Attack on Jewish shrine symbolizes death of hoped-for peace.

Byline: Hugh Dellios

NABLUS, West Bank _ Joseph's Tomb, a small walled-in, domed building where radical yeshiva students were protected by Israeli soldiers, was to Palestinians a lingering remnant of Israeli occupation and a symbol of the unfulfilled promise of Mideast peace.

Every morning, a busload of Orthodox students from the outlawed Kach movement would be escorted into the heart of this poor, gun-filled West Bank city, where they would defiantly take up their study of the Torah. To the Palestinians, the students' presence was a provocation, and the bitter interaction between them made the tomb a tinderbox waiting to explode.

And so it did shortly before dawn Saturday when the tiny Jewish shrine was overrun, burned and torn apart by a delighted crowd of Palestinian youth who moved in after the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers.

"They (the yeshiva students) would tell their children to spit on our children," said Usama Dwaikat, 38, a neighbor of the tomb whose children cowered on the floor during the chaotic fighting that trashed the area over the last 10 days. "If we let them stay here, it's war."

Like the army outpost protecting the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in Gaza and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem, Joseph's Tomb was the scene of some of last week's fiercest fighting because it was an aberration due to be dismantled in any permanent peace treaty between the Israelis and Palestinians.

In the past, the tomb was more of a Muslim shrine and picnic ground for local residents. But in the 1980s, it was turned into a yeshiva by adherents to the radical Jewish Kach movement, who lived in a nearby settlement and whose leader, Eli Rosenfeld, is known for describing assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor to Israel.