A mounting sense of urgency
By Nadav Shragai
Haaretz, December 31, 2004
Last week dozens of agents of the Shin Bet security service came to the home of Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, head of the Temple Institute in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. They came not to arrest him but to listen to him. Ariel, 60, is categorized as a "retired revolutionary" by the Shin Bet's unit to avert Jewish subversion. Today, the Shin Bet is searching intensively for the next generation of Jewish fanaticism, the new revolutionaries, who believe the time has come to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, perhaps as a way to torpedo the disengagement plan under which all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and a few in northern Samaria are to be evacuated.
Ariel, who was one of the settlers evacuated from Yamit - the northern Sinai settlement that was demolished by Israel before the area was returned to Egypt in 1982 - has for years been making vessels for the Third Temple. He embodies the potential of the ideological connection between the Temple Mount and Gush Katif, the settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip. Thus the Shin Bet decided to request that he give the agents and officials a talk.
Many thousands of schoolchildren, students and soldiers have already visited his institute, watched the films and performances, listened to the lectures and run their hands over the vessels and other objects that the Temple Institute is planning to place in the Third Temple. Ariel's books about the temple and the prayer books for Jewish holidays that the institute has published are bestsellers among the national-religious public. The Shin Bet, though, is interested in the practical aspects of his doctrine.
Ariel, who in the 1970s held the No. 2 slot on the Knesset list of Kach, the ultranationalist movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, was the head of the Yamit yeshiva at the time of the evacuation in 1982. As such, he became the first rabbi in Israel to call on soldiers to disobey an order. A military court sentenced him to a six-month suspended sentence. A year later, in 1983, he was arrested together with a group of yeshiva students from the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron, on suspicion that they had formed a plan to seize the Temple Mount and barricade themselves at the site. The Jerusalem District Court acquitted them.
Last week the Shin Bet personnel asked Rabbi Ariel to estimate the scale of resistance the public in Gush Katif will put up against the evacuation. They also wanted to find out about the possible connection between Temple Mount activity and opposition to the evacuation. Ariel preferred to talk mainly about the scenario for Gush Katif. He painted a harsh picture and said he was concerned about a possible civil war.
Destroying the homes of the just
It was only a few days later, last Wednesday, on the fast day of the 10th of Tevet, that Rabbi Ariel, at a public event, described the possible connection between the Temple Mount and actions to prevent the disengagement plan from being implemented. Ariel was the first speaker at a gathering on "the struggle for the Land of Israel in the context of the temple," which was held at Yeshivat Hakotel in the Old City, one of the more consensual and conservative yeshivas of the religious-Zionist movement. Ariel did a kind of internal but trenchant stocktaking which provides at least a partial answer to one of the major questions being asked by the Shin Bet: Will there be Jews today, as there were at the time of Yamit, who will try to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, or will a more moderate approach be adopted, on the assumption that this will thwart the disengagement plan?
Ariel was pessimistic. "My experience tells me that there are few consolations for our public. There are some who are asserting unequivocally that there will not be an evacuation. So they said. I said the same thing. I also prophesied at the time that there will not be an evacuation, that it will not happen. So I prophesied! The fact is that there will be an evacuation! The fact is that things have happened! It is all from above. Divine Providence fomented this, not the hand of man. Today we have to ask ourselves: What has God done to us? Why, after two decades, are we again confronting a crisis of this kind? Why are the homes of the just being destroyed? Why are the homes of the just people in Gush Katif under threat? A place of grace, work, heroism and precepts?"
The answer, according to Ariel: the disengagement and the threat of additional territorial withdrawal is punishment for the neglect of the Temple Mount. "I will say only this, that when the Creator, the Holy One, has nowhere to place his shekhina (Divine Presence), why should we have rest? When years pass and the right action is not taken, the plague comes. In the time of David, 70,000 people paid with their lives because the tabernacle was not moved to Jerusalem - so what do we want today? We who have not brought even one sacrifice, shall there not be wrath upon us?...
