The sight of scraggly bearded religious fanatics waving around high-powered firearms, leering at the camera and lusting for violence, mayhem and the end of democracy in the Mideast is nauseating.
For most j. readers, it’s even more so when the aforementioned zealots are Israeli Jews.
The top-notch PBS program “Frontline” will broadcast a stunning and disturbing exposé of right-wing, Meir Kahane-inspired Israeli terror groups titled “Israel’s Next War?” at 9 p.m. Tuesday, April 5.
The sight of Jews behaving as cruelly as the worst Islamist bomb-thrower (though, thankfully, less competently) will be a bullet in the bandolier of every moral relativist. You can almost hear the PBS-watching segment of America shaking its head and clucking, “You see? They’re all crazy over there. They deserve each other.”
On the other hand, if the high-ranking Israeli security personnel interviewed for the documentary are to be believed, the fanatical settlers are not just a problem to be swept under the rug. Right-wing pro-Israel advocates often complain about the notion that, if only it weren’t for the settlers, there would be peace in the Middle East. But the settlers interviewed by “Frontline” ache for war with the Arabs. And they want to be the ones to start it.
The hourlong documentary centers around three fanatical settlers, Ofer Gamliel, Shlomi Dvir and Yarden Morag. The trio of long-haired, bearded men, each of whom appears to have been yanked out of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” were recently convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms in a foiled attempt to detonate a huge bomb in front of a Palestinian girls’ school.
It was Morag and Dvir’s bad driving — and the alert eyes of a police officer, who tells the camera he believes he was directed by God — that kept scores of young Palestinians from being blown to bits in a cold-hearted terrorist attack.
“Whoever gets hurt, gets hurt,” says a completely unrepentant Dvir in a prison interview.
“Just like they do?” prompts his interviewer.
Dvir smiles. “Just like they do.”
Horrifying.
Grave Israeli security chiefs intone that the extremists’ dream “should give us sleepless nights,” and could escalate the intifada into a “conflict between 13 million Jews and a billion Muslims all over the world.”
Also mentioned in the documentary — albeit in passing — is that Israel’s top security agencies are well aware of these Jewish terror cells. Interrogations lead to the discovery of a cache of weapons used in attacks on Palestinian civilians. Illegally mounted Kahanist synagogues are bulldozed to the ground. The settlers interviewed complain of constant surveillance and harassment by the Israeli government.
In short, the Israeli establishment is coming down hard on these people, who are so extreme that even the settler movement has reacted with revulsion. It is left for the viewer to connect the dots and recognize the huge investment of time and energy to combat a group whose most notable accomplishment is laying a bomb that did not go off — and Israel is not exactly suffering a shortage of groups that manage to successfully detonate their explosives.
For informed viewers, “Israel’s Next War” is a much-needed examination of the dangerous fringes of Israeli society. Yet, one worries, for the ignorant, it is yet another opportunity to see the Middle East as the world’s sole repository of zealotry and fanaticism, wish a pox on both houses and flip the channel over to “Everybody Loves Raymond.”