Connecting the dots

[kramadas]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1064373874948

Connecting the dots, By Larry Derfner

I wasn't surprised, and I don't think anybody else was, when a "second Jewish terror underground" was uncovered by the Shin Bet over the summer.

That eight innocent Palestinians should get killed by a bunch of West Bank settlers in drive-by shootings and bombings with the intifada blazing, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

If a band of settlers was willing to shoot up a Palestinian college campus, cripple a Palestinian mayor, boobytrap Palestinian buses and plan the destruction of the Dome of the Rock in the early 1980s, when Palestinian terror wasn't a smidgen of what it's been in the early 2000s, why shouldn't there be a brotherhood of settler vigilante killers now?

In fact I was surprised that they'd killed only eight Arabs although they injured about twice that many, and a review of their attacks, which included school bombings, shows that if they'd been more proficient a whole lot more Arabs would have died.

I wasn't shocked, and frankly I wasn't too concerned because I didn't think it could go much further. What more could these guys do kill a few more innocent Palestinians? The IDF does that all the time with rare exceptions not deliberately, but rather as the inevitable result of its presence in the territories so what are a few more vigilante killings of Palestinians in these rough times?

Might the members of the underground take a different tack and try to kill Ariel Sharon? They might want to threats to Sharon from the far Right went up sharply after he signed off on the road map but they wouldn't try, I figured, because protection around Israeli prime ministers has become virtually impregnable since the Rabin assassination.

So the new Jewish terror underground didn't seem like such an awfully big deal. That changed, however, when Tuesday's Ma'ariv, quoting Shin Bet sources, reported that the conspirators had been talking of blowing up both the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aksa mosques on the Temple Mount, as well as other mosques, and also of killing Jews in Israel's "political echelon."

Shin Bet investigators learned this from their suspect-turned-informant, Shahar Dvir-Zeliger, who last week led them to caves in the West Bank where they found dynamite, rocket launchers, grenades, assault rifles, a machine gun and thousands of bullets much of it stolen from the IDF.

SO FAR only a dozen settlers have been implicated in the conspiracy, and half of them were released after they refused to tell interrogators anything. But between the members repeated killings of Palestinian passersby and their stockpiling of weapons, coupled with their reported goal of blowing up the Temple Mount mosques and killing Israeli political leaders, this Jewish underground is more than just a band of vigilantes.

Instead, this is a potential strategic threat to Israel in other words, a potential threat to the state's survival that's floating around the West Bank. This is the worst danger posed to Israel by Jews since the Rabin era, which ended with a strategic blow to the country. It had been in the air, had been warned about with mounting urgency until it fell.

This time around the Shin Bet uncovered the plot before anything catastrophic could occur. (The murder of innocents, including children, cannot be considered catastrophic in the present war only vicious, which is how the war is.)

So maybe the danger is over, maybe not. But even if the Jewish terrorists have been neutralized, we now have reason to fear that the militant Right whose home turf is the hilltop outposts and isolated settlements of the West Bank, along with numerous addresses in Jerusalem is nurturing quite a beast.

In these circles the members of the second Jewish underground, like those of the first, are the victims. The perpetrators besides, of course, the Arabs as a whole are the "Jewish section" of the Shin Bet, directed by the Sharon government, which, in the unblinking eyes of the extremists, has become no different than the judenrats of Rabin, Peres and Barak.

Speaking of the Shin Bet's "Jewish section" the unit that tracks Jewish militants Arutz 7 radio commentator Adir Zik, one of the most influential voices among the radical Right, told me in an interview a few weeks ago: "They are worse than the KGB, or the Savak [under the Shah of Iran] or the Stasi in communist East Germany."

In Zik's view, the Shin Bet is framing the young men of the new Jewish underground just as it framed Yigal Amir, just as it framed Baruch Goldstein. It wasn't Amir who killed Rabin, and it wasn't Goldstein who killed those 29 Palestinians in both cases the actual gunmen were agents of an amazing left-wing conspiracy to "finish off the Right," according to Zik.

"And the same thing is happening today," he went on, only this time it's Sharon who's behind the plot to blacken the settler movement's name.

Why? "Because Sharon today is more to the Left than Rabin was. He's planning a retreat from Judea and Samaria," explained Zik.

The same demonology was recounted to me by the wife of one of the suspects in the underground. Carrying on with the extremist line, she theorized that the vigilante killings had really been the work of Palestinians out to put the blame on the settlers just like the Shin Bet and the government, all the governments, have been doing.

This is the through-the-looking-glass logic of the militant Right the more diabolical the violence and incitement that issue from their midst, the more diabolical, in their eyes, become the forces trying to stop that violence and incitement.

It's a mechanism for escalation. In the early Eighties, it pointed at the Dome of the Rock. In 1995 it pointed at the top of Israel's "political echelon." Based on the picture emerging of the second Jewish terror underground, today it appears to be pointing in both those directions at once.

The writer is a veteran journalist and a regular contributor.

[g420]

At least Israel arrests these people unlike the PA