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Temple Mount and the Ultimate Nightmare
A mounting sense of urgency
By Nadav Shragai
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.
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