Anti-Arab Extremists Gaining Strength : On West Bank, Settlers’ Politics Drifting to Right

Here at the ideological leading edge of the Jewish settlement movement on the West Bank, the yearlong trauma of seeing friends and neighbors tried for terrorist acts against Arabs as part of a so-called Jewish Underground has not stopped an unmistakable drift to the political right.

Of 25 men convicted so far of crimes ranging from membership in a terrorist organization to murder, 11 are intimately tied to Kiryat Arba and spinoff Jewish settlements clustered in and around the Arab city of Hebron. Six are among those found guilty of the most serious charges and scheduled for sentencing Monday.

But while the underground case caused some early soul-searching among the settlers, more recent developments indicate that, if anything, political views here are getting more extreme. Kiryat Arba’s residents are in the forefront of those already demanding that the underground’s members be pardoned for their crimes.

After the government released 600 convicted Arab terrorists into Israel-occupied territories in May as part of an exchange for three Israelis taken prisoner during the Lebanon war, settlers here organized a campaign admittedly dedicated to harassing the freed Arabs until they leave the country.

But the most eloquent statement of the political mood--one that surprised even some longtime settlement leaders not known for dovish views--came during Kiryat Arba’s municipal elections last month, when voters gave the extreme right-wing Kach political movement an unprecedented 22% of the ballot.

Two years ago, recalled Shmuel Ben-Ishai, one of two newly elected municipal council members backed by Kach, he was among a handful of Kach activists to erect an unauthorized settlement on the other side of neighboring Hebron.

They called their tiny cluster of ramshackle shelters El Nakam in honor of Eli Hazeev, one of six young Jewish men killed by Hebron Arabs in 1980. Hazeev was a close associate of Kach’s anti-Arab founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane; nakam is Hebrew for revenge.

Labels From the Bible

The government opposed the settlement. But, even more important, so did leaders of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) settlement movement dedicated to re-establishing the Jewish presence on West Bank land they refer to by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

“We were the only settlement in Judea and Samaria that didn’t get the support of Gush Emunim,” Ben-Ishai recalled in an interview.

Kach was seen as too radical to be identified with the movement, so the politically potent Gush Emunim, whose history is tied closely to that of Kiryat Arba, did nothing to help as the army obliterated El Nakam.

Ben-Ishai understandably sees poetic justice in last month’s municipal elections, which left Kach holding the balance of power between two competing groups representing different factions of the old-line leadership. “They tried to force me out of Hebron. Now they have to swallow me in Kiryat Arba,” the bearded, 27-year-old politician said with a smile.

Glistening Community

Founded in 1970, Kiryat Arba today is a glistening hillside community of four-story, white-stone apartment buildings overlooking the sprawling, predominantly Arab city of Hebron.

In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt during the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbors. The settlement movement began almost immediately after the war, and today there are 42,500 Jews living in 114 West Bank settlements. They live among about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs.

Kiryat Arba, one of the half-dozen largest Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, is surrounded by a fence of chain link and barbed wire, with access only by way of a gate that is guarded at night.

The settlement looks as if it were lifted in its entirety out of a showcase display. Lawns are all neatly trimmed, and no litter is in sight. Cars are parked in small lots between apartment buildings, not on the street. The main road is divided by a median strip alive with red and white carnations.

Many Observant Jews

An estimated two-thirds of Kiryat Arba’s 5,000 residents are religiously observant Jews, compared with less than one-third nationally. Women wear head scarves, and one of the most impressive buildings in town is a modern yeshiva, or school for study of the Talmud, the body of Jewish civil and religious law.

Beneath that deceptively placid exterior, however, an almost messianic fervor motivates the people of Kiryat Arba.

“We feel we are the forefront of Zionism,” said Elyakim Haetzni, a lawyer, longtime municipal council member and a leading ideologue of the settlement movement. “We feel that on our fate rests the whole fate of the Jewish state. . . . If there is no Palestinian state here today, it’s only because of Kiryat Arba.”

Haetzni describes as his enemy “everybody who wants to take my house from me and take me forcibly from my homeland and take Judea and Samaria away from the Jewish people and thereby ultimately destroy the state of Israel.” The Palestine Liberation Organization, he said, is “my mortal enemy.” So are left-wing Jews who want to trade West Bank land for peace with the Arabs, and the United States, which pressures Israel toward such a deal.

‘You Won’t Move Us Out’

“You (the United States) won’t move us out from here,” Haetzni vowed. “Take it out of your head. You may cause here havoc, but you won’t move us out from here.”