"The Holy One wants us to begin and then he will continue. So begin! What does it mean, `And they shall make me a sanctuary and I will dwell in the midst of them'? Does anyone expect the Holy One to do the work for us? If we build him a sanctuary, he will reside in our midst!"
Ariel then quoted a few sentences from the Hanukkah prayers which describe how the Maccabees purified the temple and lit candles after liberating it from the Greeks. This was his way of hinting about what has to be done on the Temple Mount, and he added, mysteriously, "If only I could say what is in my heart ..."
Back in 1967, in the midst of the Six-Day War, Ariel disclosed some of the secrets of his heart. As a young chaplain he did guard duty at the entrance to the Dome of the Rock, the conjectured site of the temple. He was convinced, he related, that the Muslim shrine would remain empty until the state sent engineers to demolish the mosque - but they never came.
Need to act on the Temple Mount
Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, head of the Tzomet Institute for technology and halakha (Jewish religious law) at the settlement of Alon Shvut, also drew a connection last week between the "decree of disengagement and weakness of the public" and "the absence of the act on the Temple Mount." Rosen, who is identified with the National Religious Party and is far more moderate than Rabbi Ariel, also spoke at the meeting last week. He did not talk about removing the mosques but about arranging Jewish worship on the Temple Mount. At bottom, though, his analysis was identical to Ariel's: "If there is a weakness in the heart, at the Temple Mount, this is manifested in organs that are far from the source of vitality, at the extremities, such as in Gush Katif and the Gaza District, and in today's reality we truly have a problem with the extremities of the nation and the land." At the same time, Rosen emphasized, "The whole strengthening of the temple is a matter of malchut [rulers of the realm] in Israel, of statehood, and not of private individuals."
Rabbi David Dudkevich, the rabbi of many of the "hilltop people" in Samaria, also believes that "weakness at the place of the temple is projected to the external organs." Dudkevich, who participated in the meeting, last week urged the public not to make do with another "outcry to heaven." "Do not address the eternal question - `Until when?' - only heavenward but also inward. It is not so honest to cry out `until when' to the heavens when you are ensconced in your homes. This is a period in which human beings must act, so that this time shall not be as earlier times."
This conception, which views the Temple Mount as the source of vitalization and strength, which affects the situation in which the people of Israel finds itself - both for good and for ill, is today shared by most of the Temple Mount activists. Twenty-five years ago, that faith led Rabbi Yeshua Ben Sasson to identify the Temple Mount as a font from which Israel's enemies draw vitality and strength to hurt us. Ben Sasson believed that "the Muslim control of the Temple Mount is the source of the ills in the Jewish people, and that control accords Islam a source of spiritual sustenance from which its believers draw their power of vitality in the land." He and some of his colleagues maintained that removing the "abomination" from the Temple Mount and blowing up the mosques would stop the withdrawal from Sinai. In the end they shelved the plan.
Yoel Lerner, who planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock 30 years ago, also hoped that his act would scuttle the separation-of-forces agreement between Israel and Egypt after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Michael Dennis Rohan, an Australian who set Al-Aqsa Mosque ablaze in 1969; Alan Goodman, who opened fire on the Temple Mount in 1982, and the "Lifta Gang" which almost succeeded in blowing up the Dome of the Rock in 1984 - all were mentally deranged, and Rohan and two members of the Lifta Gang were hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. They attacked or tried to attack the mosques after being exposed to extremist messianic ideology. In the case of the Lifta Gang, the process was accelerated when they joined up with criminal elements. In the 1980s a few members of the group were placed in administrative detention (arrest without trial) on suspicion of planning to attack the Temple Mount mosques. Earlier, at the end of the 1970s, the Shin Bet suspected a resident of Kiryat Arba of planning an act of violence on the Temple Mount, but did not manage to interrogate him: he was killed in a terrorist attack.
