THE FANATIC RIGHT IN ISRAEL

...THE COLLAPSE OF LABOR'S HEGEMONY in Israel was completed after the Yom Kippur War of 1973...

...Etzion intended to use them for the Third Temple...

...The National Unity Government, headed by Shimon Peres, has placed constraints upon these extremists...

...In the early '50s the major political force on the right were the General Zionists, a moderate movement that worked at times with Labor, albeit with discomfort, in the prestate period, supported the Haganah (the mainstream Zionist underground), and rejected the methods of the Lehi and Etzel...

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...He constantly projected an image of the Arab as the eternal enemy...

...The occupation grew harsher, more repressive...

...But in 1982 the sons and grandsons of the '48 fighters fought in a war that most Israelis did not understand and some rejected...

...With the aid of contributions from Christian fundamentalists in the United States, these people have undertaken an organized project of buying one apartment after another within the Muslim Quarter in order to Judaize it...

...The most powerful picture in this yeshivah, which is also found in hundreds of homes in West Bank settlements, is of the Third Temple superimposed, through photomontage, upon Al-Aksa...

...Some members of this group are active supporters of Rabbi Kahane...

...The Tehiyah firebrands saw the legitimation of the Herut party in Israeli politics not as a sign of victory but of a weakening of resolve...

...They resolved to lead the country toward a fulfillment of the "territorial promise," which they believed to be part of the divine covenant between God and the Jews...

...These students decided to act decisively at this moment of general self-examination...

...In the Ateret Kohanim Yeshiva (Crown of the Priests), established in the Muslim Quarter, young men study talmudic texts relating to the restoration of sacrificial worship in the Temple...

...This endeavor met with the approval of Labor Prime Minister Levi Eshkol...

...They were charged with the maiming and attempted murder of the Arab mayors of several West Bank cities...

...Another wing, however, while not explicitly calling Arabs Amalekites, has adopted a radical policy toward them, with the hidden agenda of a mass expulsion of all Arabs from the Land of Israel...

...During the 1920s the Revisionists had separated from the Zionist mainstream, accusing the latter of betraying Herzl's legacy and thus needing "revision...

...From the Likud's rise to power in 1977, and even toward the end of Labor's dominance, in 1975, vigilante actions were undertaken almost weekly on the West Bank and in Gaza...

...After the actual withdrawal, some of these same people organized to seek revenge against Arab terrorist acts...

...Several messianic Gush Emunim activists and supporters of Kahane see the first step toward rebuilding the Third Temple as the transformation of the Muslim Quarter into an expanded Jewish Quarter...

...others are distinguished only by their hatred of Christians...

...Conversations with these people, like conversations with activists of Gush Emunim or Kach, reveal a sense of historical continuity, the feeling that they are reenacting the biblical period...

...And such settling was steadily accompanied by vigilante actions against neighboring Arabs...

...Though its supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, Peace Now could not translate its numerical strength into political strength...

...The Temple Mount still remains in the hands of Muslims...

...The struggle of the yeshivah students and their allies—they adopted the name Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faithful") in 1974—to annex the territories conquered in 1967 took two main forms: first, settlement activity in the territories, and second, political involvement in the Knesset and on the streets (such as demonstrations against the Kissinger–Rabin peace talks in 1974...

...No longer in public office, Ben-Gurion was too weak politically to block the rehabilitation of the Revisionist right...

...In those days the Herut party, which was to come to power in 1977 under the leadership of Menachem Begin, had all of seven members in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament...

...But a small group of religious Zionists—students at the Merkaz Harav Yeshivah who were influenced by its charismatic Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, were not concerned with this question of guilt...

...Among the participants in this underground is Yehuda Etzion, one of the founders and central figures of the West Bank settlement Ofra...

...In Ben-Gurion's eyes, they were a parallel to the illegitimate Communists...

...He promised to establish many more settlements like Elon Moreh (an originally illegal Gush Emunim settlement set up near Nablus in 1975 that has sparked much divisiveness)— a promise he made right after his election, at a religious ceremony under the canopy of a prayer shawl, while holding a Torah scroll...

...It collapsed quickly after its principal activists were tried and sentenced...

...The people in these settlements often were driven by an idealistic belief that a takeover of the West Bank was the fulfillment of the divine promise...

...Nevertheless, what had been considered out of bounds eventually gained legitimacy with large parts of the Israeli public...

