HERZLIYA, Israel, 17 December 2003 — Jewish militants arrested for plotting to blow up a Palestinian school also had vague ideas about destroying Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, the third holiest shrine of Islam in Jerusalem, the head of the domestic Shin Bet security service said yesterday.
Such designs by extremists pose a strategic threat to Israel and Jews around the world, and “should keep us awake at night,” said the Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter.
In the past three years of fighting, seven Palestinians were killed and 19 wounded in attacks by Jewish extremists, Dichter said. Four Israelis from the Bat Ayin settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron were arrested in April 2002 after a bomb was found in their car trailer.
Police said the settlers intended to set off the bomb at a Palestinian girls’ school in east Jerusalem. They were released in a plea bargain deal. Other settlers arrested in the past year on suspicion they were involved in attacks against Palestinians were released after police could not come up with enough evidence to issue an indictment. Dichter said yesterday that beyond plotting violence against Palestinians, “it appears to me that the dream of these same extremists is most worrisome.”
“The dream of these extremists to remove ... the mosques from the Temple Mount should keep us awake at night,” he said. Dichter was referring to a key disputed Jerusalem holy site, revered by Muslims and Jews. “Jewish terrorism could create ... a significant strategic threat, and replace the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians with a conflict between 13 million Jews and 1 billion Muslims in the world,” he said.
In the 1980s, Jewish militants bombed the cars of Arab mayors in the West Bank, seriously injuring two of them. Another group plotted to blow up one of the mosques on a disputed Jerusalem holy shrine. The site houses the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques.
Dichter also said that the recent lull in anti-Israeli attacks gave a dangerous illusion of quiet. “Over the past 10 weeks since the Maxim bombing it seems that things have quietened down but it’s an illusion,” Dichter.
“More than 20 suicide bombers have been halted on their way to Israel... It’s an illusory quiet. The suicide bombers are a strategic threat to Israel so all means should be taken up in order to fight the bombers and the people who send them off.”
There have been no suicide attacks in Israel since a bombing in Maxim’s restaurant in the northern port of Haifa on Oct. 4, the longest lull since the start of the intifada in September 2000.
Dichter, who was making a rare public appearance, said that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was doing nothing to stop attacks by hard-line groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, he alleged.
“Arafat is not waging a war on terror. Arafat over the past three years has not told his henchman to wage war on terror attackers... He is not giving instructions to stop terror attacks.”
The Israeli Army’s Chief of Staff Gen. Moshe Yaalon added that Arafat and fellow Palestinian leaders still did not appear to recognize Israel’s right to exist. “My assumption is that the Palestinian leadership does not believe in the concept of two states,” Yaalon told delegates.
“The current Palestinian leadership would rather have conflict, maintain the status quo, thinking that terrorism and demographic changes will eventually wipe out Israel as a Jewish state.”
Dichter said that there was evidence that groups such as Hamas, which have refused to agree even a limited truce, were building up their arsenal. Criminals in Israel were also helping the Palestinians acquire weapons, sometimes smuggling them through checkpoints, he added.
Dichter also launched a strong defense of Israel’s controversial West Bank separation barrier, saying it had already thwarted several attacks.
“In the West Bank the fence and the peripheral fence around Jerusalem are imperative,” he said. “I can stress very simply that lives have been saved by the fence.”
Questioned about the route of the barrier, which juts deep inside Palestinian territory in places, Dichter said it was unrealistic to expect it conform to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. “The green line was not planned at the time for the erection of a fence to stop terrorists or illegal workers coming into Israel.”