The top investigators of the Shin Bet's department to prevent Jewish subversion are now busy trying to create a profile of the next Jewish terrorist. The most advanced intelligence methods are used to monitor the groups from which the next attempt to wreak havoc on the Temple Mount will emerge.
The Shin Bet has a pretty good idea about the method of operation that will be used to strike at the mosques. It will be done from a distance by firing a rocket, missile or mortar (probably using stolen weapons). The security authorities believe that a frontal attack, like the ones planned in the past by Jewish militants, is doomed to failure because of the considerable reinforcement of security on the Temple Mount and the lessons that have been learned from previous attempts.
When it comes to the profile of the coming assailants, the Shin Bet is far less sure. The following story illustrates the complexity of the problem.
No squad knew about the others
Shahar David Zeliger, a resident of the settler outpost Adei Ad, who planned a shooting attack on Arabs and was sentenced to eight years in prison a few weeks ago, told his interrogators months ago that three of his friends had planned an attack on the Temple Mount and on a series of other mosques as well. "Not one squad knew about any of the others. The whole network was compartmentalized," he said.
Zeliger named names. One of them was a prominent hilltop leader in Samaria, another also lived in Samaria, but the third, from the Hebron area, was no longer among the living. He was killed in a terrorist attack. Despite the ambivalence with which the interrogators treated Zeliger's testimony - because some of what he said was self-contradictory - they decided to look into the story. The red light was lit for the investigators by the fact that the suspects were from the Yemenite community and were "Rambamists" (Rambam is the Hebrew for Maimonides), or "Darda'im." The suspicions were intensified after the investigators discovered that Matti Shvu, one of those convicted in the case of the Bat Ayin underground, who is not a Yemenite, is also a follower of Darda'ism. (Shvu, a resident of the settlement of Havat Maon, in the southern Hebron Hills, was sentenced to two years in prison for possessing combat materiel.)
The Darda'im - the name is from dor de'a, meaning "generation of knowledge" - is small sect within Yemenite Jewry which follows the teachings of the 12th-century philosopher and physician Maimonides, the greatest Jewish sage of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest arbiters of all time. The Darda'im view Maimonides' rulings as the last and final word on religious matters. They say that he is the only person since Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, the compiler of the Mishna, who wrote an essay on the entire Torah and remained true to its viewpoints and to the views of Hazal, the ancient Jewish sages. The Darda'im tend to ignore the chain of rulings which has been handed down in later periods, from the Rabbinical Responsa and even from "Shulhan Arukh," the 16th-century code of Jewish law. They are especially antagonistic to the "messianic kabbala."
"Mori" Yihye Kapah, who was born in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1850, is considered the founder of the Darda'im. His grandson, Rabbi Yosef Kapah, an Israel Prize laureate, who died about five years ago, was considered the most important rabbinical personage close to the Darda'ist movement in this generation, though he kept aloof from disputes related to this approach.
An investigation of the leaders of the Darda'im in the hilltop outposts and of their friends - the group whom Zeliger named as potential attackers of the Temple Mount - turned up a bizarre way of life: a fusion of doctrines, beliefs, viewpoints and above all extreme asceticism such as the investigators had never before encountered. An example is Hill 26, adjacent to Kiryat Arba, where Nati Ozeri and his wife, Livnat, lived with their children. Apart from them, there were also a few unmarried people at the site. Ozeri (who was murdered by terrorists about two years ago) and his wife (the daughter of Shaul Nir, a member of the 1980s Jewish underground who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984 for his part in the murder of students at the Islamic College in Hebron but was released six years later after being pardoned by President Chaim Herzog) at first lived in a car and had a small kitchen and mattresses for sleeping. In their permanent residence, they lived "in closeness to God and to nature." On either side of the room they lived in, which was later demolished by order of the security forces, stood a metal container. One was used as a kitchen, the other as the children's room. For hours Ozeri would walk about his home - the walls were made of exposed limestone and the floor was concrete - wearing tefillin (phylacteries).
