Israelis, Palestinians face hard choices with own extremists

The Israeli press has lately been filled with disaster scenarios about possible settler violence during the withdrawal, while the pro-settler HaZofeh newspaper ran a front-page headline Friday about purported plans by the "regime" to construct detention camps for "opponents."

"The dictatorship of the Sharon family takes on new heights," HaZofeh said.

The disaster scenarios, described in the popular Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper and attributed to a classified police document, include that settlers will lock themselves and their children in a bunker and threaten mass suicide, spring attack dogs on police, and throw stones and hot oil on those who come to evacuate them.

Prominent coverage in the mainstream press has also been given to death threats contained in letters to ministers.

"The coverage is greatly exaggerated," says Emily Amrusy, spokeswoman for the main settler group, the Yesha Council. "The government and media are carrying out a delegitimation campaign. The worst incitement is the incitement against us."

Amrusy says the government is trying to distract attention from the demands of settlers for a referendum on the Gaza withdrawal. She says Livne's unit "will be used to silence the great outcry of a large segment of the public. Dictators in other countries have also used these types of bodies to shut people up."

However, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a cabinet minister who also served under Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated in 1995, says the threat of violence against Sharon is real and immediate. "I am worried about Yigal Amirs who are spread out in the country, whom we may not know about," Ben-Eliezer was quoted by Israel Radio as saying, referring to Rabin's assassin.

Israeli police have asked for an increase in funding amid concern over possible far-right violence at the sensitive Temple Mount/ al-Haram al-Sharif sacred site. The far right rhetoric is becoming shrill and at times apocalyptic.

On Thursday night, at a gathering attended by thousands in Jerusalem to protest the Gaza pullout, a leaflet was distributed accusing Sharon of forcing Israelis into "Auschwitz borders" and of bringing about a disaster as great as the destruction of the First and Second Temples by the Babylonians and Romans respectively.

Police have opened an investigation into whether there was incitement at the meeting.

Some Gaza settlers recently fastened orange Jewish stars to their shirts, thereby likening themselves to Jews forced by the Nazis to wear the yellow star of David. Housing Minister Yitzhak Herzog Sunday proposed banning the use of holocaust symbols in protests, Israel Radio reported.

Livne says the unit will not violate freedom of expression. But she says that what constitutes incitement has broadened in the current highly charged atmosphere.

"Even the very same sentence uttered in normal times has to be viewed differently while we are sitting near an explosion," she says.

Gauging incitement, Livne adds, "is relative to the situation and the person who says it. There is no comparison between a person on the street saying something and a rabbi saying something." Asked if Israel would begin administrative detentions against the far right, Livne responds: "Not yet."

In his writings, Haetzni likens the Gaza withdrawal to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. As one of the speakers at the Thursday night gathering, he said that Slobodan Milosevic is on trial in The Hague for ethnic cleansing.

"If Sharon carries this out against the Jews, he must sit as an accused in The Hague next to Milosevic," Haetzni told the audience, adding that he challenges the government to indict him for incitement.

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