...within the cities, especially in Jerusalem, they concentrated on two other issues: the struggle against those Israeli Jews whom they saw as identified with the Palestinians, and the end of Muslim control of the Temple Mount, to be replaced by the Third Temple...

...What is new, and even more alarming, is the rise of a number of underground groups...

...Messianic visionary groups were formed not only in the settlements but inside the Green Line, that is, within Israel's original 1949 borders...

...In all his speeches and television appearances, he used a religious vocabulary...

...During Ariel Sharon's time as minister of defense, the "enlightened administration" Israel had attempted to maintain on the West Bank came to an end...

...The National Religious party, from which the leaders of Gush Emunim had emerged, was bound by political and personal ties to the movement...

...it has even attempted to work out peaceful relations with Arab neighbors...

...Later, the activists of the underground Etzel and Lehi movements, founded in the following decade, came from its ranks and identified with Jabotinsky's thinking...

...the Yom Kippur War legitimated Gush Emunim...

...The future will witness new outbursts of extremism...

...The Israel that rules over the historic territories of the West Bank today becomes the Israel of the Hellenistic period, or the Israel of the First Commonwealth, or the Israel of the first conquest...

...The eccentrics' underground is, however, not linked to Gush Emunim...

...These first West Bank settlements after the '67 war, hardly more than Potemkin villages at first, could only be established with the practical support of Labor...

...The most extreme group opposing the withdrawal from Sinai were the supporters of Rabbi Kahane, who fortified themselves in a bunker in the northern Sinai town of Yamit...

...No one could possibly have imagined that an elected MK would attempt again and again to enter villages of Israeli Arabs in order to open offices for "the emigration" of their residents...

...The Kach ("Thus") movement of Rabbi Meir Kahane represents a mixture of all these elements, pushing extremism further...

...There had always been a wing of Labor that espoused the conquest of that West Bank...

...In fairness, it must be said that the more moderate wing of Gush Enumim has fought against this identification of contemporary Arabs with the Canaanites...

...But in Israel, which has multiplied its original number of inhabitants 10 times, wars and immigration have changed the society totally...

...Thus several attempts to expand Jewish settlement in the heart of Hebron have been blocked by the IDF [army] under orders of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin...

...The only question is whether the government will maintain its present firmness of response...

...As for the leaders 316 of Herut, they had always identified themselves with the notion of Israeli sovereignty over "two banks of the Jordan," and so were delighted to help annex at least one bank...

...In 1948 a half-million Jews, motivated by a strong belief in the right of the Jews to establish their own sovereign state, fought under Labor against seven Arab states...

...In the Israel of 1985 there is a sense that the rule of law has been restored and that vigilante or other underground activities will be met with firm government policies...

...Gradually, the right-wing "untouchables" made their way into the Israeli establishment...

...Three or four years ago no one would have dreamed that Kahane would be elected to the Knesset, or that, in public-opinion surveys conducted in January 1985, his party would receive enough support for between four and five seats in the Knesset...

...Begin, as leader of the opposition, in the years before 1977, and then during his tenure as prime minister, spoke continuously of the natural right of the Jews to every inch of the Holy Land...

...More important, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had consented earlier to the reinterment in Israel of the remains of Zev Jabotinsky, the ideological leader of the Revisionist movement, on Mount Herzl alongside other Zionist leaders, a move opposed by Ben-Gurion while premier...

...Within Gush Emunim there is the same tendency to use, or misuse, biblical paradigms, and for the membership to see themselves as direct inheritors of Joshua...

...During the years of Begin's rule, the reli317 gious sector in Israel (though still a minority within the general population) gained moral appeal and was courted by all political groups...

...In the Israel of the '70s and early '80s it was no longer embarrassing to be both on the right and religious...

...it saw itself as the link between the awakening right and the rising religious forces in the country...

...315 (President Ephraim Katzir said at the time that "we are all guilty...

...This underground activity was accompanied by Kahane's racist incitement against non-Jews and by his call for revenge according to the biblical injunction, "an eye for an eye...

...Indeed, some of his main supporters have been on trial as members of the most violent underground movement...

...with a planned attack on the Temple Mount...

...The members of this wing are taken to be followers of Rabbi Moshe Levinger...

...Raphael Eitan used the army as much as possible to aid the settlements...

