Summary
The Jewish underground (machteret): a network of respected Gush Emunim mainstream activists, uncovered by arrests on April 27, 1984, responsible in Lustick’s account for the 1980 car-bomb attacks on the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah, the July 1983 Islamic College attack in Hebron, bombs placed under five Arab buses, and a 1978-1982 plot to destroy the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3350-3560).
Details
- The best organized effort to destroy the el-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock was undertaken by this group of Gush Emunim activists from the West Bank between 1978 and 1982; an army officer expert in explosives was involved, munitions were stolen from the Israel Defense Forces, and the plan was aborted only following the group’s failure to gain explicit approval from leading Gush rabbis (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3350-3450).
- Twenty-five Gush activists, mostly West Bank settlers, were arrested on April 27, 1984 in connection with bombs placed under five Arab buses, which police thwarted at the last minute; during interrogation and trial their responsibility for the mayors and Islamic College attacks was established (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3350-3450).
- Virtually all of them were respected members of the Gush Emunim mainstream with close ties to its leadership — a rabbi directing a religious school in Kiryat Arba, a former general secretary and a former secretariat member of Gush Emunim, the head of the Committee for Renewal of Jewish Settlement in Hebron, several reserve officers, a founder’s son, a Nekuda reporter and a certified war hero — corresponding in almost every detail to the Gush Emunim ideal, and, apart from one or two, they expressed no serious regrets (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3400-3500).
- Within two months of the arrests, the Yesha Council and Nekuda’s editorial board, attacked from within the movement for their “hasty” condemnation, threw their support behind the defendants; in July 1985 both joined the defendants’ families in demanding a blanket pardon (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3450-3560).
- The fall 1986 amnesty campaign for the underground prisoners convicted in 1984 gathered about 300,000 signatures by spring 1987; twenty of the twenty-seven men convicted were free by September 1986 (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Introduction, lines 730-770).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, Yehuda Etzion, Temple Mount, Yesha, Hebron