NYT: Israel Gears Up for Burst of Far-Right Anger

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is increasingly denounced as a traitor. Israeli government ministers are receiving death threats. Protesters have accosted senior politicians and yelled at them during public appearances.

Far-right Israelis are growing increasingly strident in the months leading up to the planned withdrawal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip this summer. Many Israelis are drawing parallels to the period of inflamed passions that preceded the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was killed by a nationalist who rejected Mr. Rabin's concessions to the Palestinians.

Mr. Sharon, a supporter of the settlers for decades, has been the target of their wrath since last year, when he announced his plan to evacuate all 8,500 settlers from Gaza and several hundred from the West Bank.

Israel's security services have not cited any evidence of specific plans for violence against Mr. Sharon, but senior Israeli officials are calling for pre-emptive steps like detention without trial, which is permitted under Israeli law. The practice, known as administrative detention, has been widely used against suspected Palestinian militants, but only rarely against Israelis.

"Sometimes in order to safeguard democracy, we have to use undemocratic means such as administrative detention," President Moshe Katsav said this week.

The public security minister, Gideon Ezra, has even cited a prominent far-right campaigner, Itamar Ben Gvir, as a good candidate for detention.

Mr. Ben Gvir, an admirer of Meir Kahane, the anti-Arab militant who was assassinated in 1990, says Mr. Sharon is betraying Israel. While Mr. Ben Gvir says he will not engage in violence, he says there are others who will.

Mr. Ben Gvir and his supporters sometimes turn up at events attended by government ministers, and he recently harangued Education Minister Limor Livnat at an event.

"Expelling Jews from their homes - how can this be?" he shouted at the minister as he was jostled by her bodyguards.

Organized protests assumed an aggressive edge this past week before two important votes on the Gaza pullout.

On Monday and Wednesday evenings, protesters set tires ablaze in several main roads around the country and scuffled with the police who moved in and arrested dozens of demonstrators. A policewoman suffered a broken sternum when she was kicked in the chest.

"What hurts the most is that some of them called us Nazis," the policewoman, Gal Kedem-Biton, said of the demonstrators in an interview with Yediot Aharonot.

When Mr. Rabin was killed a decade ago, Israelis were stunned. But the possibility that another senior government official could be assassinated is now widely discussed in the media, the government and the security services.

Mr. Ezra says people like Mr. Ben Gvir are dangerous because they "are influencing youths to act against the law."

"These people give instructions in closed meetings and there's nothing you can do about it," Mr. Ezra said. "The only way to deal with them is to put them in administrative detention. I don't like it, but I think we are going through a difficult period, and I don't want clashes."

At a news conference this week, Mr. Ben Gvir appeared in front of a banner reading, "Administrative detention is political terrorism."

"If they lock me up in administrative detention, they should be prepared for hundreds of people like me who will sprout up and continue screaming against Sharon," he said.

Another far-right campaigner, Noam Federman, was placed under administrative detention in 2003 while he was being investigated on suspicion that he planned violence against Palestinians. However, a court ordered him released last year, and he is now under house arrest. He is allowed out periodically, and has delivered ominous warnings.

Asked this week by Israeli television if he considered violence against Israeli politicians legitimate, Mr. Federman replied: "I didn't take out Rabin. I didn't weep when he died, but I didn't wipe him out."

"It's very possible that someone will take out Arik Sharon," Mr. Federman said, referring to Mr. Sharon by his nickname. But he added, "it will not be from me or my close friends. We have our own plans on how to struggle."

Mr. Federman said that when the evacuation date drew near, the more militant opponents might try to sow chaos throughout Israel, rather than focus on Gaza, which will have a huge security presence.

Graffiti in several places around the country describes Mr. Sharon as a "dictator" and a "traitor." "Hitler would be proud of you," said one spray-painted message, along with "Lily is waiting for you," a reference to Mr. Sharon's wife, who died five years ago.

Several of Mr. Sharon's ministers have recently received death threats directed at them and their families.

"You will attend the funeral of your children," said a letter addressed to Israel's transportation minister, Meir Sheetrit.

