Meet the New Extremists

By Matt Rees

On a dusty sofa beside the shipping container where one of their number lives, the young men pass the wine and play with the red-laser sight of a Glock pistol. Yehoshafat lights another cheap cigarette, combing his long, square beard with dirty fingers and pulling his big, knitted yarmulke down to his eyes. Yair eats a slice of barbecued lamb with his hands. Elisha points through the silent darkness to the lights of nearby Israeli settlements and tells the story of King David's meeting with his wife Avigail in the valley below. The hilltop, settled by a few youngsters in defiance of the Israeli government, bears the name of this woman of the Old Testament.

In their 20s and 30s, these men are representative of a generation of Jewish extremists who have taken up residence in the occupied territories and have come to see the government of Ariel Sharon as a threat to their way of life. Angrily dismissive of Sharon's plan to withdraw them from their homes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, they say they will resist with force. Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service believes that several dozen young settlers consider themselves bound by religious duty to protect the land of Israel, even if it means fighting against the state. "They don't give a damn about Israel," says Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, head of a yeshiva whose students divide their time between Jewish studies and army service. "There's a real danger they will turn to political violence."

Intelligence officials tell TIME that since discovering religious Jews on reconnaissance missions across the valley at the Mount of Olives, they have been concerned about the possibility of radical settlers launching a missile attack against the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Officials are also worried about the threat of lone assassins like Yigal Amir, who slew Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin nine years ago this week. "These extremists believe Yigal Amir changed the course of reality," says an intelligence official. "They still celebrate the murder of Rabin."

The young men in Avigail weren't always outside the mainstream. Most were in combat units of the Israeli army during their compulsory military service. As they recount their army days, they tell of operations carried out for Israel's special forces, Egoz and Shimshon, units with names that inspire admiration among almost all Israelis. Israel's politics--not they--have moved away from the ideals they fought for, the men argue. "We're not interested in protesting Sharon's plan," says Yair. "We're going to sabotage it."

The new extremists accuse those who support disengagement of being erev rav, a biblical term that refers to people from other nations who joined the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt. Some Talmudic rabbis blame all the bad events in Jewish history--from the Golden Calf to the destruction of the Temple and the Diaspora--on the traces of those non-Israelites in Jewish society. Increasingly, the fringe of religious extremists, bound to refrain from killing Jews, justify the possibility of political violence by arguing that police and soldiers evacuating Jews from their land would be erev rav, enemies within who deserve to be destroyed.

Late in the night at Avigail, Yehoshafat runs through a list of erev rav that ranges from Jewish kapos, who aided the Nazis during the Holocaust, to an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence group. "Esau always wants to hurt Jacob," he says, referring to the biblical enmity between the wicked son of Isaac and his good brother, whom God renamed Israel and made father to the Jews. "We had erev rav 5,000 years ago, and we have them today." In these dusty hills, the Old Testament is closer to Yehoshafat and his friends than the government in Jerusalem 25 miles away. So is its logic--grim, brutal, absolute. --By Matt Rees. With reporting by Aharon Klein/Avigail

With reporting by Aharon Klein/Avigail