It has been argued, and persuasively, that the movement to settle and hold land captured in 1967, in particular the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has changed Orthodox Judaism more profoundly than any event since the Holocaust.
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Respected rabbis based in New York have issued Halakhic decrees forbidding any Jew from ceding even an inch of soil of the Old Testament land of Israel.
Orthodox pupils from Melbourne to Mexico City and Marseilles idolize settlers as the revolutionary vanguard of contemporary Judaism's most sacred and burning cause.
In Israel, yeshiva students tied to ultra-Orthodox movements which were formed specifically to fight the concept of Zionism and which still hesitate to fully embrace concept of Jewish statehood, are among the most fervent participants in protests against territorial compromise.
Now, as a vexed Israeli right faces the prospect of the first evacuations of established settlements in the territories, opponents of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan have begun to go public with a view that has long circulated quietly in Greater Israel circles, a perspective that draws a link between the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry and the forced expulsion of Jews from their homes in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank.
Concurrently, security officials at the highest levels of the secret service and police hierarchies caution that Jewish zealots, sworn to foil the disengagement at all costs, are mulling acts of violence whose repercussions could be termed without hyperbole as cataclysmic.
The parallel talk of Holocaust and Armageddon has sparked debate within Israel on the dangers of disengagement versus the risks of a concussive Jewish backlash.
The argument was especially resonant this week, as Jews the world over prepared to fast for the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av.
Tisha B’Av, which begins at sundown on Monday, traditionally marks a long march of catastrophic events for the Jewish people, from the anniversaries of the destruction of the First and Second Temples, through the beginning of the 1492 expulsion from Spain during the Inquisition, to the start of the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
For some Israelis this week, the question at hand was this: If the pullout is likened to the 'Final Solution,' is Jewish terrorism the next step?
At one end of the debate stood Amnon Shapira, a leader of Hakibbutz Hadati, the movement of Orthodox-affiliated kibbutzim, a central pillar and springboard of the settlement movement.
Shapira sparked wide comment and, in some quarters, outrage, when he invoked the Holocaust in castigating fellow religious kibbutznik Yonaton Basi for accepting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's offer to head the government's Disengagement Administration.
Warning Basi that his work could result in many Jewish deaths, Shapira said Basi would never be able to look into the eyes of loved ones bereaved and orphaned by the terrorism which Shapira said would surely result from the pullout.
When Basi answered that his work would be limited to administering compensation for settlers, Shapira's reply was blunt:
"During the Holocaust there were bureaucrats who dealt entirely with technical matters. Does that make what they did less sinful?"
Spurred in part by the comments of anguished Holocaust survivors, who implored Shapira to keep the Holocaust out of the national debate over the withdrawal, Shapira telephoned Basi on midnight Saturday to apologize.
But the floodgates had opened. Basi was swamped with e-mails and other messages threatening him and his family, calling him a kapo and a Judenrat official - despised terms for Jews who had helped to round up fellow Jews, deport them, put them to death, and sort through and dispose of their remains.
This week, Shapira was back on the offensive. "I know I could be strangled for mixing the Holocaust with disengagement," he said Sunday.
According to Shapira "the destruction of settlements and synagogues" was "the first stage in the holocaust the Palestinians are planning for us," adding that he had phoned Basi to prevent "a dear man, head and shoulders above the rest, from taking part [in it]."
"Shapira is basically telling people: `Go and kill Yonatan Basi,' Basi told Haaretz last week. "Should Shapira continue to speak in this manner, he will be responsible for making me the next Jew to be assassinated in the state of Israel."
Israeli commentators, careful not to trivialize the possible danger to Basi, said Sunday the intended target could be considerably higher up.
Some linked Shapira's remarks with a photo montage of Yitzhak Rabin dressed in an SS uniform, a poster distributed at a vehemently anti-government rally held in Jerusalem days before a Jewish extremist gunned down the then-prime minister in a bid to end his peace moves.