Mr. Sharon speaks fondly of the settlers, and dismisses the threats, sometimes joking that he does not wear a bulletproof vest because they do not make them in his size.

The Yesha Council, the main group representing settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, is leading the organized opposition to the evacuation plan, and it says it rejects violence.

The council has arranged huge rallies against the pullout, drawing crowds of 100,000 or more.

But the council says Mr. Sharon's government is trying to vilify settlers by linking them to fringe elements, and it contends that Mr. Sharon is the one guilty of incitement.

"We are disturbed at the way Mr. Sharon and his spinmeisters are moving," said Yisrael Medad, a spokesman for the Yesha Council.

Referring to the threatening letters sent to government officials, he said: "I'd bet my bottom dollar these are from cranks and psychos. Its very troubling the way the atmosphere is being cranked up against us."

"We would like to have 100,000 people calmly sitting down in the highways," he added. "But in the atmosphere Mr. Sharon is creating, I don't know what will happen."

Mr. Sharon's plan to withdraw the settlers, which narrowly survived several previous votes in the legislature and his cabinet, was comfortably approved by Parliament on Wednesday. The cabinet is expected to give its backing on Sunday.

No official date has been set for the evacuation, but government officials say they expect it to begin in July and last for up to three months.

Security around Mr. Sharon is now extraordinarily tight. At public appearances, he is routinely ringed by a dozen or more bodyguards. Streets are blocked off in all directions.

(When JBT fascists take over)

From GAMLA:

Two Strong-minded Defense Chiefs Purged Ahead of Evacuations ************************************************************

DEBKAfile Special Analysis

The non-extension of Lt.-General Moshe Ayalon's tour of duty as Israeli armed forces chief of staff is unprecedented. The one-year extension has always been automatic for every one of his predecessors, a routine that crossed party divisions and assured the country that the army serves the nation as its supreme defender and is above and apart from the political schemes of the government in office.

This virtual sacking hit Israel like a thunderclap after midnight Tuesday, February 15, the more shocking since it followed shortly after the announcement that Shin Beit Director, the second top czar of Israel's war on Palestinian terror, will also not be asked to stay on when his stint is up in May. Both of these experienced veterans, widely acclaimed for their achievements in cutting down Palestinian terror, are being dropped ahead of the evacuations of Israeli civilians and troops from the Gaza Strip and northern West bank in the coming July. Both have spoken out against the step - each in his professional capacity.

By Wednesday morning, a vocal chorus from the extreme political left to the right had condemned the step as irresponsible. The Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee will be called into urgent session.

An angry tremor ran through the IDF's high command. High albeit anonymous officers voiced fears of the destabilizing effect on the armed forces at a very tricky period. The top soldier's retirement inevitably generates a round of new appointments and musical chairs which are bound to complicate the run-up to the dangerous and painful withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Many commanders expect the post-disengagement Palestinian territory to turn rapidly into a fast-exploding powder keg.

It is too soon to say whether General Yaalon jumped or was pushed. But it hardly matters. Prime minister Ariel Sharon and defense minister Shaul Mofaz obviously wanted him out of the way and replaced with a more supportive military chief before the evacuations began. Three of the frontrunners are deputy chief of staff and former air force commander Dan Halutz, former deputy chief of staff Gaby Ashkenazi and a dark horse, close friend of the prime minister, former OC central command Moshe Kaplinsky.

After soldiering for 37 years - mostly in combat units - general Yaalon knew the rules and kept to them, voicing his views to the heads of government and parliament in private, although his conviction that Israel was undertaking unacceptable risks in withdrawing from Gaza at this time was no secret. The departing Shin Beit director spoke freely of the threat of a second South Lebanon badland rising in the Gaza Strip after the redeployment of Israeli troops outside the territory and away from the Philadelphi border strip with Egypt and laying much of southern and central Israeli open to Hizballah-backed Palestinian terrorism, missiles and mortars attacks.

Yaalon objected strongly to troops having to execute the forcible evictions of evacuees from their homes and this task passed to the police. His departure will tell the country that its highest-ranking soldier opposes the employment by the prime minister and defense minister of the armed forces to drive civilians out of their homes on the front line for political ends while engaged in battling an enemy attacking those same civilians.

