The double homicide deepened the atmosphere of hostility and distrust at a critical juncture in the Middle East conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak immediately suspended high-level peace talks in the Egyptian resort town of Taba and called his representatives home for “consultations.” The talks resumed two days later, but Israeli and Palestinian negotiators broke up on Saturday without reaching an agreement. Meanwhile, the body count keeps rising. Two weeks ago a 16-year-old Israeli, Ofir Rahum, was lured to his death in a West Bank ambush by a Palestinian woman who had apparently initiated an affair with him over the Internet. Two days after the restaurateurs’ killings, a 45-year-old Orthodox Jew was shot dead by snipers as he drove home from work in East Jerusalem. Likud Party leader and legendary hardliner Ariel Sharon, the probable victor in next week’s vote, said that Jerusalem is a city “under siege.”
That siege mentality is barely acknowledged on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv, a sun-splashed avenue of designer boutiques, bohemian cafes and African art shops where Dayan, 29, and Zeituni, 34, had worked for the last two years. The cousins were part of a youthful crowd of left-wing Jews who fraternized with Arabs during the intifada and occasionally, friends say, dodged Israeli military roadblocks to eat lunch in West Bank villages on the Jewish Sabbath. “Motti had a lot of Arab-Israeli friends,” says Iris Ruugi, who works in a bric-a-brac shop next door to Yuppies. “He believed we can live together, and he always thought he’d be safe.” The killings stunned members of Dayan’s and Zeituni’s circle. “I don’t know if I believe in peaceful coexistence anymore,” said one female friend of Zeituni’s. Says Eli Liami, 43, who owns a clothing boutique near Yuppies: “Many people around here are now saying, ‘Sharon is the solution’.”
They aren’t the only ones. Sharon leads Barak in the polls by 16 percent. Last week Sharon signaled his willingness to negotiate with the Palestinians by dispatching top aides to talk with Yassir Arafat’s representatives in Vienna, but many observers believe that a Sharon victory would scuttle any hope for a peace deal and lead to an escalation of violence. “The general feeling among Palestinians toward Sharon is fear,” says Amira Hass, a writer for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. In front of the closed-down Yuppies cafe last week, grim-faced passersby lit candles and placed flowers beneath photographs of the owners. “Before this the war seemed very far away,” said Ruugi. “But now my friends are dead, and it’s become real.” Real enough to harden the hearts of even the liberal denizens of Sheinkin Street.
