Over 50 years after it was founded, the Gal underground movement remains something of a mystery. Even the Shin Bet security agency agents who worked on the case find it difficult to completely understand.
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The underground was formed in the mid-1970s by Yoel Lerner. Lerner was a genius, a linguist, a translator and education, a brilliant debater who spoke seven languages, but also a right-wing nationalist and radical revolutionary who was in and out of prison. He saw the law as nothing more than a recommendation.
The declared purpose of the Gal underground was to replace the Israeli government with a regime that would act based on Jewish law. The organization included 45 members, who planned a series of 13 actions to be carried out in a 40-day period. The last, scheduled for the 40th day, was designed to rock Israel and the world to the core. It entailed blowing up Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
Lerner died eight years ago. I knew him very well. We met and spoke dozens of times. I still have my notes from our conversations, letters he sent me from prison, and articles and ideas he typed or handwrote.
Israel's security apparatus has figured out only part of the Gal plans, and exposed only a few of its members. After Lerner was released from prison, he revealed a bit more, but never the entire story. He said that Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook, head of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva and the spiritual leader for the Gush Emunim folk, was in on the secret, as were a few religious MKs, and even a cabinet minister. But their identities remain secret. Lerner said plenty, but refused to name names, and took the secret to the grave.
The Gal members wanted their actions broadcast on the radio, as well as at peak viewing hours for Israel's only TV station at the time – the "Mabat" evening news. One member, who had the relevant technical capabilities, was supposed to take over the frequency on which Israeli television broadcast and announce to the public when the movement's various activities were due to take place.
The 13 actions were planned for different places in the country. One was to target a government ministry, apparently the Treasury. Another was planned against the offices of the Histadrut Labor Federation. The next day, an action was to be carried out against the Prime Minister's Office. There were supposed to be five days between most steps of the plan, with only the last few taking place one day after the other.
The members of the underground prepared an announcement and intended to publish it in one of the afternoon newspapers. It included one sentence: "Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown," the words of the prophet Jonah to the people of the sinful city Nineveh, at the order of God. At the same time, the Gal members prepared a prison for cabinet ministers at a community in southern Israel.
Lerner's underground was made up of three "rings" of activists. Each one was cut off from the two others and its members identities were unknown to the other rings. The first ring included the leaders. The second were the simple "soldiers," and the third included potential members who had yet to be trained.
Most of the members who were arrested in 1977 belonged to that third ring. Eight were students of Lerner's. An IDF officer, Armand Azran, also a former student of Lerner's, supplied the group with bricks of explosives and other weapons.
The underground trained in the fields outside Beit Shemesh. They met at various apartments, mostly in Jerusalem, but never knew each other's real names. Azran, for example, was known as "Pinchas." Lerner himself was called "Elijah." Other members took on similar biblical "underground" names. They practiced espionage and bombmaking. They wanted to replace the government of Israel with a Jewish theocracy.
Lerner said that "The 13-step plan, the jewel in whose crown was the action on the Temple Mount, was worked out in detail. It was only written down in a few copies, which the Shin Bet didn't get. A few hours before the Shin Bet arrested us, I burned the incriminating material, and one of my friends destroyed a recording that documented a meeting of the leadership."
Lerner was born in Brooklyn during World War II and raised in a secular family that moved back and forth between the US and South Africa. At age 19, he made aliyah and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he embraced religion. He began teaching, first in Kiryat Shmona, and then at some of the most prestigious religious Zionist institutions in the country: Himmelfarb School and Nativ Meir yeshiva high school, as well as in schools in Beit El and Binyamina.
A year before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Lerner joined the Jewish Defense League, founded by Rabbi Meir Kahana and the Kach movement. He was very different from most of the people who surrounded the Kach founder in those days. He was educated, independent, and assertive. Lerner taught Kahana Hebrew and translated many of his articles and books. Like Kahana, Lerner saw Arabs in Israel as the source of all evil and wanted to kick them out of the country.
However, Lerner didn't hesitate to disagree with some of Kahana's other opinions and earned himself the reputation of one who would go up against him. With his impressive rhetorical abilities, Lerner was much better-spoken than Kahana and managed to annoy him more than once. Still, their fights did not affect their appreciation of one another. Lerner opposed the idea of Kach running in the Knesset election, but later changed his mind and appeared on the movement's Knesset list twice. In 1996, he was slotted into the fifth place on Professor Shaul Gutman's Yamin Yisrael list.
