''Frontline" excels at weaving together disparate threads of the extremist settler saga, presented over the years in isolated news stories, into a coherent look at the underground movement. The program includes chilling interviews with those bent on a holy war against the secular Israeli state as well as against Palestinians living on what they consider the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Israeli security worries about assassination attempts against Sharon, the most heavily guarded prime minister in Israeli history, and plots to blow up Muslim holy sites on what Jews revere as the Temple Mount.
''Only chaos can change the situation," maintains one extremist settler.
''The Israeli secular entity has to be destroyed. God can't reveal himself until it's all wiped out. As long as the State of Israel stays as it is, there will be no redemption."
Words like ''redemption," ''sanctify," and ''revenge" marble the vocabulary of these people, as they do those of other extremists. These settlers carry the absolutist gleam in their eyes that we've come to view with trepidation from ''true believers" everywhere. Another settler says this about his philosophy: ''Two eyes for an eye, teeth for a tooth."
And then some. In 2002, Israeli police thwarted a plot hatched by extremist settlers to detonate a bomb at a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem, timed to explode at 7:30 a.m. to kill the most children. While the three men initially arrested are now serving prison sentences, others whom authorities believe were involved in the plot were acquitted for lack of evidence.
It must be said that while deploring this heinous scheme, one cannot forget the scores of heartless killings committed within Israel by Palestinian terrorists, with no discernible effort by the Palestinian Authority to stop them.
