JERUSALEM — Israel’s security agencies are stepping up precautions in a deadly serious effort to prevent the assassination of another prime minister or other senior minister.
Death threats and hate-filled graffiti plastered around Israel by extremist Jews angry at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to evacuate some Jewish settlements has reached a fever pitch. Mr. Sharon is forced to travel with as many as a dozen bodyguards, even within the Israeli parliament.
“I’m telling you, they will try to kill the prime minister,” Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was reported having said at Sunday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.
As Mr. Sharon and other Cabinet colleagues listened, Mr. Ben-Eliezer read out excerpts from a hate letter he had received from opponents of the planned evacuation of Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip.
“You miserable Iraqi with Arab Nazi blood in your veins — may you know only sorrow and pain,” said the letter, which also threatened his family.
The Iraqi-born Mr. Ben-Eliezer is one of several ministers who have received abusive letters and death threats or been publicly attacked by pro-settler groups in recent weeks.
Dalia Rabin, the daughter of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who was murdered by a Jewish extremist in 1995, wrote last week in Yedioth Ahronoth: “Wake up before it is too late. … If we don’t do enough now to stop the deterioration we will once again witness the horrible spectacle of the murder of another prime minister.”
Serving then as a minister in Mr. Rabin’s Cabinet, Mr. Ben-Eliezer was attacked by a mob protesting his support of the 1993 Oslo agreements, which opened an ultimately unsuccessful peace process with the Palestinians.
At a subsequent Cabinet meeting, he warned about the mounting threat of violence and expressed fear about where it might lead. “Rabin silenced me and no one else listened. A month later he was assassinated,” recalled Mr. Ben-Eliezer, a member of the left-wing Labor Party.
The extremists also have attacked conservatives including longtime settler supporters like Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has reluctantly agreed to the Gaza pullout.
Mr. Netanyahu related to the Cabinet how an ultrareligious youth, “very inflamed,” had charged at him and had to be restrained by security men at a wedding over the weekend. When he left the wedding, Mr. Netanyahu said, dozens of youths chanted denunciations of him.
Television viewers last week saw conservative Education Minister Limor Livnat being followed at a public event by shouting extremists while two security men tried to keep them at a distance.
Transportation Minister Meir Sheetrit, a supporter of the Gaza pullout, said he had received dozens of death threats as well as a letter saying he would witness his children’s funerals.
Mr. Sharon apologized to the ministers for the ordeal. “It’s incredible that threats are being sent to ministers and nothing is being done,” he said.
He reiterated his determination to execute the pullout and indicated that he had no intention of submitting to widespread demands that he submit the pullout plan to a referendum.
Supporters of a referendum say it is the only way of preventing the division of the nation into two hostile camps. But Mr. Sharon views the demands as an attempt to stall the pullout in the hope of undermining it completely.
Senior officials from the police and the Shin Bet security service met Sunday to coordinate efforts for monitoring right-wing extremists and tightening security around elected officials. But Shin Bet officials said there was “at this stage” not enough intelligence to warrant administrative detention of persons inciting violence.
Several security officials said the real danger comes not from those writing letters or even hurling abuse in public, but from those hatching plots in silence like Yigal Amir, the assassin of Mr. Rabin who is serving a life sentence.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.