Features
Militant settlers put Sharon on notice
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By
Jonathan Cook in Jerusalem
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Saturday 26 February 2005, 15:35 Makka Time, 12:35 GMT
While
the aggressive language of many among Gaza's 7000 Jewish settlers is
making Israeli officials nervous, the government is far more fearful of
the response of the wider settler population of the West Bank and East
Jerusalem.
They
number at least 400,000, a significant proportion of them hardline
religious Jews who have little time for realpolitik or compromise. They
believe they are doing God's work in settling land that was promised
the Jews in the Bible.
"Enough with the embraces and love," Oz Kadmon from
Kafr Darom said. "[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is a belligerent man
and he must be addressed in the language he understands."
Kfar Darom is one of 21 settlements due to be
evacuated this summer after the Israeli government voted last week to
pull out of Gaza.
And Kadmon is no young firebrand: he is a father of
six and a senior official in Sharon's own Likud party. But like many
other settlers he is resorting to threats of violence against Israeli
leaders that have been taboo since the assassination of a previous
prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, by a fanatical young settler in 1995.
Flurry of threats
"Why is it taboo to talk of transferring Arabs,
yet the government of Israel is now preparing to uproot thousands
of Jews and destroy their homes?" 44-year-old Eve Harowe, who moved to
the West Bank settlement of Efrat, near Bethlehem, from Los Angeles 17
years ago, said.
"All of this land is for the Jewish people and must never be surrendered."
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Israel's cabinet has approved the
plan to give up Gaza settlements | The
strength of the settlers' opposition to the "disengagement", as
Sharon's plan for the withdrawal from Gaza is officially known, can be
gauged by a sudden flurry of death threats and hate mail being directed
at senior politicians and army commanders.
One, Brig Gen Ilan Paz, head of the civil
administration in the West Bank, received a letter warning him that he
would suffer death by "amputation", a Biblical punishment. Shaul Mofaz,
the defence minister, was sent a meat hook through the post.
Sharon himself has had to hire security guards to
protect his late wife Lily's grave at his Sycamore ranch in the Negev,
after letters from extremists warned that they would desecrate it.
Nazi uniform
Walls across the country are daubed with death
threats, bumper stickers read "Lily is waiting for you", and montage
photographs are circulating of the Israeli prime minister dressed as
Stalin above the words "The Dictator".
Similar photographs of Rabin, showing him in a Nazi
uniform, appeared shortly before his assassination. His killer objected
to the Oslo accords signed by Rabin which handed over control of cities
in the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.
Already the government has called up hundreds of
reserve soldiers and policemen and is preparing to deploy 18,000 to
enforce its decision.
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Ultra-Orthodox Jews are leading
the charge against Sharon's plan |
But what disturbs many ordinary Israelis is the
possibility that the evacuation will trigger a civil war in which
soldiers and policemen sent to clear Gaza will face a dangerous
confrontation with militant settlers.
Most of the nearly 200 settlements in Gaza and the
West Bank are effectively small armouries that have been generously
supplied by the Israeli army for three decades. Men wander around with
automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, and women keep a pistol
within arm's reach in their cars and homes.
The Yesha council, which represents settlers in the
West Bank and Gaza, says resistance must be non-violent. It is
formulating a legal strategy for opposing the disengagement with the
help of former senior army officers who live in the settlements.
They have been devising ways to bypass police road blocks to bring as many as 100,000 demonstrators into the Gaza Strip.
Shadowy groups
But already, five months before the evacuation
begins, there are signs of a split in the settler leadership. A letter
written by one regional council head, Pinhas Wallerstein, to his
residents tells them: "If there is a need, we will not hesitate and we
will lay our lives on the line to fight the evacuation."
At a settler conference in Jerusalem on Thursday,
leaflets were handed out observing that each settlement had "more
weapons, ammunition and skilled individuals than during the Warsaw
ghetto uprising". Official banners read: "Sharon, you are bringing a
Holocaust upon us".
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What worries Israeli officials are
militant elements among settlers | More
worrying than the inflated language, however, are signs that shadowy
groups of militant settlers are making inroads into the mainstream of
the settler community as it grows increasingly disillusioned with
governmment policy.
