PBS Frontline - Israel's Next War (2005)

PBS Frontline - Israel's Next War (April 5th 2005)



They do not believe in peace talks. They do not want to share the land. They are well armed and are carrying out increasingly violent attacks, even targeting innocent civilians. They are members of Israel's militant far right, and they are threatening to become Israel's next big problem. In "Israel's Next War?" FRONTLINE goes deep inside the world of militant Jewish radicals who pose a grave new threat to Israeli security and, potentially, to the region. "The dream of these extremists"?to blow up the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the most important holy sites in the Muslim world?"should give us sleepless nights," says former Israeli Security Chief Avi Dichter. "Jewish terror is liable to create a serious strategic threat that will turn the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a conflict between thirteen million Jews and a billion Muslims all over the world." The program also profiles two young men?Shlomo Dvir and Yarden Morag?who planned to set off a bomb at a Palestinian girls school just as hundreds of young students arrived in the morning. The timing was carefully designed to harm as many children as possible. "It was my idea," says Shlomo Dvir in an exclusive interview from an Israeli prison. "Whoever gets hurt, gets hurt." Most Israelis reacted with shock and horror when Dvir and Morag's plan was revealed?but a small minority refused to condemn them. Dvir and Morag's bomb never went off?an Israeli policeman lucked onto their plot at the last minute?and the investigation led Israeli security officials to an underground of other radical settlers who helped with this attack and others. These settlers are part of a much larger group of far rightists in Israel?the Kahanists, who are members of Kach, the outlawed party of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who rose to prominence in the 1980s with his message that nothing short of the expulsion of all Arabs from Jewish land will guarantee Israeli security