There was no electricity and no running water or flush toilet. Nor did the lone house on the hill have television, a computer or a stereo system. Progress, and especially electricity and its associated products, were considered almost the enemy in the Ozeri household. When the children fell ill, their parents treated them without antibiotics. After her husband's murder, Livnat Ozeri said that the novel "Gai Oni," by Shulamit Lapid, which describes the harsh existence of the founders of the northern village of Rosh Pina, was one of the sources of inspiration from which she and her husband drew inner strength and fortitude. Nati Ozeri often visited the Temple Mount, contrary to the ruling of most contemporary rabbis; his explanation was that Maimonides, too, visited the site.
'Hasidism in boots'
There are not many Yemenites in the settlement of Bat Ayin, in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem, but the fact that Ofer Gamliel, a carpenter and father of seven who was part of the "Bat Ayin underground" and is now serving a 15-year prison term for attempted murder, is from the Yemenite community (though not a Darda'ist) was sufficient for the Shin Bet investigators to target him as part of their examination of the "Darda'ist conspiracy."
Bat Ayin was founded in 1989 on land belonging to the settlement of Kfar Etzion and other land that was acquired from local Arabs. The founders - Dov Horowitz, Zvi Enosh and Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg - sought to create a fusion between Judaism of the Gush Emunim variety and working the land. They said they were practicing "Hasidism in boots." There are now more than 100 families in Bat Ayin, most of them newly religious. A large number of converts to Judaism also live there. Dozens of men in the settlement have a wide-ranging military background, in the Israel Defense Forces and in the security establishment. There are members of commando units and former pilots who came to Bat Ayin to combine worshiping God with working the land. A few of the residents belong to the Bratslav Hasidic sect. Some immerse themselves in the springs in the area, both during the day and at night.
Apart from the Arabs, who are considered enemies, Bat Ayin has also declared war on materialism ("Western culture"). Simplicity is the hallmark, whether in the clothing (which tends to wretchedness), the dirt paths, the homes whose construction was not completed. The residents of Bat Ayin have a few rules that they follow religiously: no television sets (other than in the homes of the few who work in the media or as actors); maximum modesty, especially by the women (head covering, stockings, long sleeves); and no German products.
The residents work in a variety of jobs. Some grow organic crops, others are ceramicists, some are Torah scribes. A few of the women engage in sculpture, weaving and Judaica. A few of the residents write poetry. Among the settlers are directors, musicians, makers of stained glass, embroiderers, and designers of candlesticks and memorial candles. There is also a flourishing catering business. Farmers in Bat Ayin raise organic grapes from which they make organic wine. One family produces organic flour, from the stage of sowing the wheat grains to the grinding. This was also the breeding ground for the Bat Ayin underground, which planned to detonate a cart filled with explosives next to a school in the Arab neighborhood of A-Tur, in Jerusalem.
Suicide for the sake of heaven
A similar group of young ascetics live in the hills near Givat Ronen, close to Nablus, an outpost established by Ronen Arussi, another "Rambamist." Arussi, a Torah scribe and metalworker by profession, was one of those arrested in the "underground" affair this year, some of whose members were suspected of being connected to the Bat Ayin group and of involvement in several cases of murder and attacks against Arabs. Nearly all the suspects, including Arussi, were released due to lack of evidence. At the funeral of settler Nati Ozeri, Arussi spoke about the death of Israeli sovereignty and the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty. Some of the hilltop residents (and from this point of view Arussi is only an example) are disenchanted with the Israeli way of life, or totally alienated from it, to the point where they deny the sovereignty and rule of the state.
Journalists are not the only ones who find it difficult to communicate with the hilltop residents around the settlements of Yitzhar and Itamar - so do the law enforcement authorities. Some of the hilltop people in Samaria view the police as representatives of a "foreign government."