Leading the way is a group known as the "hilltop
youth", teenage children who have been setting up dozens of isolated
outposts of a few caravans across the West Bank. Attempts by the
government to dismantle them in 2002 led to vicious fights between the
youngsters and soldiers.
Since then the hilltop youth have been attending
summer camps where they have been trained by a militant group called
Fortress of Judea, itself a front organisation for the outlawed Kach
movement.
Kach subscribes to the racist ideology of the late
Rabbi Meir Kahane, who demanded the forced expulsion of all Arabs from
the Holy Land.
Violent standoff
The first signs that militant settlers are seeking a violent confrontation with the government have come in past few weeks.
Shortly before the disengagement vote, groups of
hardliners, including many teenagers, took over road junctions across
Israel at rush hour, burning tyres, scrawling on walls "Rabin is
waiting for Sharon", and throwing stones at police cars.
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Jerusalem's al-Haram al-Sharif is
seen as a possible militant target | Ten
police officers were injured, and at least 50 arrests followed. One
17-year-old girl interviewed later on Israeli television said: ''I
would be happy if Sharon was dead.''
Uncharacteristically, Israel's internal security
service, the Shin Bet, received no advance warning of the disruption.
Undercover agents, according to reports, have repeatedly failed to
infiltrate the extremist settler groups.
Last week it also emerged that at least 500 hilltop
youths had infiltrated Gaza with fake ID cards. The army was planning
to seal off the strip before the evacuation to prevent precisely such
an occurrence.
Guy Kotev, an Israeli radio reporter with contacts
with the settlers, said that no one could be sure what they were
planning as they were refusing to talk to outsiders. "When I ask them
where they'll be on disengagement day, they do not reply," he said.
"They are very suspicious."
Acts of betrayal
Despite the secrecy surrounding these activities, a
clear trail leads to one of their main authors, a extreme young
religious settler from Hebron called Itamar Ben Gvir. His 17-year-old
wife, Ayalah, was among those arrested during the road junction
protests.
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"Why is it taboo to
talk of transferring Arabs but the government of Israel is now preparing
to uproot thousands
of Jews and destroy
their homes?"
Eve Harowe, US-born West Bank settler | Ben
Gvir has hardly been out of the Israeli media since he recently pushed
his way towards the education minister, Limor Livnat, shouting that he
would hound all the supporters of disengagement.
Later, on Israel Radio, he said government ministers
were engaged in acts of "betrayal", code among the settlers for treason
punishable by death.
Ben Gvir is considered one of the senior figures in
Kach, the organisation behind the training of the hilltop youth. In a
recent interview he said: "They should know getting the nation of
Israel out of Gush Katif [the largest Gaza settlement] means you will
need to prepare a lot of coffins."
He and a handful of other well-known extremists were
recently reported to have established a new far-right underground
organisation. Ben Gvir boasts that it has several thousand members
sworn to secrecy who are interested in "intensifying" the
settlers' protests.
Armed standoff?
What will such a struggle consist of? Another Kach
leader, Noam Federman, says resistance will not necessarily take place
inside Gaza if it is sealed off by the army.
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Some settlers have issued death
threats to senior Israeli leaders |
One option, he says, would be to launch an attack on
the most sensitive religious site in the Holy Land, al-Haram al-Sharif,
which Jews call the Temple Mount.
Currently it houses several mosques, including the
Dome of the Rock, a site revered by Muslims as the place where the
Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. Israel stakes a claim to the area,
saying it is built over the remains of the destroyed Second Temple.
Extremist Jewish groups want to bomb the mosques and
build the Third Temple, to herald the arrival of the Messiah. Some
believe that an attack against the holy site would foil Sharon's
disengagement by plunging Israel into an armed standoff with its Arab
neighbours.
That is also the fear of the police, who have asked
for an extra $13 million to protect al-Haram al-Sharif during
disengagement.
"The real struggle will take place in Jerusalem and
other places across the country," Ben Gvir said, "and that has the
possibility to ultimately thwart the plan."
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