Israel's Unsettling Underground

...Of course, Zion was then held by the Ottoman Turks, who ultimately forced Shabtai Zvi and many of his followers to convert to Islam...

...Among supporters no less than opponents of Gush Emunim—the ultranationalist "Block of the Faithful" settler movement whose more extreme members were apparently prominent in a conspiracy not only to retaliate against West Bank Arab terrorism but to drive the Arabs from the region—a stressful debate is under way...

...The result has been a sharp conflict of opinion between the fanatics and the nonfanatic majority of West Bank settlers, which includes most of Gush Emunim...

...Those close to Jerusalem and the Green Line (Israel's eastern border before the 1967 War) comprise hundreds of dwellings each and are actually government-subsidized bedroom communities where high-quality housing can be had for 3040 per cent less than it would cost within the Green Line...

...Gush Emunim's spokesmen insisted that the reports were so much malicious propaganda...

...In rejecting this argument, the majority has called for a time of "profound soul-searching" to find out how such poisoned flowers grew from the soil of idealism...

...The extremists, by contrast, repeat Rabbi Levinger' s claim that the government' s failure to respond firmly to Arab terrorism against the settlers has left them "no choice" except to take matters into their own hands...

...The existence of a West Bank Jewish underground has been widely bruited about ever since the booby-trapping three years ago of cars belonging to three Arab mayors there...

...Lunatic fringes always sharply reflect the dangers of extremist movements...

...Once the plot was foiled, the public and the government experienced a threefold jolt...

...Rightly fearing that the voluminous unofficial reports reaching the press were jeopardizing the whole settlements policy, the government urged the public "not to judge all settlers by the deeds of a few misguided" fanatics...

...Such individuals have long been spoon-fed from government budgets and hailed by the authorities as heroes of present-day Zionism...

...Then came shootings of individual Arabs, the mass window smashing of parked cars owned by Arabs, a hit-and-run attack on an Arab college that took the lives of three students, and the stoning of buses carrying Arab workers...

...More ideologically desirable to Gush Emunim are the small compounds of 5-25 families deep inside Arab-populated areas...

...Intheearly 1980s, hepersuadeda much less reluctant Likud government to allow the gradual reoccupation of the old Jewish Quarter in the very heart of Hebron, making it one of the most volatile tinder boxes on the West Bank...

...But in Israel and among Jews in general, Messianism has had especially disturbing connotations, at least since the Middle Ages...

...Upset by these realities, the extremists apparently feel that drastic measures are necessary to preserve Israel's control over the West Bank...

...Instead, it pleaded that they were acting "out of despondency...

...Third, during their interrogations it became obvious that they were merely part of a broader conspiracy responsible for numerous other outrages...

...The whole sequence of events distressed the Jewish world so deeply that as late as the 19th and early 20th centuries, Orthodox Jews attacked Zionists as false messiahs...

...First, experts said that the bombs would have killed and wounded dozens, possibly hundreds, of people —including Jews, for they use the buses as well...

...Israel's ongoing economic crisis has sharply cut government funding of the bedroom settlements, and the reservoir of volunteers for the ideological (and, to be sure, pioneering) ones appears to be drying up, too...

...By letting the police put Rabbi Levinger behind bars, Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir's Administration admitted that despite its sympathy for Gush Emunim's aims and ideology, it had come to regard the movement's extremists as an outright menace...

...Their argument did not hold water...

...Consequently, the suspicion grew that the conspirators wanted to sow panic among the Arabs and induce them to flee the West Bank...

...The implications of fanaticism were further underscored by the fact that not all the perpetrators of recent acts of terror belong to the settlers' underground...

...the third alerted a police explosives expert, who was blinded trying to dismantle the bomb...

...This, it was reasoned, would both clear the Moslems off the Temple Mount and precipitate an Islamic holy war against Israel that would soon expand into a confrontation between the superpowers—leading to Armageddon and ushering in the coming of the Messiah...

...Still another surprise was the news that although several of the detainees were giving the investigators a hard time, many seemed to be talking freely about their exploits and expressing pride in "doing what had to be done...

...A second factor is the concern of many ultranationalists that the heyday of West Bank reclamation has already come and gone...

...And, in fact, as the investigation progressed even stranger plans and more ominous goals came to light...

...What made them boil up...

...Significantly, when the scope of the extremists' conspiracy became clear, the tragic historic precedents of Messianism emerged as major points of argument among members of Gush Emunim and their sympathizers...

...For in the 17th century Shabtai Zvi proclaimed himself a messiah and assembled Jews from various lands to march to Zion...

...Who is to blame for these developments...

...A different group had been amateurishly booby-trapping the doors of Jerusalem's Christian churches, and members of a third group were caught trying to place explosives under the A1 Aksa mosque...

...After all, when West Bank settlers attacked Jerusalem as soft on the local Arabs, high-ranking officials—notably former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and former Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan —seemed to support the charges...

...In the early 1970s, he had manipulated a Labor government into approving and financing the construction of Qiryat Ar-ba, the modern Jewish settlement that today sits above the Arab town of Hebron...

...Second, those brought in during the first wave of arrests all lived in settlements on the West Eliahu Salpeter, aregularNL contributor, is a correspondentfor Ha' aretz...

...While the meeting disassociated itself from the underground and Jewish terrorism, it stopped short of unequivocally condemning the conspirators...

...The would-be perpetrators thus appeared to be men of utter ruthlessness or utter incompetence...

...Yet no one doubted that this was only the beginning...

...Moreover, their original claim that some frustrated settlers had simply sought to retaliate against Arab attacks on Jews left too much unexplained...

...Two were crippled...

...Probably more than anything else, it was such sheer lunacy that worried the government and, indeed, most members of Gush Emunim...

...A month before, no one would have expected a Likud regime to permit the detention of the gawky, squeaky-voiced, yet very influential rabbi...

...One school contends that if not for the aftereffects of Shabtai's undoing, Jews would have started emigrating to Palestine long before they actually did and hundreds of thousands of them would have escaped Hitler's gas chambers...

...To theseyoung people, the idea of an underground engaged in the wanton murder of Arabs remains inconceivable...

...Bank or the Golan Heights...

...The seriousness of the crackdown was confirmed in mid-May with the arrest of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a founder and spiritual leader of Gush Emunim, after the police questioned him three times...

...Each of these incidents followed similar attacks on Jewish targets, leaving little doubt that they were organized acts of vengeance...

...It is too early to say where and when the tremors will end...

...Not until the discovery of an attempt to simultaneously blow up five Arab-owned buses in Jerusalem, however, was Israel's General Security Service able to produce solid evidence against the suspected culprits...

...The first soul-searching session, attended by most settler leaders, took place in the West Bank last month...

...By now it is an open secret that the underground was infiltrated, and the planned bus-bombing was prevented at the last minute, thanks to Prime Minister Shamir's loosening of the restraints that his predecessor, Menachem Begin, had imposed on the security service...

...One important factor is surely the way many West Bank settlements have been founded: illegally at first, and then sanctioned by the government under Right-wing pressure...

...There are, roughly, two types of settler communities...

...The capitulations showed the extremists that the government would not resist them, and perhaps even regarded their antics as a means toward ends it desired but was afraid to pursue itself...

...For example, one faction in the underground proposed bombing two of Islam's holiest shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the A1 Aksa Mosque, on Jerusalem's Temple Mount...

...Those who had wanted a clear-cut disavowal were disappointed...

...It has to be remembered that one o f the maj or elements of Gush Emunim comes from the youth of the Poel Ham-izrachi, a religious Zionist movement dedicated to the ideals of sanctity of life, work, and equality of all humans created in theimageof God...