A somewhat generalized portrait of the hilltop residents in Samaria is provided by their colleague, Yosefi Siman Tov, who lives in one of the settler outposts near Tekoa. "Everything there springs from the earth," he says of his friends in Samaria, "including man. The Nablus guys are like Joseph," he explains, "truth to the end, without compromise. They are trying to return to the period of the Bible. After Shechem [the biblical character and also the Hebrew name for Nablus] raped Dina, Shimon and Levy took revenge and murdered all the residents of his city. Even their father, the patriarch Jacob, was furious and cursed them. Patience is not one of the prominent traits of the people of Samaria. Some of them want messiah now. Head in the wall. If they came to our hilltops [in the Judean Desert], the slow pace would drive them crazy. Here everything is built slowly and gradually. The soil would spew them out."
In the southern Hebron Hills there are those who want messiah now and others who are willing to wait patiently. The Shin Bet investigators identified a small concentration of Darda'im around Maon, too. Though not a Darda'ist, Yair Har Sinai - who was shot and killed by terrorists in the summer of 2001 - embodied in his way of life an element that was also characteristic of the Darda'im in the Maon area. This is the ecological aspect: the water is taken from wells, the bread is baked in a home stove using whole-wheat flour, and the dairy products are made from the milk of the goats and sheep that are kept in the adjacent pen. Vineyards and fig groves also help the families make a living.
Har Sinai, for example, placed a large windmill for generating electricity on the roof of his house, which he built with his own two hands. The Darda'ists do not use chairs but sit on the ground. Their clothes are made of natural fabrics, such as a vest of unprocessed wool which they wear in the summer, too, a wool skullcap and cloth slippers. Har Sinai, who did not use a car and avoided firearms, walked the Hebron Hills wrapped in a tallit (prayer shawl), even if it was not prayer time, and always carrying a Bible in his shoulder bag. Unlike most of his friends, he viewed the Arabs as guides, not enemies. He admired their way of life and their proximity to nature, and considered some of them role models.
One of the first suspects questioned during the arrest of the Darda'im was Matti Shvu, a Darda'ist and a neighbor of Har Sinai. The investigators then went to members of the late Rabbi Kapah's family to learn about Darda'ism. They learned what every freshman student of Jewish philosophy is taught: Maimonides' philosophical system excels in rationalism, not mysticism. What sets the Darda'im apart is their practice of the customs and their observance of the religious laws relating to everyday Jewish life, especially in the realm of prayer, though not in public affairs, such as the Temple Mount. The investigators also met with a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council to glean more information about Maimonides and Darda'ism. What they discovered is that the Darda'im are an unusual group, but definitely not eccentric.
They reached the conclusion that a new mutation of Darda'im had developed in the settler outposts on the Judea and Samaria hilltops. These "new Darda'im" were attracted to Maimonides' doctrine as set forth in his "Mishneh Torah" because of its simplicity and lack of hairsplitting, theories and procedures which characterized some of the later commentaries. For example, the Darda'im in Samaria held a marriage ceremony for one of their friends without resorting to the services of an ordained rabbi. Their point of departure is that they do not need the services of a posek (arbiter) from this generation, because everything is addressed in the writings of Maimonides. The rabbi of Yitzhar, David Dudkevich, and the head of the Yesha (Judea, Samaria, Gaza) Committee of Rabbis, Dov Lior, who is also the rabbi of Kiryat Arba, were appalled when they heard about this. They reprimanded the hilltop Darda'im and arranged for a proper marriage ceremony to be held.
The new Darda'im are not necessarily Yemenites. One of the most prominent of them is Elitzur Segal, from the settlement of Ofra, a Torah scribe, who is close to the Kach group. Segal teaches at the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, which Meir Kahane's son, Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane (who was murdered by terrorists exactly four years ago), established in the settlement of Tapuah. There are Darda'im in Tapuah, too, especially in Tapuah West, Segal notes. A few years ago, Segal wrote a halakhic article dealing with the concept of mesirut hanefesh (self-sacrifice) during war. The article appeared in a little-known journal called "Bnei Hanevi'im" (Sons of the Prophets) and was entitled, "Suicide for the Sake of Heaven."
