Militant Settlers
Put Sharon On Notice
By Jonathan Cook
01 Maarch, 2005
Aljazeera
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."