...As a potential coalition partner, it could always cast its weight to determine whether a right- or left-wing party would form the government...

...Thus, at a funeral of a Kahane activist killed by PLO terrorists in Hebron, Kahane repeatedly preached revenge...

...If the present policy of constraint holds, there is little doubt that frontal clashes between the extreme right and government forces will follow...

...Peace groups and the Labor left protested, but they could not overcome the indifference of the silent majority...

...Definitive details about the "eccentrics' underground" are not available now because its founder escaped the police and disappeared...

...it was centered in the Kibbutz Ha-Me'uhad (largest of Israel's kibbutz movements and closely linked to the Labor party), and under the leadership of Yigal Alon, who was minister of labor in 1967 and later became foreign minister...

...These young religious Zionists actually had initiated small attempts to achieve this goal well before the Yom Kippur War...

...Such expectations grew during and were encouraged by the Likud government...

...Ben-Gurion's decline overlapped with Begin's ascendancy...

...Begin then had already participated in the National Unity government formed immediately prior to that war...

...The Golan Heights were settled mainly by the right wing of Labor...

...In the continuing struggles of the past 100 years each side has learned from the other, adopting the enemy's methods...

...The transition from Begin to Sharon to Eitan to Gush Emunim and now to Kahane did not take very long...

...When two such underground groups were caught by security forces in 1983-84, their members were tried and found guilty of the cold-blooded murder of Arabs in a bus outside Ramallah, as well as of an attempted murder in that same area...

...As if all this were not enough for one society, there is a strange phenomenon in the Old City of Jerusalem, within the Muslim Quarter, near the walls of Al-Aksa...

...The law of the Arab street—that every extremist movement gives rise to one even more extreme—now passed over to the Jews...

...His journal, Ha-Sulam (the Ladder), was considered an extremist fringe publication, largely ignored by the public...

...At the same time, the underground groups saw their task as furthering the same goals through undemocratic methods...

...Nothing that Kahane said was unfamiliar to his audience...

...In his first years in Israel, Kahane was regarded as a peripheral and transient figure...

...The big change in the influence of the Israeli right came after the Six-Day War of 1967, when the Herut party achieved new legitimacy...

...Gush Emunim, however, took upon itself the role of the new pioneer in settling the West Bank...

...The present moment in Israel represents a temporary cease-fire...

...In this setting the various right-wing parties— Herut, the religious parties, and Tehiyah —all declared they wished to change the social reality through democratic means...

...In the Jewish and Muslim quarters several talmudic scholars are engaged in the weaving of the garments to be worn by the High Priest...

...During the period between the Yom Kippur War and the War in Lebanon, Gush Emunim reached its peak...

...This might be called the "underground of the settlements...

...Its first settlementsKiryat Arba, Ofra, and Sebastia—all were established illegally...

...He declared that all non-Jews in Israel were akin to the famous biblical foe, the Amalekites, and as such should be decimated by "God's chosen...

...the West Bank and Gaza are not annexed...

...The Six-Day War made Herut part of the Israeli establishment...

...The National Religious party (NRP) had always served as a balance between right and left in the government...

...Significant changes within the Israeli right occurred when a new party, the Tehiyah, was established, decidedly to the right of Herut...

...It is widely known that the supporters of Rabbi Ariel, former rabbi of Yamit in Sinai—they have been accused of attempting to enter the Temple Mount area in order to set up a synagogue—received tens of thousands of dollars for legal defense from an American fundamentalistic sect...

...A third underground group, which functioned in Jerusalem, turned its hatred in another direction—on the Christian churches...

...So, too, the recent War in Lebanon has witnessed the rise of still more extreme movements...

...Some of them—sons of the founders of the group of West Bank settlements called Gush Etzion, many of whom had been killed or captured in the 1948 Arab attacks—began to reestablish these settlements late in 1967...

...First, there is a Jewish underground operating violently against Palestinians on the West Bank...

...His powerful messianic visions led him to purchase and store in Ofra huge pieces of 318 wood, supposed to be the original supports of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans 2,000 years ago...

...In Israel the most recent wars gave birth to new radical-right movements...

...Today Begin occupies a respected position not in the middle of the right but toward its left...

...The movement established 150 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza...

...And after that there are the extremist underground supporters of Kahane, drawing upon the revival of messianic religious expectations among certain sectors of the population...

