Jewish Terrorism in Israel by Pedahzur Ami & Arie Perliger

Author:Pedahzur, Ami & Arie Perliger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science/International Relations/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

THE WITHDRAWAL FROM GAZA

Already in late 2003, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon started to devise a plan for the evacuation of the Jewish settlement and IDF forces from the Gaza Strip. The disengagement plan also included the removal of four small settlements that were located in the northern part of the West Bank (northern Samaria). At this point, Israel was still embroiled in, and Sharon, similar to many other Israeli policymakers, felt that Israel, along with its military offensive response, should present conciliatory steps in order to break the deadlock between the two sides and also encourage moderate Palestinians to resist prolonging the violence.

In early May 2004, the disengagement plan was approved by the Israeli government, and on October 26, 2004, the Knesset ratified the resolution. As was the case in the early 1980s with the Camp David Accords, as well as a decade later after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the main resistance to the evacuation came from the settler movement and the various religious Zionist streams and groups. They had organized countless rallies, demonstrations, and assemblies against the plan in order to mobilize public support. Rabbis once again insisted that the plan was an intolerable violation of the Jewish heritage and rules of the Halakha and that the evacuation had no moral or other legitimacy. They called on IDF soldiers to disobey the orders of their commanders, and some of them urged even more extreme steps such as illegal resistance. In consequence, the protest increasingly began to involve illegal activities whose intent was to disrupt the public order, such as blocking main highways by crowding them with demonstrators or by putting sharp nails on the road. However, some of the initiatives went one step further and eventually developed into terrorist activities.

The first act of organized terrorism in response to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria came to light in early May 2005. There were three members in the cell: Rabbi Mordechai (Mordi) Levinstein (Harel), who taught at the Homesh Yeshiva;38 his brother Elitzur Levinstein; and a yeshiva student, Avraham (Mordechai) Levkowitz. Their plan was not particularly complex, but it was potentially very lethal. The three had intended to douse vehicles with flammable materials and ignite them near the Kibbutz Galuyot Interchange on the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv. The operation was planned for the early hours of the morning, when the highway was very congested. The plotters sought to create a tight blockade of the road so that drivers who were behind the burning vehicles would be caught in the firetrap and not be able to escape.39 When asked by a police investigator what would have happened if the operation had gone as planned, one of the detainees, Avraham Levkowitz, replied that he wouldn’t have been particularly sorry if innocent people were harmed “because sometimes in order to obtain a just goal, illegal acts must be carried out during which people might get hurt.”40 These words reveal an important process that was gathering momentum within the religious Zionist stream in the context of the resistance to the disengagement plan.

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