Extremists threaten hell over W. Bank pullouts
http://www.jordantimes.com/mon/news/news8.htm
 
By Michael Blum
Agence France-Presse

June 19, 2006

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Right-wing Israeli fanatics are plotting an apocalypse of fire and brimstone to sabotage Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's plan to evict thousands of Jews from the West Bank after a 40-year occupation.

A draft battle plan, seeking to incite a third Palestinian uprising in the vein of the Intifadas of 1987-93 and 2000 until today, has been drawn up and handed out to sympathisers at an award ceremony for a dissident Jewish conscript.

On its cover the short booklet adopts images of the apocalypse, pertinent to popular culture surrounding the end of the world: Flames licking through fields and villages, Israeli army vehicles ablaze and olive trees axed to pieces.

"We are going to create an atmosphere of terror," promises the pamphlet in its heavily printed dozen-odd pages, calling on militants to "lead the call to fight against the army of destruction."

Last year's evacuation of 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, which ended 38 years of settlements in the Palestinian territory, and from four isolated enclaves in the northern West Bank, is still fresh in the collective memory.

At the prize giving, the names of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, who engineered the Gaza pullout, and Olmert his successor are met with boos and curses by hundreds of religious Jews in a Jerusalem wedding hall.

"Remember what Sharon did," shrieks a small poster depicting Sharon with a profile reminiscent of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather."

Rabbi Shalom Wolpo, organiser of the gathering, grabs the microphone and lumps Israel's newly elected premier together with two of the Jewish state's most potent enemies, the ruling Palestinian movement Hamas and  Al Qaeda terror network.

"Olmert is a Hamas and Al Qaeda renegade. He is helping them fulfil their cataclysmic plans," he bellows.

To warm applause, he brandishes an army helmet, promising that settlers will be protected against the soldiers coming to evacuate them should Olmert implement his plan to redraw Israel's borders with the Palestinians.

"If the army becomes a tool of destruction and ethnic cleansing, we will consider every soldier an enemy," says the rabbi.

The pamphlet distributed at the gathering lays bare the planned extreme right-wing response to "Olmert's destruction plan", in which tens of thousands of Jews are liable to be evacuated from most of the occupied West Bank.

First off, swarms of militant Jews will puncture the tyres of jeeps and army trucks, torch military supplies and dump toxic products into water supplies to cut the soldiers' advance in its tracks.

In a second wave of protest, young people will flock en masse to settlements threatened with eviction orders and try to succeed where they failed last year in Gaza: To stop soldiers and police from carrying out their mission.

In parallel, the plan calls for assaults on Palestinian villages and fields, and for water and electricity supplies to be sabotaged in order to provoke a "third Intifada," divert military attention and delay evacuation.

"This is a war that knows no bounds," vow the authors of the brochure which encourages readers to deface mosques with anti-Muslim graffiti.