Doomsday scenarios

_{By Yossi Melman}

Fri., December 31, 2004 Tevet 19, 5765

Haaretz - Israel

"Quantity doesn't matter." This is how a senior defense official describes the analysis of the head of the Shin Bet security service's "Jewish division," a unit that is responsible for combating Jewish terrorism and subversion. The unit has been assigned the organization's most difficult task: thwarting the intention of Jewish zealots to strike at the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. From the unit's point of view, "When it comes to the Temple Mount, the result is not always the test."

Because of the vast importance of the two mosques - Omar (Dome of the Rock) and Al-Aqsa - for all Muslims around the world, the Shin Bet and the Israel Police are apprehensive about every violation of order, every provocation or terrorist attack. The scenarios refer not only to concerns about a "mega-attack" - destruction of the mosques, which the Jewish extremists refer to as "razing the abomination" - but also to an "ordinary explosion," such as en explosive device that goes off on the Temple Mount without causing damage to the buildings themselves but could trigger a huge conflagration. "Because of the sensitivity and the symbolism of the place, a kilo could cause damage of a ton," the senior source notes.

"Remember how the Muslim world roiled in 1969, when Michael Dennis Rohan, a non-Jewish Australian lunatic, a Christian, tried to set the mosques on fire," says Reuven Hazak, a former deputy chief of the Shin Bet. "It was a small fire and caused little damage, but there was a tremendous storm. So just imagine what is liable to happen today if there is any sort of attack on the Temple Mount. It's not a simple matter. The mosques are prominent static targets. Without giving anyone ideas, firing one missile from a high place and hitting the Dome of the Rock could cause incalculable damage."

Hazak was in charge of Operation "Green Light" - the capture, in April 1984, of 27 members of the Jewish Terrorist Organization. The core of the plan of the organization's leaders, Menahem Livni and Yehuda Etzion, was to perpetrate a "strategic attack." Striking at the Temple Mount mosques, the chosen targets, was intended to realize a messianic goal (preparation for establishing the third temple) and a political goal as well (thwarting the planned withdrawal from Sinai and bringing about the annulment of the peace treaty with Egypt).

In 1981, the head of the Shin Bet, Avraham Shalom, asked Reuven Hazak to leave his job as director general of the Jerusalem Municipality and return to the Shin Bet. Shalom appointed Hazak his deputy and made him coordinator of Operation "Dead End," to uncover the terrorists who were responsible for the attempted assassinations, on June 2, 1980, of the mayors of Nablus, Ramallah and El Bireh. One of the first things Hazak did, superstitiously, was to change the mission's code name from Dead End to Green Light.

Hazak and his associates discovered that in addition to the attacks on the mayors and the murder of three Palestinian students at the Islamic College in Hebron, the terrorist settlers had planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock. They had concealed the explosives in secret apartments in Jerusalem, in Kfar Avraham near Petah Tikva and in a chicken coop in the Golan Heights settlement of Nov. Former Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon was then the head of the Jewish Division and a member of Hazak's team. In a conversation with him, and in his book about the Shin Bet, he describes the terrorists' operational preparations.

After secretly carrying out surveillance of the mosque (one of the members of the group disguised himself as a priest) and measuring the diameter of the supporting pillars of the dome, they planned to attach chain-reaction bombs to the pillars, which would conduct the shock wave into the pillars in order to implode the dome, and thereby prevent an outward explosion that would likely cause casualties among Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall below.

To this end, Livni, an engineer by training and a deputy battalion commander in the Engineering Corps, purchased bottomless barrels from a plant in Rishon Letzion, which were to be used as explosive containers. The barrels were to be attached to the pillars.

With the aid of his military know-how, Livni and his friends stole, from an army base on the Golan Heights, dozens of kilograms of plastic explosives from a top-secret missile ("Tsefa Shiryon"), which was intended to activate minefields in the event of a Syrian tank invasion. So determined was the group to remove the "abomination" that they also considered the possibility that the air force pilot in the group, Yaakov Henman, would bomb the mosques from the air.