"Nowhere in the writings of the ancient sages did we find condemnation of such actions," Segal wrote. "On the contrary, people who took such action were praised for it. And it is simple and clear to anyone who understands even a little about the ways of war, that in every war situations arise in which a person must knowingly place himself in a situation where his death is certain, and anyone who volunteers for such an operation will be called a holy hero."
There are many who would undoubtedly agree with that, but Segal continued, "It is permitted to carry out an action that causes death, as people in the outposts [in Sinai] did in the Yom Kippur War and in other wars in which they fought the enemy to the death, even though they could have saved themselves, or as the holy person Dr. Baruch Goldstein did in Hebron [in 1994 Goldstein shot and killed 29 Muslim worshipers in a Hebron mosque before being killed by others at the site], but it appears that even a more certain death, such as blowing oneself up with a hand grenade together with the enemies - a case in which death is certain - is also without a doubt permitted and a commandment."
Segal terms the present period a "time of war" - "but only with the Arabs, not with the Jews." The issue of the Temple Mount, he says, "does not fall within the category of self-sacrifice" to which he referred in the past. Of the Darda'im, of whom he is one, Segal says, "Certainly everyone who wants to renew the Torah in the spirit of Maimonides will aspire to see the detonation of the mosques and their plowing under by bulldozers. It is inconceivable that a person will pray three times a day to the temple building and not aspire to see the place bulldozed and blown up. After all, prayer is not virtual." At the same time, "as a Rambamist with both legs planted firmly on the ground," Segal believes that the people whom Dvir Zeliger named to the Shin Bet interrogators did not intend to attack the Temple Mount. "There is no infrastructure that makes possible the renewal of worship in the temple and therefore there is no point in doing it now," he says. The same view is taken by Dvir Zeliger's lawyer, Ariel Atari, who says that his client's comments in this regard were unfounded and that the talk about blowing up mosques on the Temple Mount was no more than a wish that is not backed up any concrete plan.
Marginal militancy
The Kach group and its hangers-on also have the potential to attack the Temple Mount mosques. Attorney Naftali Wertzberger, who often represents Kach members and hilltop residents who run afoul of the law, thinks that as the disengagement looms ever closer, the greater the risk that someone will try to use the Doomsday weapon. "It's an option that is increasingly talked about, and if there are 10 who are talking, there is also one who is thinking about it seriously. It's unlikely that the Shin Bet will find someone like that. Past experience teaches that it's some sort of unplanned, unorganized outburst; a personal decision along the lines of Baruch Goldstein or another shaheed [martyr for the cause]. It could be a decision of momentary despair, made by someone who is not controlled by a rabbi or rabbis. In general, I don't think there are any rabbis who would authorize anything like that. Those people are also not part of any specific group or under the influence of a particular leader."
Dr. Shlomo Kaniel, from Bar-Ilan University, who has carried out the only scholarly study of the phenomenon of the hilltop settlers, views them as a "collection of individualists."
"There is no clear ideology there, there is no book that can be specified as a guide for their way of life, but a mixed bag of books and beliefs. They have no orderly doctrine. Each of them has his own mix. One is into spirituality, another into nature, a third is into religion and a fourth is into kabbala. Most of them disparage statism and the establishment and feel alienated and even hostile to them," Kaniel says.
As for the Temple Mount, it occupies only a few of the hilltop people, Kaniel says, most of whom are very insular and do not try to influence the public at large. "The danger will arise if they link up with external elements - criminal or inflammatory - who are liable to drag them in dangerous directions."
"External elements" of this sort are the members of the Kach and Kahane Lives movements, which have been outlawed. Itamar Ben Gvir, from Kach, discloses that consideration is now being given "to the use of the Temple Mount" as a means to torpedo the withdrawal. But "this does not involve an explosion, rather public protest on a large scale." At the same time, Ben Gvir thinks that "the possibility cannot be ruled out that desperate people, who feel that they are being trampled under the Sharon dictatorship, will take action. Goldstein did what he did after the Kach movement was outlawed."
