By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Of further concern was the fact that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was targeting British targets abroad, while the loyalist paramilitaries were more localised.

“But when loyalists started, for example, buying weapons on the (British) mainland and abroad, we took that very seriously and certainly didn’t regard them as more ‘friendly’,” the MI5 veteran told me. “They were quite dreadful thugs.”

(Editor's note: Doug Hamilton, one of our most experienced correspondents and lively writers, recently took up a new post in Jerusalem. Here's the back story to his latest feature "A Biblical view of peace high in the Holy Land.")

(Photo:the West Bank Jewish settlement of Psagot, 17 November 2008/Eliana Aponte)

When I began my assignment to Israel & the Palestinian Territories two months ago, I was determined to get out and about and see as much as possible for myself. I wanted to find out up close what life was like for the people who live here -- from the Palestinians lining up obediently to get through intimidating Israeli checkpoints, to the nightlife crowd a world away in chic Tel Aviv, to the Orthodox Jews in 16th century attire in their Jerusalem districts where you dare not drive on the Sabbath, to the Palestinian olive groves and to the settlers on the occupied land of the West Bank.

I bought a GPS navigator to help me get around and the first thing I discovered was that my desired West Bank and Gaza destinations were "in an unreachable area", according to the device. The occupied territories show up as dark grey background on the GPS. But its warnings can be overridden and  it will then guide you  pretty accurately to the "unreachable destinations" you seek.

As the little green arrow that designates your car moves along corridors through the dark grey background, isolated splodges of beige show up on the map. These are Israeli settlements, mostly on the hilltops. You look up from the highway and see new roads going up the slopes leading to new houses with red-tiled roofs. They are protected by steel gates and coils of razor wire and electric alarm fences, or set behind Israel's formidable security barrier of concrete and watchtowers. The further out you go from Jerusalem, the more there is a frontier feeling to these strangely suburban-looking little communities, surrounded by rocky terraced hillsides that have barely changed down the centuries.

A settler group recently organised a visit for foreign media to correct what they view as our misperceptions about their movement. The people I met on this little tour -- which provided the material for my feature -- betrayed not a flicker of self-doubt. They had a few sharp answers ready for any challenge to their fundamental premise: God gave this land to the Jews and nothing over the 3,500 years since the Old Testament -- the book they live by -- has changed or can change that fact. The settlers we met were all friendly and polite. I have also witnessed young settler activists in less genteel circumstances, calling for the killing of young Palestinians who throw rocks at police guarding security-barrier constructions and demanding the displacement of Palestinian villagers in the way of their project to make the occupation of what they call Judea and Samaria a permanent fact.

 Sometimes we journalists speak of stories that are so compelling, so important to tell that they “hit you in the face”. In the West Bank these days, we’ve begun to take that literally. In the past couple of weeks, Palestinian journalists working for international media, including Reuters, have become the targets of Jewish settlers in a way that has highlighted what many see as a violent trend among that community which has caused alarm not only among ordinary Palestinians but among Israeli leaders and their international allies, most recently the European Union . The EU noted an upsurge in violence during the annual harvest of olives, a key crop in the hills of the West Bank. The statement came out just hours after settlers had again attacked journalists, as well as Israeli police.  

A couple of weeks ago, one of my colleagues, photographer Nayef Hashlamoun, was among journalists hurt when young Jewish religious settlers set about them in Hebron as they tried to cover efforts by local Palestinians and Israeli and foreign activists to pick olives. Israeli troops stepped in disperse the attackers and to offer medical aid to the journalists. But the soldiers’ actions were not enough to spare them criticism from fellow Israelis in the media. The incident led major television news bulletins in Israel that evening, with the channels questioning why the soldiers, part of the conscript army Israel deploys across the West Bank to protect some 300,000 settlers, had not arrested the assailants. 

The incident and its coverage in Israeli media highlighted the extent to which the settlements, undertaken following Israel’s seizure of the West Bank in the war of 1967, remain not just, in the words of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an “obstacle to peace” with the Palestinians, but also an focus of discord within Israeli society. On Tuesday, the day Americans choose  the president who may try to succeed where Rice and George W. Bush have failed in bringing peace to the Middle East, Israelis will mark 13 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His Jewish killer remains unrepentant and a hero to some Israelis for his attempt to stop Rabin and his government from handing the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Yasser Arafat’s PLO after the Oslo peace accords. The assassin, Yigal Amir, sparked a furore last week by giving secretly taped television interviews in prison. It provided a reminder of the continued divisions over Rabin’s ‘land-for-peace’ strategy and revived painful memories of internal violence. 

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who will finally step down after a February election after formally resigning over a corruption scandal, warned of the emergence of radical underground Jewish groups  after a bomb damaged the home of an Israeli academic in Jerusalem who has spoken out strongly against the settlers, who choose to live in the occupied West Bank in defiance of international law. Olmert has also lambasted “pogroms” against Palestinian villagers. Palestinians and their international allies complain, however, that Olmert has failed to remove settlers, despite Israel’s international commitments to do so. Indeed, his government has overseen an expansion of settlements.

This past week, the American Jewish Committee, which was set up over a century ago in response to pogroms against Jews in Russia, issued a statement sharing Olmert’s alarm at the rise in settler violence.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported a total of 222 incidents in the first half of 2008 versus 291 incidents in all of 2007. It said that 23 incidents of the cases recorded this year led to Palestinian casualties. Later OCHA reports document further difficulties during the olive harvest.

“There has been a rise in Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria,” Gadi Shamni, Israeli army commander of the central region, referring to the West Bank, recently said.  ”In the past, only a few dozen individuals took part in such activity, but today that number has grown into the hundreds.”

In the Israeli press, the op-ed pages of Haaretz  have seen an exchange of opinions, including mutual accusations of propagating nothing less than “hatred” for fellow Jews, that has in turn generated wider  coverage in the national media.

In an unsigned leader article  last week entitled “Defeat Settler Terror”, the left-leaning broadsheet put its cards on the table, concluding: “Any attempt at compromise, and any negotiations with representatives of the settler “moderates,” would constitute a capitulation to terror and the abandonment of the state to a dangerous group of lunatics who are liable to bring about its destruction. “

A few days earlier, prominent pro-settler spokesman Israel Harel had defended the movement, distancing it from violent extremists and accusing anti-settlement activists and Palestinians of creating fear on settlements by not observing arranged times for picking olives: “When the truth is distorted so radically, and when all the ills of the state and the people are imputed to the settlers, the only possible conclusion is that aside from the political motive, the deeper reason for this destructive criticism is hatred - pure, baseless hatred.”

To that, the newspapers’s commentator, Gideon Levy hit back with a piece conceding his antipathy toward the settlers. His piece was entitled simply “Yes, Hate”.

With emotions running high, and with journalists ourselves feeling the story of the settlers is “hitting us in the face” at times, my colleague Allyn Fisher-Ilan took time to investigate the view from inside one of the fortified hilltop settlements that dot the West Bank landscape. There she met a 25-year-old woman called Renana Cohen who insisted that, whatever Olmert’s successor and Bush’s successor might think of following through on Rabin’s willingness to consider removing at least some of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, she had no intention of complying. She and her friends would “do everything to prevent” an evacuation, she said. ” I cannot even imagine it happening,” she added from the settlement which overlooks the major Palestinian city of Nablus. “If we don’t live here, then the Arabs would.”

 (Sami Aboudi contributed to this blog)