...on the contrary, it was stylish...

...Both Sharon and Eitan used their resources to establish new settlements not only in distant and desolate places but in the most densely populated Arab areas, such as the center of Hebron itself, the area directly above Ramallah, and another directly above Nablus, the major West Bank towns...

...These antidemocratic trends had their origin within Gush Emunim...

...A climax came in 1982 when Gush Emunim, along with supporters of Tehiyah, Rabbi Kahane, and other right-wing groups, tried forcibly to block the decision of the Begin government to withdraw from Sinai, as stipulated in the Camp David agreements...

...Harassed by Ben-Gurion himself, Eldad was removed from his high-school teaching post and had great difficulty in getting another job...

...Meanwhile, he headed the messianic wing of the settlement underground that intended to blow up the AlAksa Mosque, which stands on the ancient Temple site—a plan that was, however, rejected by other leaders of the underground...

...and with the planned explosion of six Arab buses...

...and 2 million Palestinians still live within the borders of greater Israel...

...The ideological opponents of Gush Emunim, such as Shalom Achshav (the Peace Now movement), tried to puncture the nationalist balloon, but without success...

...Others— such as Shlomo Hillel, today the chairman of the Knesset, and even Moshe Dayan—sporadically gave support to this endeavor...

...This group planted explosives in several churches, and wounded a nun in Bethany...

...The new state of Israel soon eliminated the remains of the prestate extremist right...

...This effort failed...

...Much like Herut after the SixDay War, Gush Emunim, too, began to appear legitimate to large groups within Israel after the Yom Kippur War...

...Then there is what some call the "eccentrics' underground," plotting to blow up Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount...

...with the murder of three students at the Islamic College in Hebron and the wounding of 23 others...

...As often occurs within idealistic groups, fanatic elements gradually emerged among the settlers...

...They become one with King David, Joshua, Judah Maccabee, and with the Zealots who rebelled against Rome...

...Israel Eldad, today an elder statesman of the ultraright Tehiyah party...

...Mapai, the Labor party, led by David BenGurion, controlled the government, the Histadrut (the trade union federation), and other public areas, leaving the right without power bases...

...These two actions received the support of several leading Labor-party figures...

...The weakness of the Israeli extreme right in those early years of the state is reflected in the experience of Dr...

...Throughout this process, Gush Emunim has received the support of a wide range of political leaders on the right...

...The right-wing extremists were removed by the army, supervised, ironically, by Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister...

...More than 40,000 settlers live in these occupied territories today...

...For example, the Zerifin underground, composed of some former fighters from Lehi (the Stern gang) and Etzel (Irgun, the Begin-led Revisionist underground), was caught after a few actions such as its attempt to blow up the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv...

...I n the experience of nations, wars generally cause a rift...

...Nor are the ties between these extremist Jews and Christian fundamentalists limited to the acquisition of apartments...

...Israelis asked themselves: who was to blame for the initial confusion of that war...

...And this would be accomplished by establishing borders that would give Israel "full security...

...A year later, on the West Bank at a point south of Gush Etzion near Hebron, Rabbi Moshe Levinger and his followers established Kiryat Arba, a settlement meant to be the beginning of a Jewish Hebron, which eventually was to swallow up the Arab city...

...The violent undergrounds, which blossomed under the Begin and Shamir governments, now seek new ways to realize their goals...

...Orthodox identity, which in so highly secularized a society as Israel had once been very nearly concealed, now became fashionable...

...Sharon and Eitan, today Knesset members from, respectively, Herut and Tehiyah, helped Gush Emunim in its settlement efforts on the West Bank—and thereby further widened the gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel...

...It is a small and isolated religious sect, another manifestation of extremism...

...Tehiyah opposed the Camp David accord with Egypt, and military figures such as Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eitan, the former chief of staff, played an important part in this response...

...Among the settlers they focused mainly upon the struggle with their Palestinian neighbors...

...They do so with the care and precision demanded by Levitical instructions, which state that the priestly garments cannot be woven with metal tools...

...It is clear, however, that this group also planned to blow up Al-Aksa and had even tried to penetrate the Mosque's courtyard, carrying many pounds of dynamite...

...Today he constitutes the most radical wing of the right...

...Geulah Cohen, today a leader of Tehiyah, used to sell it, standing on the streets of Jerusalem...