Small groups of settlers have used Kiryat Arba as a launching pad for a dozen other settlements in the Hebron area, including several Jewish outposts in the Arab city itself.

It also became a launching pad for the Jewish Underground. Menachem Livni, the leader of the group, is a former chairman of the Kiryat Arba town council and a longtime settler in the area.

The underground includes the sons-in-law of two prominent local rabbis--Eliezer Waldman, a member of the Israeli Parliament from the rightist Tehiya Party, and Moshe Levinger, who spearheaded the drive to resettle Jews in Hebron.

Because 11 of the convicted Jewish Underground members have close ties to Kiryat Arba and its satellite settlements, Kiryat Arba was shaken when police cracked the underground in the spring of 1984. Settlement leaders here split over how strongly to support the accused men and their families. From outside came the repeated charge that their acts were an outgrowth of an uncompromising nationalism fostered by the settlement movement.

Need for Soul-Searching

“Certainly those who committed those acts should have to do soul-searching,” Waldman said in an interview. “Their friends--we--we all have to do soul-searching.”

However, he rejected any suggestion that the settlement movement shares the blame. “In every ideal, there may be actions that stray from the general line of the ideal,” Waldman said. “Then you have to look into the matter, deepen the ideal--not the way some suggest, that maybe the ideal is not correct. No, I don’t accept it at all. The ideal is the Zionist ideal. It’s the classical Zionist way of settlement building.”

Waldman is among those calling for the underground’s members to be pardoned, provided that they express remorse for their crimes and promise not to repeat them.

Kach’s Ben-Ishai takes a stronger stand. “We look at them as heroes,” he said of the underground’s members who terrorized Arabs. “We are not Christians,” he explained. “The Christians say if somebody hits you on the right cheek, turn the left one so he can hit you again. We say no, that if someone wants to kill you, to hit you, hit him first and hit him hard. And that’s what they (the underground) tried to do.”

A Responsive Chord

Why did Kach’s anti-Arab message strike such a responsive chord in Kiryat Arba’s municipal elections?

Old-line settlement leaders here say it is the predictable result of people’s frustration over weak policies toward the West Bank under a succession of Israeli governments.

“It is like a rash the body gives out on the skin in order to show a violent reaction,” said Haetzni. “Maybe it is good for us that the reaction should be more violent, until they (the nation’s leaders) wake up. Or maybe they will wake up only after they have 10 or 20 Kahane members in the Knesset (Parliament).”

“You must understand that many people who don’t think deeply into these matters are prone to be fascinated by slogans and simplified expressions of the way of solving difficult problems,” Waldman added. “And Meir Kahane supplies them.”

Both men rejected charges that the political right in Israel has failed to speak out forcefully against Kahane-style extremism.

‘Just Spitting Hatred’

“We must first of all express our clear opinions with regard to this phenomenon of Kahane, and we do,” Waldman said. Referring to Kahane’s habit of calling Arabs “dogs,” the Kiryat Arba member of Parliament commented: “It shocks me to hear such speaking. . . . just spitting hatred. That’s not a true representation of Zionism. It’s a distorted representation of Zionism, of Judaism, of the Jewish religion and of Jewish nationalism.”

Haetzni, a frequent political lecturer, said that whereas he used to spend 90% of his time during question-and-answer sessions fighting leftist ideas, “now I have to spend 50% of my time fighting Kahane ideas.” He added: “You should hear, over every open grave after a victim of the PLO falls, how everybody is clamoring for Kahane. You should hear it--go to those funerals.”

Although Kahane represents “ideas which are alien to me, which I utterly reject,” Haetzni stressed that “he is not my enemy” and his followers “are not pariahs.”

‘Ordinary, Decent Citizens’

“I am very sorry. The 200 or 300 people who voted for them in Kiryat Arba, we know them. They are ordinary, decent citizens. The vast majority of them doesn’t have rabid ideas vis-a-vis the Arabs and voted out of protest--as hundreds of thousands of Israelis are going to do in the next elections.”

The protest vote is bound to grow, Haetzni said, until the government acts forcefully against known PLO strongholds in the East Jerusalem press, the West Bank Arab universities and the Palestinian refugee camps.

At the end of last week, Haetzni’s faction signed a coalition agreement with Kach, giving it a five-member majority on the nine-member municipal council. One of the provisions of the agreement will result in the firing of all the municipality’s Arab employees.

The announcement came just three days after Ben-Ishai had said of the Arab workers in an interview: “You don’t have any relation with your enemy. The only way to look at them is as your enemy. . . . I don’t have the power now to throw them out of the country, but I have the power to throw them out from Kiryat Arba.”