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Security Officials Had Feared Attack By Jewish Extremists

Posted on: Friday, 5 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

Aug. 5--JERUSALEM - For months, top Israeli security officials have warned that Jewish extremists, desperate to sabotage Israel's planned withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip, might attack Arabs or Muslim religious symbols. Their aim, these officials worried, was to try to deflect attention and police manpower away from the pullout effort.

By sowing dissension and confusion, they would hope to derail and postpone indefinitely the plan set to take effect Aug. 17, police said.

The nightmare scenario that security heads frankly admit losing sleep over involves possible mortar or missile attacks on Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City on the plateau that is sacred to Arabs and Jews. Another major worry is right-wing extremists' trying to assassinate Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

While yesterday's slaying of four Israeli Arabs and the wounding of 13 others by a right-wing extremist on a bus in northern Israel falls short of the worst-case scenario, it is precisely the sort of provocation police have worried about.

Tribal by its nature, the killings provoked a tribal response. Angry witnesses beat the shooter to death. Moshe Karadi, the national police commissioner, quickly warned that the shootings could trigger more violence. Officials are worried that a general strike called for today in Shfaram, where the shootings took place, and the high emotions that will accompany the funerals following Friday prayers could lead to rioting. Jerusalem police have been put on high alert.

"We are witnessing attempts by extreme right-wing people, terrorists, who want to set the region ablaze and feel they have freedom of action," Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of Israel's parliament, said.

While the shooting was widely perceived here as an attempt to bolster the increasingly desperate anti-disengagement movement, there is also the possibility it will set back the movement, as happened last month when right-wing settlers attacked a Palestinian man in the Gaza Strip and nearly stoned him to death from close range. The incident, caught on videotape, triggered revulsion and a backlash among many Israelis who began to perceive the settlement movement as lawless when it does not get its way.

According to initial reports, the 19-year-old gunman, AWOL Israeli Pvt. Eden Natan-Zada, was raised in the blue-collar Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Letzion. He deserted the army about two months ago to avoid being deployed with other troops in the building of the tent city used to house the troops who will withdraw all 21 Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the West Bank.

Natan-Zada, also identified as Tzubeiri in some reports, had recently been spending time in Tapuah, one of the most extreme of the 120 or so Jewish settlements sprinkled across the West Bank. Its hard-core following is dominated by devotees of U.S.-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, who proposed expelling Arabs from Israel and its occupied territories. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990 and his Kach political movement was banned in Israel, but his followers persist.

Israeli Arabs make up approximately 20 percent of Israel's 6.9 million population and because of their delicate place in Israeli society, they represent a tempting target of opportunity for a saboteur trying to stop the disengagement.

While hundreds of thousands of Arabs living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River fled or were forced from their homes during the 1948-49 war that followed the creation of Israel, the population that came to be known as Israeli Arabs managed to remain within the boundaries of Israel. Although they have full citizenship, many Israeli Arabs say they are regarded as second class.

The volatility and ambiguity of their status was underscored in October 2000, when thousands of Israeli Arabs living not far from Shfaram rioted in support of the Palestinian uprising, which began the month before. Israeli police shot and killed 13 of the rioters using a level of lethal force that critics said would not have been used against Jewish demonstrators.

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Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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