The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, accused extremist rabbis and settler leaders on Sunday of inciting a civil war against his government’s plan to withdraw all Jews from the Gaza Strip and some parts of the West Bank.
Sharon banged the table at the weekly meeting of the Cabinet as he denounced his opponents’ call to soldiers to disobey orders to remove the settlers, their threats of violence against the security forces and their likening of the Gaza pullout to Nazi crimes.
”We have witnessed in the past few days a fierce campaign of incitement and, I would say, calls that are actually aimed at causing a civil war,” the prime minister said.
”I am telling you [the settlers]: leave the army and the security forces out of this ugly game. It is unacceptable to involve the army, to incite against them and to threaten them.”
Despite Sharon’s warning, tens of thousands of settlers and their supporters, a large proportion of them teenagers, rallied in Jerusalem on Sunday night against the plan to withdraw 7 500 Jews from the Gaza Strip.
Under the banner ”Disengagement is tearing the nation apart”, some of the protesters held up pictures of the prime minister labelled ”The Dictator”. Others waved the biblical quotation: ”A time to love, a time to hate … ”
Last week, at a meeting of settler leaders, rabbis and the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, opponents of the plan said it would provoke a civil war, and threatened to expel soldiers from the settlements.
At the weekend 200 rightwingers, including the father and brother of the finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published an open letter denouncing Sharon’s plan as ”a crime against humanity and the ethnic cleansing of Jews”.
The letter called on Israeli soldiers to disobey orders to carry the policy out
It said the army ”was created to defend us against enemies, not to go after Jews and expel them from their motherland. Soldiers, officers and policemen must listen to their national conscience and not participate in operations they are bound to regret for the rest of their life.”
Another of Netanyahu’s relatives equated the removal of settlers with Nazi crimes.
Sharon responded on Sunday by criticising those of his ministers, such as Netanyahu, who have failed to criticise such accusations. ”I expect government ministers to make their voices heard in this matter,” he said.
”I call on ministers, and those in the settlements who have come out with this campaign of incitement, to stop this thing immediately.”
Rabbis have said on previous occasions that the Torah requires soldiers to disobey orders to remove Jews from their homes, and that Jews may kill Jews in defence of Jewish control of the land.
Settler leaders say Sharon is behaving undemocratically, because members of his Likud party rejected the Gaza plan in a referendum.
The warning of violence has revived memories of the assassination in November 1995 of the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, by a rightwing extremist after a vitriolic campaign which compared him to a member of the Nazi SS. Rabin’s supporters accused Sharon and Netanyahu of stoking the hatred that led to that assassination.
On Sunday the justice minister, Yosef Lapid, warned that a similar climate was emerging. ”I think some of the expressions we’ve heard lately do remind us of the expressions we heard before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin,” he said.
”The difference is that before Rabin’s assassination we didn’t think it was possible. Now we know it is.”
Lapid said that to curb the threat the authorities were prepared to invoke measures used against the Palestinians, but rarely against Israelis, such as detention without trial.
”For the first time in 50 years there is the threat of serious clashes between various factions of our political spectrum which threaten to be alarmingly close to a bloodbath,” he said. We cannot tolerate incitement to violence or unlawful action …
”We have the legal right to order administrative detention. We use this on very, very rare occasions because, although it is lawful, it is not a democratic instrument.”
Rightwing members of Parliament accused Sharon of being the one to provoke a civil war. ”The key to civil war is in the prime minister’s hands,” a National Union MP, Aryeh Eldad, said defiantly.
”If it does break out, he will be remembered in the history of the nation of Israel as the one who caused it.”
The Cabinet is expected to vote tomorrow in support of the principles of a parliamentary Bill giving legal force to the disengagement plan.
The Bill will lay out two stages of evacuation, authorising first the security forces to seal off the areas marked for withdrawal, and then the forcible removal of settlers who refuse to leave voluntarily. – Guardian Unlimited Â