On the face of it, the Shin Bet and the police should now be experiencing a sense of deja vu. Once again Jewish fundamentalists are talking about an attack on the Temple Mount in messianic terms, as a means to achieve a political goal. In the 1980s, the idea was to prevent the withdrawal from Sinai; today they want to scuttle the disengagement plan. But the Jewish Division (an operational unit in the branch to foil terrorism and prevent Jewish and foreign subversion) can only envy Hazak and his colleagues, and not only because they succeeded in foiling two attempts to attack the Temple Mount (the second was almost negligible, by a group of newly religious and eccentric criminals from Jerusalem's "Lifta Gang"). Today, the Shin Bet has to cope with the zealots of the third millennium - the "hilltop youth" in the West Bank.

"There is a fundamental difference in the worldview of the hallucinatories among the hilltop youth who want to destroy the mosques, and the members of the Jewish underground back then," the senior defense official explains. "The members of the underground considered themselves part of the state and thought they would help the state with their acts. The hilltop youth are from a different world - bolder, more determined, and do not view themselves as being part of the state. On the contrary, they are divorced from Israeli society."

Reuven Hazak prefers to define the difference between then and now in the following terms: "The people I dealt with, the members of the terrorist organization, were hallucinating with their feet on the ground. The hilltop youth are floating weirdos, for whom fantasies are a substitute for thoughts. They have no self-control and they have no inhibitions."

A case in point is the "Bat Ayin underground," which the Shin Bet uncovered in recent years. The agency was able to convert only part of its intelligence information into court evidence. In the end, three of the members were convicted of attempted murder for placing a booby-trapped wagon next to an Arab girls school in East Jerusalem.

According to the Jewish Division, there were two central changes in the past three years. One is that the Temple Mount, in its religious-messianic context, plays a cardinal role for extremists who are identified with the Bat Ayin underground or its supporters. The second is the disengagement plan and the desire of the extremists to torpedo it. As the senior figure notes, "This is the central threat (along with the intention to kill the prime minister) that has been created as a result of an ideology that permits an extreme act, which heightens the motivation." According to the scale of threats prepared by the Shin Bet, dubbed the "Dichter Scale" (for the head of the organization, Avi Dichter), the danger of an attempt to assassinate the prime minister is 6 - "wishing for the death of the prime minister" - while the threat to the Temple Mount stands at 7 - "signs attesting to perpetration." At level 7, that is, "they are talking about how to do it, now and as urgently as possible."

In addition to the effort to monitor various groups, there is concern about a lone terrorist, who will be even harder to find. It could be someone with a solid ideology "who reaches the conclusion that demonstrations and protests are not enough and decides to take it upon himself to do something without telling anyone," or what the Jewish Divison calls a "psychiatric assailant" - someone unknown and unexpected, who is released from a mental hospital.

Since August 2003, visits (under supervision) of Jews and foreigners to the Temple Mount have resumed. "On the one hand it's a safety valve to release negative energies," says the senior security source, "but it also makes the Temple Mount accessible to all kinds of dangerous elements." For this reason it can be said that the Jewish Division is already on high alert. It is making use of all the means at its disposal to collect information about those marked as potential terrorists ready to attack the Temple Mount, in order to foil their plans. These means include infiltrating agents into the groups, recruiting informers and surveillance.

It's a tough assignment because of the unusual day-to-day behavior of the suspects among the hilltop youth. The division has set up a special task force for this purpose. The task force prepares situation appraisals every day and works in close cooperation with the Jerusalem District of the police, under Major General Ilan Franco. The Shin Bet is responsible for supplying the police with intelligence for securing the Temple Mount and making preventive arrests or keeping suspects away from the area and preventing them from visiting the Temple Mount. "A few threat scenarios have been drawn up," a senior officer in the Jerusalem police emphasizes, "and an operational response has been prepared for each threat."

The police have deployed several circles of security: checks at the entry gates to the Western Wall Plaza, permanent around-the-clock presence of police at all the gates leading to the Temple Mount, and on the mount itself, use of lookouts to detect any sign of an attempt to infiltrate over the walls or across the roofs of nearby buildings, foot patrols, and a system of hidden cameras that broadcast the images to a control center that is manned 24 hours a day. Because of these security arrangements, and because the entry of vehicles into the Old City is possible only through a few gates, which are under supervision, the chance of getting a booby-trapped car to the Temple Mount is "close to zero," says the senior police officer.

Another scenario, involving a suicide attack by means of a plane, such as with the Twin Towers, or the bombing of the mosques from the air, "is being handled," the police source notes, "at the national level by all the elements in the IDF and the Shin Bet that are responsible for airborne transportation in Israel."