Even if this was not the intention, his retirement days ahead of the July date for the start of the evacuation will signal to every officer and soldier entrusted with this task that he labors under an unstable, untried, changing chain of command.

But Sharon and Mofaz are not wasting a moment for the news to sink in. DEBKAfile has learned they have directed Gush Katif, in the southern Gaza Strip, and settlements in the northern part of the territory military areas locked down as a military zone immediately after the cabinet approves their evacuation Sunday, February 20.

Under the new orders, Israeli civilians will be barred from entering the closed zones and even residents will require special permits limiting the time they may spend outside their homes.

In effect, 10,000 Israeli citizens will be placed under marshal law.

Yaalon and Halutz have received their orders to make all the necessary preparations for the "closure" within the next two weeks, and that is exactly what they are doing. The cordon sanitaire is aimed at foiling the settlers' plan to bring tens of thousands of supporters to the Gaza Strip to stop the evacuation by their very presence.

The clampdown will also affect the media, including outlets that are firm supporters of Sharon's "disengagement" plan. Print, photo and television journalists will be barred from entering the cordon and have to make do with stage-managed briefings at special media centers run by the Army Spokesman's Office. Footage recording the pull-outs will be provided by army camera crews, and subjected to military censorship. The media, along with the settlers, will effectively be gagged, all in the name of saving the Sharon government from embarrassing scenes at home or abroad.

These draconian measures were indicated but hardly contested. "Anyone who speaks or writes against the disengagement plan is guilty of incitement," Sharon declared at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday.

Even the people facing eviction appear to be living in a dream world, believing they have five months to play with till the axe falls in July.

Not so Israel's entrepreneurs.

DEBKAfile reports that commercial companies are investing huge sums in creating services for the besieged Israeli communities and their outside contacts, including foreign journalists. Some have built systems for facilitating the rapid movement of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip and set up deals for procuring the precious permits - all for a hefty fee. Financing was arranged to loft airships, or zeppelins, over the Gaza Strip to provide the trapped settlers with round-the-clock telephone and Internet communication with the outside world.

This plan was scotched by military hints that the airships would be shot down or electronically jammed.

A number of so-called "extremists" who have changed their identity card addresses to "Gaza Strip" are in fact agents of those firms, planted in the region to keep their operations ticking over smoothly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been invested to beat the government's "media blackout" on the areas destined to be evacuated.

Importers and retail sellers of satellite telephones and digital cameras report a dramatic spike in sales and rentals. One Tel Aviv firm told us buyers are snapping up everything that clicks, "especially the most expensive equipment", with digital cameras priced at between 30,000 and 60,000 shekels a hot item. They are to be smuggled to the future evacuees with instructions in their use from former Mossad intelligence operatives or Shin Bet security agents trained in surveillance tradecraft.

Among the customers for these services, DEBKAfile's counter-intelligence sources report, are foreign citizens and organizations working undercover for foreign intelligence services in the market for real-time information from the Gaza Strip, a development that could have diplomatic and political ramifications for the Israeli government.

Changing horses in mid-war was a characteristic tactic for the old Sharon and evidence that he has not changed his spots - as his spinmeisters contend. As defense minister who led the country into the 1982 Lebanon War, he ordered certain units not to be mobilized because their commanders and men opposed his policy. Now as then, he is taking pragmatic decisions, guided by considerations of political ends - not means or ideals. Then as now, the prime minister brooks no objections to his decisions and is deaf to counterarguments. Although elected to lead the Likud and committed to the opposite agenda, he has had no compunctions about switching to the radical left-wing platform of uprooting Israeli towns and villages rather than building them, a contradiction of his life's work. He has proved capable of wooing the ultra-religious factions when he needs their votes and kicking them out when he does not; embracing the anti-religious Shinui party for the sake of a stable government and dumping its ministers in favor of a new darling.

It is now the turn of the chief of staff and domestic security director to be traded in for more amenable successors. Both learned the hard way of the high price they must pay for questioning the course Sharon had determined. Mofaz in contrast has remained in place by sacrificing a sacrosanct national tradition that honored the armed forces as the people's servant and protector.

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