”Sharon, Lily is waiting for you.” The message being spray-painted around Israel contains menace: Lily, Ariel Sharon’s wife, died of lung cancer in 2000; now hardline Jewish opponents of the prime minister are willing him to join her.
The alternative version of the graffito — ”Sharon, Rabin is waiting for you” — is a more direct threat. It refers to Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister who was assassinated in 1995 in protest at his moves towards making peace with the Palestinians.
Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, is one of two poster boys for Israel’s extreme right, a group estimated to number several thousand who mostly live in West Bank settlements. The other is Baruch Goldstein who died, in the eyes of a minority of Israelis, in glory after killing 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
Both represent the pinnacle of Jewish violence, an undercurrent which is mostly submerged but is expected to re-emerge in opposition to the Israeli government’s plan to withdraw from its settlements in the Gaza Strip in July.
Barely a day goes past without Israeli newspapers reporting on the threat to the government from the extreme right. These threats are taken seriously by the Israeli authorities and the Jewish division of the internal security agency, the Shin Bet.
The Israeli right believes that the state of Israel should have its biblical borders. For some that means from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt, but as an absolute minimum it should consist of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Many also want all Palestinians to be deported.
For them Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza is a religious crime which should be stopped by any means.
Noam Federman, a polite and friendly man who is currently under partial house arrest in a small enclave of deeply religious settlers in the centre of Hebron, places a stone — a Jewish mark of commemoration — on Goldstein’s grave before speaking of Sharon’s crimes.
Federman insists he is against violence and law-breaking, but adds that he would not prevent or condemn anyone else from stopping the evacuation of the Jewish settlements in Gaza. ”The Sharon government is criminal. It has crossed all the red lines. No one should expect their opponents to behave differently. It’s not about legality, it’s about morality. I follow God’s law,” he says.
If he became aware of a person, such as Goldstein, who planned to commit an attack, he says he would not alert the authorities. ”I do not work for the police or the Shin Bet,” he says.
Since 2002, Federman has either been in detention or under full or partial house arrest. He has been accused of complicity in attacks on Palestinians and the planting of a bomb near a Palestinian school in Jerusalem.
He denies involvement and prosecutors have not been able to mount a substantial case against him. However judges have agreed that he represents an adequate threat to law and order to have his freedom curtailed.
His associates take the same tone, paying lip service to the law, but rejecting the government as illegal, and endorsing extreme acts in opposition to disengagement.
The extreme right in Israel is not a single grouping. Many of the groups inspired by Rabbi Meir Kahane have been outlawed for the their racist ideology, but their unofficial label is ”Kahanists”.
So far their actions against disengagement have been little more than civil disobedience and intimidation, but many Israelis fear a second Goldstein or Amir.
Baruch Marzel formed Kach after the assassination of Kahane in New York in 1990. Disengagement from Gaza, he says, is as serious a crime as the Nazis’ extermination of six-million Jews.
”We have had one Holocaust. These things were passed in a democratic way and we paid a high price. Oslo was passed in a democratic way and we paid dearly.
”The disengagement plan was promoted by a corrupt prime minister with a corrupt family, by a corrupt cabinet in a corrupt way.”
The government, he says, has no right to take Jews away from the land that was granted to them by God.
”We are loyal to what God wants. We are loyal to the demands of the land of Israel and we are not willing to give up one inch. We will stop Sharon one way or the other.”
Marzel foresees a split in the Jewish nations between what he sees as leftwingers and the religious. He is confident that the religious, with their high birth rate (he has nine children), will take over Israel.
”We have kids while the leftists have cats and puppies. The next generation is ours, no doubt. The question is what damage will they do before we can take over,” he says. ”We cannot be Jewish and be part of something that goes against God. I am willing to do anything I can to stop this.
”This is worse than killing my kids or raping my daughters,” he adds.
Federman agrees and says he is not concerned about the outbreak of a civil war among the Jews. ”This is already a civil war,” he says. – Guardian Unlimited Â