The Emergence of the Israeli Radical Right

Abstract

Most Israelis were greatly shocked when they learned on the eve of April 27, 1984, that a plot to blow up five Arab buses full of passengers during a crowded rush hour was barely prevented. In the following week, twenty-seven men suspected of forming an anti-Arab terrorist network were arrested. It was soon disclosed that the suspects had been responsible for an attempt to assassinate the Arab mayors of three West Bank cities in 1980, for a murderous attack on the Islamic college in Hebron in 1983 that took the life of three students and wounded thirty-three, and for a score of lesser acts of violence against Arabs. A very elaborate plan to blow up the Muslim Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount, the third most sacred place for Islam, was also on their drawing board. What surprised observers and political analysts in April 1984 was not so much the existence of the terror group as the identity of its members. They belonged to Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful) a religious fundamentalist group committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank (biblical Judea and Samaria). Though an aggressive (sometimes even illegal) settlement movement, Gush Emunim had never openly embraced an ideology of violence. Its orthodox leaders asserted a biblically based Jewish claim to Judea and Samaria but had never advocated deportation of the Arab population.' Instead they professed the belief that peaceful and productive coexistence with the Arabs, under benevolent Israeli rule, was both possible and desirable. That any of these highly educated and responsible men, some of whom were ranking army officers and all but one heads of large families, would resort to terrorism was completely unexpected. The exposition of respectable Jewish terrorism was followed, three months later, by another unexpected event, the election to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an extreme religious fundamentalist. Nearly 26,000 Israelis (1.3 percent) voted for Kach (Thus), the political party that called for the expulsion of the Arabs from historic Palestine; 2.5 percent of Israeli soldiers were among them. Almost everybody remembered that it was Kahane who, since 1974, had publicly advocated T.N.T. (Terror Neged Terror), which in his terminology stood for Jewish terrorism against Arab terrorism.2 The astonished Israelis did not have to wait long to discover what the new party was about. A day after the elections, Kahane and his supporters held a victory parade to the Western Wall in old Jerusalem. Passing intentionally through the Arab section of the old city, Kahane's excited followers smashed through the market, overturning vegetable stalls, hitting bystanders, punching the air with clenched fists, and telling the frightened local residents that the end of their stay in the Holy Land was near. The same kind of street brutality has repeated itself many times in the last four years, especially following anti-Jewish terror incidents. But instead of being shocked by what until that time could only have been seen in old-time fascist movies or in modern scenes from Teheran, some Israelis