What could go wrong on Aug. 15, when Israeli soldiers start knocking on doors in Gush Katif?
Catastrophic scenarios range from the indiscriminate killing of Jewish civilians to guerrilla-style warfare against military and police units charged with implementing the withdrawal.
Details of one plan that could have resulted in scores of victims were revealed May 18 in an indictment brought against two brothers, residents of the West Bank settlements Yitzhar and Homesh.
According to charges brought in a Tel Aviv court, the pair loaded two gasoline-doused vehicles with mattresses, tires and other flammable items and planned to set them ablaze at one of the most congested areas of Tel Aviv’s Ayalon freeway during the morning rush hour.
“The suspects practically and intentionally endangered the security and the lives of all drivers and citizens in the vicinity of the vehicles,” the charge sheet alleged. “All this was driven by the suspects’ opposition to the disengagement plan.”
Former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter said the early May plot easily could have become a double-suicide attack.
“Certainly they would have been killed instantly,” he said of the two planners, “but the rest would have depended on who crashed into them — a passing bus filled with children? A fuel tanker? God only knows what could have happened there.”
Another plan that tragically came to fruition was the massacre of Israeli Arabs on a bus in the northern Israel town of Shfaram. A 19-year-old army deserter named Eden Natan Zada, who also used the name Tzuberi, sprang to his feet and sprayed automatic fire in all directions, killing four people and wounding about a dozen.
Soldiers will not be precluded from defending themselves if settlers open fire during the withdrawal, said the Israel Defense Forces’ new chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who called on settlement movement leaders to rein in extremists and prevent events from spiraling out of control.
So, too, have dozens of rabbis who have banded together to criticize colleagues whose interpretations of Jewish religious law appear to sanction violence and insubordination in the army.
“We have a special responsibility to preserve pikuach nefesh,” or the sanctity of life, said Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, the head of the Religious Kibbutz Movement.
Leaders of the Yesha settlers’ council have backed resistance to the withdrawal but stress that such resistance should be nonviolent.
Gilad and 80 other rabbis — many of them passionately opposed to the withdrawal plan — insist that civilians must not take the law into their own hands, nor should soldiers refuse orders from their commanders.
Hezi Kalo, a former Shin Bet official and now a research fellow at the Herzliyah-based Institute for Counter-Terrorism, stresses that most in the right-wing comp are patriotic citizens exercising their right to protest nonviolently against what they truly believe is a betrayal by Sharon and his government.
More than 100,000 opponents of Israel’s pullout streamed to the Old City of Jerusalem for a combination group prayer and protest this week in the largest peaceful anti-disengagement demonstration yet.
Nevertheless, Kalo estimates that there are dozens of hard-core opponents, many of them veterans of elite IDF fighting units, with the capability and intention of carrying out terrorist acts.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and top brass from the IDF and police force are trying to boost the morale of soldiers who will have to confront any anti-withdrawal extremists. As the clock ticks down to the mid-August evacuation, senior officers sense that the esprit de corps is eroding, particularly among troops from nationalist communities where the anti-withdrawal slogan “A Jew does not expel a Jew” has deeper resonance.
Simha Weiss, 47, who has lived for 16 years in Shalev, a tiny settlement in southern Gaza, insists most longtime residents of the cluster of Jewish communities known as Gush Katif would never think of provoking violence against Israeli forces who come to evacuate them.
“These soldiers are like my own children,” she said. “I think I speak for most when I say we will never lift a hand against them, nor will they against us.”