Wednesday, September 22, 2004
By ZEV CHAFETS
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Almost 30 years ago, I visited Ariel Sharon at his ranch, an isolated spread not far from the Gaza Strip. There were Arab workers all over the place. "Aren't you worried about your safety?" I asked. Sharon gave me a look I've never forgotten.
Worried? He was a warrior in his prime, the toughest Israeli of his generation. Who could hurt him?
Sharon is an old man now, surrounded by a thick cordon of security. Hamas terrorists in Gaza routinely threaten him, but he's still not afraid of Arabs. It's his own countrymen who want to kill him.
The irony is obvious to Sharon himself. "I've been defending the Jews all my life," he said in July. "Now, I have to be protected from the Jews."
How many assassins?
Not all the Jews, of course. But enough. The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security force, estimates that there are several dozen potential assassins at large in Israel right now. Most of them are young men, second- and third-generation settlers who live in small, temporary camps in the mountains of the West Bank. Security officials refer to them as "hillboys."
The hillboys have nothing personal against Sharon. They simply consider him an impediment to God's plan, which is replacing Israeli democracy with a theocratic dictatorship governed by Jewish scriptural law.
The hillboys are Al-Qaida in yarmulkes, and, like Al-Qaida, they are armed -- mostly with weapons stolen from Israeli army units that have been sent to protect them over the years. Some are infantry veterans. Others are self-taught.
And, like Al-Qaida (or Hezbollah or Hamas), the hillboys are not alone. "There are probably 500 Israelis who completely identify with them," according to a senior intelligence official. "But they have a lot of sympathizers among settlers and right-wing rabbis. They have supporters in the U.S., too, mostly in New York. Kach types."
Kach, an extremist group founded in America by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, is outlawed both in Israel and the United States. Nobody admits to belonging. But one of the group's former leaders, Noam Federman, is being held in Israeli administrative detention, a pre-emptive incarceration normally used only for suspected Arab security threats.
Israel also maintains an airport blacklist of foreign (mostly American) Jews it regards as potential hillboy allies. And it maintains close ties to U.S. authorities. Recently, the FBI arrested an American Jew for making a long-distance threat against Sharon.
Still, most of the hillboys are native Israelis. They are alienated not only from mainstream society, but even from the authority of the hard-line orthodox rabbis now calling upon soldiers to disobey any future order to dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Ambitious plans
The hillboys oppose the withdrawal, of course, but have more ambitious plans. They want, according to the Shin Bet, "to commit an act that will change reality."
Murdering Sharon could be that sort of act; Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is a hero to the hillboys and their supporters. But the Jewish terrorists know that even killing Rabin didn't end the Israeli government's determination to give up "holy land" for reasons of national security or diplomacy.
That's why Israeli intelligence officials fear something even bigger than a prime-ministerial assassination -- an attack on the Al Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest shrine, on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
"Sharon can be protected," says a former military intelligence officer. "The real nightmare is one of these hillboys on a dark night with a shoulder-launched missile that can hit Al Aqsa from 1,000 meters. Talk about altering reality!"
XZev Chafets is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.