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Government is in bind at Temple Mount, warns ex-police chief
Erik Schechter
Security officials face a Catch-22 in their bid to prevent what they fear is a rising risk of Jewish extremists carrying out an attack at Jerusalem's Temple Mount, says Arieh Amit, former Jerusalem police commander.
The Mount is the most serious of the potential trouble spots where security experts fear that Jewish radicals may strike, provoked by what they see as government inaction in the face of the Palestinian intifada.
"The pressure that drives the Temple Mount activists would be safely released," Amit argues, if the government allowed Jews to pray at the contested holy spot. However, such an action by Israel would be regarded by Muslims as violating what they've come to see as a "mega-symbol," he says. So whichever way the government moves presents a risk of "a jihad against Judaism."
Even before the Al-Aqsa Intifada began, far-right groups chafed at rules that allowed Jews to visit the Mount but not to pray there. Since Ariel Sharon's visit to the site on September 28 and the subsequent outbreak of the uprising, the Mount has been closed to non-Muslim visitors - a situation that some security officials fear may increase the ferment among groups whose ultimate aim is building the Third Temple.
Amit points to the Mount as a crucial flash point as concerns rise about the potential for Jewish extremist action in response to the ongoing intifada. Those concerns were amplified by a vigilante bombing of a Palestinian store in early April by Jewish settlers in Hebron. Six soldiers who were passing the store on patrol at the time of the blast were lightly injured.
Another potential flash point, he notes, is Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs - like the Mount, a place holy to both Jews and Muslims and the place where Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994. But Amit believes the situation at the Temple Mount is more volatile: "At least in Hebron, there's an arrangement. There are hours for Jewish prayers and hours for Muslim prayers." So delicate is the situation in Jerusalem, he says, that an anti-Arab terror attack elsewhere could ignite a mob response during Muslim prayers on Friday at Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Mount.
West Bank settler leader Aharon Domb, however, plays down the risk of Jewish terror. Domb, the ex-spokesman of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, says settlers have shown great restraint, despite the stress of living under fire for seven months: "In terms of the number of attacks and their seriousness, there's never been a period as bad as now in Judea, Samaria and Gaza."
The settler leadership, he stresses, has pointedly endorsed only non-violent protests in response to Palestinian attacks. "Someone who still doesn't understand that violence hurts the settlers' image," he says, "has something wrong with his head."
But he concedes that as the situation worsens, individuals or small groups might break those bounds: "We are not living on a small commune, and we don't have a private police force."
However, he says two factors militate against Jewish violence. First, the government's stepped-up strikes against Palestinian terrorist targets have left "less of a vacuum to be filled by private individuals." Second, as the scope of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation widens, the settlers no longer feel isolated, without backing from the Israeli public. "The hopelessness that drives individuals to commit desperate acts is not felt now," Domb argues.
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