"As far as extremism in word and deed is concerned, we ain't seen nothing yet," said political commentator Emmanuel Rozen. "The bar has been raised on violence and epithets and the kinds of acts which people are willing to carry out, in order to make manifest their worldview."
Referring to then-defense minister Ariel Sharon's 1982 razing of a Sinai settlement city under a peace treaty with Egypt, Rozen said, "The state of Israel is no longer the country it was during the evacuation of Yamit in 1982, and not even the country it was after the Rabin murder in 1995.
"We haven't seen so much as the point of the tip of the beginning of what will happen in opposition to the disengagement."
Anxiety over an extremist fringe To be sure, the overwhelming majority of anti-disengagement forces staunchly opposes the use of violence to advance their agenda. Settlers point to a series of peaceful mass protests, culminating in a "human chain" of more than 100,000 demonstrators that stretched Sunday evening from the Gaza Strip to the Western Wall.
At the same time, some of the most vocal opponents of the disengagement plan have openly admitted their fears that an extremist fringe could turn its anti-pullout fervor in a deadly direction.
Over the past week, the head of the Shin Bet was quoted as telling legislators that in the wake of the disengagement initiative, that there at present a few dozen right-wing extremists backed by as many as 200 supporters, who "want to see the prime minister dead."
Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, who oversees the police, took reporters aback Saturday night by telling a national television audience:
"We sense that the level of threat to the Temple Mount from the standpoint of extreme and fanatic Jewish elements carrying out a terrorist attack in order to 'reshuffle the cards,' to serve as a catalyst to a change in the entire political initiative [the disengagement process] - this level has risen in recent months and more so in recent weeks."
Among the potential operations cited by security sources were a bid to crash an explosives-laden drone into the Temple Mount, or launching a manned suicide mission to plow a light plane into masses of Muslim worshippers there.
World War III Just what such an attack might mean was set out by lawmaker Ehud Yatom, a member of the hawkish wing of the Likud and a strong opponent of the disengagement plan. In 1984, Yatom was a commander of the Shin Bet manhunt that seized members of the "Jewish Underground" of religious militants just before the group was to mount a multiple bombing on the sacred Mount.
If an attack were to harm the Muslim shrines of Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, the result would pit "the entire Muslim world against the state of Israel and against the Western world, a war of religions," Yatom said.
"With all of the pain and suffering they have caused, today's terrorist attacks would be nothing compared to what could happen - it could even mean World War III."
A product of nearly 2,000 years of Jewish liturgy and the Messianic fervor set in motion by the 1967 war, the image of the mosques of the Muslim Noble Sanctuary replaced with a rebuilt Temple is a recurrent one in posters and rhetoric of Jewish extremist groups.
Muslim militants, for their part, have used the Third Temple imagery to advance claims that Israel's true goal is to do mortal harm to the mosques.
More than six months ago, Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter issued the first public warning of the renewed threat to attack the Muslim shrines.
Speaking of the extremists dream to remove the "abomination" as they call it, from the Temple Mount, Dichter declared that Jewish terror could pose a significant strategic threat to Israel as well as the Jews of the Diaspora, "turning the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians into a confrontation between 13 million Jews and one billion Muslims around the world."
Yehuda Etzion, one of the leaders of the 1980s plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the gilded, jewel-like mosque at the heart of the Temple Mount compound, remained chillingly unapologetic Sunday about his group's aim.
"The Dome of the Rock is the wrong structure in the wrong place at the wrong time, because it is right and proper that our Third Temple should stand there," he told Army Radio.
Asked if he would turn in others who now wished to carry out an attack on the Temple Mount in order to thwart the disengagement, Etzion declined to answer directly. "Losing one's patience after so many years of distortion is something understandable," he said.
"Is this a proper act? First of all, it is proper. On the other hand, it is improper as an act to thwart the disengagement. If it is proper, it is proper for its own sake, in and of itself.
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