A few years ago some Kach members were part of a secret plan, which was not carried out, to smuggle dismantled sections of an altar to the Temple Mount, rebuild it there and use it for animal sacrifices. Noam Livnat (the brother of Education Minister Limor Livnat), who is now coordinating a campaign to get soldiers to sign a petition stating that they will refuse to obey an order to evacuate settlements, was in on the altar plan. One of the sources drawn upon by the Kach group is the Brachot tractate of the Gemara, which tells about the reluctance of King Hezekiah to bring children into the world after seeing in a vision that his offspring would be sinners. However, the prophet Isaiah instructs the king to distance himself from developments that are in the hands of God. The Kach people, too, describe the dangers consequential on the detonation of the mosques as "accounts that are in the hands of God." They understand from the Gemara about Hezekiah that when a commandment exists, such as the one in Maimonides to build a house consecrated to God, the dangers must be ignored and the commandment obeyed verbatim, just as Hezekiah upheld the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" even though he knew what the future held in store.
In the ceremony of marching from gate to gate of the Temple Mount, which the El Har Hamor organization holds on the eve of the first day of every new Hebrew month, Kach youth can often be seen dancing in a circle and singing its own variation on the popular song, "Yibaneh Hamikdash" (The Temple Shall Be Built). They sing, "The temple shall be built, the mosque shall be blown up," or "the mosque shall be burned." Yossi Peli, the son of Rabbi Menachem Felix - one of the founders of Gush Emunim - and the organizer of the ceremony around the Old City wall describes this as "unfocused militancy, on the margins." He notes that the ceremony, in which thousands take part in song, dance and prayer, draws a broad public, which takes the occasion to express its yearning for the temple without breaking the law, all being done in coordination with and under the watchful eye of the police and the security forces.
The activity carried out by Peli and the El Har Hamor group reflects the fact that increasing numbers of groups are now engaged with the Temple Mount in one way or another. Another development is that ever more religious arbiters, especially in the national-religious sector, are no longer forbidding visits to the Temple Mount, though such visits must be made within certain halakhic restrictions. This change is evident among the Yesha Committee of Rabbis and within groups from Har Etzion Yeshiva and Birkat Moshe Yeshiva, from Ma'aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem, who visit the Temple Mount with their rabbis.
Not everyone who takes part in the ceremony of circling the wall allows himself to visit the Temple Mount. Some of the participants obey the halakhic injunction which bars Jews from entering the compound in our time. Among those who have taken part in the Temple Mount gates ceremony are Rabbi She'ar Yishuv Hacohen, chief rabbi of Haifa; former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Zalman Melamed from the settlement of Beit El, and even Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, who is one of the fiercest opponents (for halkhic reasons) of visiting the Temple Mount.
Apart from the Kach activists, a few hilltop settlers and the "new Darda'im," the world of kabbala is also considered to have the potential for an attempt to strike at the mosques. It was the kabbala from which Yeshua Ben Sasson took the inspiration for his plan to blow up the mosques 30 years ago. The Shin Bet is also keeping a close watch on yeshivas where many of the students are newly religious, such as the Bratslav Shuvu Banim Yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem. The potential to destroy the mosques for ideological reasons is not difficult to identify. It is spelled out in hundreds of books, writings, pamphlets and articles that have appeared over the years.
However, past experience shows that planners of attacks on the Temple Mount who were apprehended only by chance were unknown figures, semi-religious, from the fringes of society, not necessarily settlers, most of whom were clinically deranged. They tried to strike at the Temple Mount after being exposed to one of the beliefs or viewpoints which are expressed by the recognized streams. This unknown connection is the big nightmare of the security services. The potential, everyone knows, is there.
