebron, not far from the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, where he lived. Vargas, a Venezuelan-born martial arts instructor with a pregnant wife and a child, was shot at close range in the chest, dragged from his car and left in a pool of blood on a quiet street in a Palestinian neighborhood on the Israeli-controlled outskirts of town. His car, apparently stolen and abandoned by his killers in a Palestinian-controlled part of town, was later recovered by Palestinian police. Israeli security officials said they were getting full cooperation from Palestinian police.

A few hours later, a caller speaking Hebrew telephoned police to say he had killed a Palestinian man in revenge for Vargas's death and left the body near the Jewish settlement of Itamar, southeast of Nablus. Israeli authorities found the body of olive farmer Mohammed Suleiman Zalmut, 68, a father of three, a short time later. But police said later they did not believe the slayings were connected.