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Demonstratively Different
Ina Friedman
 NOT A RALLY AGAINST ANYTHING: The huge, disciplined Jerusalem gathering |
Day after day in early January, thousands of West Bank settlers, men, women and children - lots of children - marched through balmy weather, converging on Jerusalem from north and south. They took to the treacherous roads after the December 31 murder of Talia and Binyamin Kahane, in a roadside ambush near the settlement of Ofrah. "It made us feel like the people in the movie 'Network,' throwing open their windows and shouting: 'We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" says Ruchie Avital of Ofrah.
Yet the tone was anything but strident. At one point, when the marchers were moving past the Arab village of Hizmeh, just outside Jerusalem, Palestinian children threw stones at them. The marchers' sole response was to inform their police escort. When a child let slip a cry of "Death to the Arabs!" he was promptly chastised by a chorus of his elders.
In the past few weeks, pent-up anger over the settlers' vulnerability to attack on the roads, along with deep concern that a far-reaching peace deal - involving the uprooting of many of their homes - would be struck before the February 6 election, has spawned a revival of activism on the hard right: marches, a hunger strike, a mass rally in Jerusalem, and other demonstrations. But in contrast to the strategy of incitement that marked the anti-Oslo protests of 1993-1995, a policy of restraint is now being promoted by most grass-roots leaders.
The question of precisely where the exercise of free speech crosses the line and becomes incitement to violence remains a sore one on both sides of the Israeli political divide. Only now, five years after the Rabin assassination, is the Justice Ministry completing its draft of new legislation to address this issue. And many veterans of the anti-Oslo campaign of 1993-95 still bristle at any suggestion of a cause-and-effect link between rhetoric and violence, deeming it a leftist ploy to gag dissent.
"I reject the notion that heated rhetoric inevitably leads to violence," says Susie Dym, spokesperson for Cities of Israel, an organization she describes as the "no-budget, self-motivated" national network of activists promoting what they call "peace for peace" - without territorial concessions. "Anyway," she adds, in response to recent publicity about official fears of an attempt on Prime Minister Barak's life, "it's obvious that the threat today is to the public - in our cities and on the roads - not to the prime minister. Any worry about Barak's safety right now is way off target."
"Things got so bad for us after the Rabin assassination that I was actually approached by Amnesty International, which was greatly concerned about the abuse of our civil rights," recalls Yehudit Tayar of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Sa-maria and Gaza. "I have an allergy to the way we're routinely painted as extremists. The fact is that we in Judea and Samaria are the most responsible population in this country, and all we want is to live normal lives. But whenever we express that desire, we get slapped with the line: 'If you're not for Oslo, then you're not for peace.'"
The spokesmen of the groups that have emerged recently, however, are facing the issue of inflammatory rhetoric and political violence head on. "This has been a matter of great concern to us," says Lilach Hadar-Ashtar, spokeswoman for the ad hoc Forum for Jerusalem, which sponsored a mass rally in the capital on January 8. The gathering was conceived and promoted as an "apolitical, supra-political rally in support of a united Jerusalem, not a demonstration against anything," she stresses. To ensure inclusiveness and decorum, the Forum stationed hundreds of monitors in the crowd with instructions to confiscate any "inappropriate placards" and "summarily remove" anyone who became verbally or physically unruly. "We would have considered it a huge failure had the event smacked of anything radical or anti-democratic," Hadar-Ashtar says.
Similarly, the thousands of settlers who participated in the marches from settlements to Jerusalem, organized as a campaigned dubbed "Israel Is Fighting for Its Life and Soul," received instructions stating the organizers' "vigorous opposition to violent action of any sort" and their "prohibition of any physical or verbal confrontation with the army, police, or media."
"Out of its frustration and despair, the left has been brandishing the weapon of the Rabin assassination at us," says Rabbi Avi Gisser of Ofrah, one of the four initiators of the campaign. "But we've learned the lessons of the assassination, and we're conscious of the need for moderation in the way we express ourselves."
THE BROADER POLITICAL CIRcumstances have also helped bottle up any urge to replicate the turbulence of 1995, when Rabin was portrayed as everything from madman to traitor and anti-Oslo frenzy culminated in assassination. While the concessions called for in President Clinton's peace proposal are incalculably more extensive than anything imagined in Rabin's day, the likelihood of an accord being reached before the end of Clinton's term is slim. And with Barak lagging far behind Likud candidate Ariel Sharon in the polls, the chances of his being reelected to continue the peace talks seem equally remote.
The strategy at Sharon's HQ is to run a deliberately vague and insipid campaign, aimed at capturing the uncommitted center, leaving it to the blunder-prone Barak to lose the election on his own. And since any blast of right-wing stridency would undermine this approach and could generate sympathy for Barak, Sharon's people have signaled allies in activist groups to exercise restraint, and the message has been clearly received - at least by the new grass-roots leaders.
Even the Council of Settlements, which was at the forefront of the anti-Rabin campaign, changed its tone in a matter of days. Hours after the Kahane couple's murder, Shlomo Filber, the director of the council, accused Prime Minister Ehud Barak of giving the Palestinian Authority "the green light for terrorist actions." Yet later that week, when settler Hagai Ben-Artzi (former Prime Minister Netanyahu's brother-in-law) chose to characterize the Barak government as "traitorous," the council took pains to deplore his behavior.
Still, the mellowing of the hard right could yet be marred, even foiled, by a single act of violence. And there's no lack of potential for that around.
Zo Artzeinu, the group that caused chaos in the summer of 1995 by blocking main roads leading to Jerusalem and battling with the police in the capital, was set to mount a similar operation on January 11. Demonstrators had instructions to stop their cars at precisely 5 p.m. for two minutes before continuing at a snail's place to Jerusalem's Old City. A few days before the operation, Zo Artzeinu leader Moshe Feiglin was also telling activists that "By the time you get there, you'll see that there's already activity in progress on the Temple Mount" - without specifying what he had in mind.
Indeed, another source of provocative action could be any of several organizations that promote the idea of building the Third Temple on the Mount. A new report by Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, on the dramatic growth of these groups in recent years - to encompass thousands of people - warns that many of their members "have a record of violent nationalistic criminal offenses." Keshev regards the threat to the two mosques on the Temple Mount as being so dire that it recommends "inviting international bodies (the U.N. or a multilateral force) to share responsibility for the security of the holy sites on the Temple Mount."
And then, of course, there's the risk from supporters of the radical - and outlawed - Kach and Kahane Chai movements, heightened after the slaying of Binyamin and Talia. "Vengeance is a key element in the doctrine of the Kach and Kahane Chai people, and they [feel they] bear an enormous sense of guilt because they never avenged the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane," explains Prof. Ehud Sprinzak, the leading expert on Israel's radical right. "So now there will be a particularly powerful impulse to avenge the death of his son."
Sprinzak moots two possible scenarios: an attack on a "major symbol of Islamic or Palestinian society," with the mosques on the Temple Mount being the most obvious target; or a massive attack on Palestinian civilians. But because the "usual suspects" in the Kach and Kahane Chai circles are under surveillance by the police and General Security Service, any action would be more likely to come from an "anonymous face in the crowd." Or, as Sprinzak pointedly puts it: "The Kach and Kahane people are now searching for their Yigal Amir."
If either of those scenarios is played out, or even attempted, the effect on the volatile situation on the ground and on the election is anyone's guess. Ominously, Sprinzak is convinced that, within the 30-day mourning period for Talia and Binyamin, the Kahane camp will try to strike. If it does, nobody will remember the effort to foster a tone of moderation.
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