Fears over 'Jewish underground'
2008-09-28 23:49
Jerusalem - A new ultranationalist
underground is apparently active in Israel and responsible for a
bombing that wounded an outspoken critic of Jewish settlement in
the West Bank, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Sunday.
The attack on Thursday at the home of political scientist
Zeev Sternhell rekindled fears that ideological friction in
Israel could explode into internal violence as its leaders
pursue a land-for-peace deal with Palestinians.
"The security agencies have been ordered to deal with this
case, investigate it and act with the utmost speed to bring to
justice what appears to be another underground," Olmert told his
Cabinet in broadcast remarks.
Sternhell, a leading opponent of settlement building in the
Palestinian territories, was slightly wounded by the pipe bomb
that blew up at the gate to his home in Jerusalem.
A week ago, Olmert used the evocative imagery of violence
against Jews in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
in condemning as a "pogrom" a Jewish settler rampage in a
Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank.
Settlers shot and wounded three people in Asira al-Kabaliya
on September 13 after a Palestinian stabbed a Jewish boy in the
nearby settlement.
'Bad wind'
After the explosion outside Sternhell's home, police found
posters in his neighbourhood offering a one million shekel
($294 000) reward to anyone killing a member of Israel's Peace
Now movement, which opposes Jewish settlement on land occupied
in the 1967 Middle East war.
Olmert compared the bombing with the 1995 assassination of
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish ultranationalist and a
hand grenade attack that killed a Peace Now activist in 1983.
"A bad wind of extremism, hate, evil, violence and contempt
for state authorities is blowing through certain sectors of the
Israeli public and threatening Israeli democracy," said Olmert,
who is engaged in peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
In the 1980s, a Jewish underground group, acting after six
Jewish seminary students were killed in a Palestinian attack,
carried out bombings that maimed several West Bank mayors and a
shooting in an Islamic college that killed three students.
Members of the group were jailed, but the sentences were
later commuted by then-President Chaim Herzog.