Lerner's first brush with the law came because of anti-missionary activity. In 1974 a number of Christian institutions in Jerusalem were set on fire, including Beit Zion on Hanevi'im St. and a Christian bookstore in Rehavia. Lerner was arrested on suspicion of taking part in the arson but acquitted due to a lack of evidence. But he was convicted on another serious charge: incitement to revolt. Police detectives had found a paper in one of his desk drawers titled: "Plans and ideas to thwart the withdrawal agreement from Sinai and Judea and Samaria, if a peace treaty is signed."
The Anarchist's Cookbook
The possibilities spelled out in the document included blowing up buildings at the Cave of the Patriarchs and blowing up the Dome of the Rock. Detectives also found a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook, which Kahana had brought him from the US. Lerner had managed to translate a few pages of it, and had underlined one sentence: "The time for protests has passed." That was enough for the court, which sentenced Lerner to 26 months in prison.
While behind bars, Lerner started to think up the idea of the Gal underground, which he named after a beloved student of his who was killed in the Yom Kippur War – Binyamin (Benny) Gal.
Lerner developed his ideas. He saw the rebuilding of the Temple as an existential need of the Jewish people, and talked at length about how when the Third Temple rose, the Jewish people would once again be able to observe some 40% of the religious commandments. Lerner was convinced that Israel must be ruled by Jewish law, with the Sanhedrin court as the main source of authority. When the laws of the secular state conflicted with Jewish law, Lerner often opted for the second, and it didn't take him long to start thinking about a change of regime and begin working on the Gal movement's radical plans.
Lerner and his underground were exposed by chance as a result of the haste of Misha Mishkan, a right-wing activist and settlers who would go on to become of the symbols of the opposition to the evacuation of Yamit. Mishkan refused the compensation the government offered to Yamit residents. Mishkan was not a member of Gal, but knew Lerner well enough to inform him that he had obtained a "biblical fruit" – referring to a hand grenade, which was supposed to be thrown at Arab students in Jerusalem. Lerner met Mishkan and had reservations about his intention of carrying out an indiscriminate mass-casualty attack. He was afraid the Gal plot would be exposed because of some personal initiative by someone he knew, a concern that turned out to be correct.
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A few days later, Mishkan was arrested. He told police that he had general knowledge of an underground plot that involved Lerner. This tip led to Lerner's arrest, and lifted the lid on part of the Gal underground just two months before it was slated to carry out its first "action." Only 10 members were indicted. Most of the counts of the indictment were not detailed, both because not all the facts were known and because of a desire to keep the affair out of the limelight.
Lerner was sentenced to three years in prison. Azran, who expressed remorse, was given 18 months. The rest, which included some minors, were sentenced to various short sentences of a few months.
But not even his time in prison was enough to cool Lerner down. "The government of Israel," he wrote, "is only here to uphold order and protect the people from foreign enemies. The obligation to honor this government and obey it is in effect only if this government obeys the Torah, its laws, and the rule of God, which is the supreme authority for both the Jewish people and their elected government."
Bringing back the 'Hasmoneans'
In later years, Lerner would transition into academic work, but he still had a revolutionary-underground adventure ahead of him – the Hasmonean Affair, for which he also would up in prison. According to the Shin Bet, this was another underground initiative that Lerner insisted on calling a "youth movement."
The original Hasmonean Alliance was founded after Passover of 1937, four years before Lerner was born. Its founders were Rabbi Moshe Zvi Segal, who blew a shofar at the Western Wall despite the prohibition of the British Mandate status quo, and was imprisoned for it.
The main points of the Hasmoneans were similar to principles of Irgun founder Yair Stern, and stressed values such as the redemption of Israel. In 1981, not long after he was released from prison, Lerner set out to reestablish the Hasmoneans. He even tried to persuade the then-elderly Segal to help him.
One of the young members of the group, a Nativ Meir yeshiva student who saw Lerner as a confidant, suggested that a bomb be placed near one of the walls of the Dome of the Rock. He even laid out a detailed plan that included collecting explosives in the Negev Desert to use to build the bomb, which would be detonated by the sun using a photoelectric cell.
Lerner claimed in court that he had only been pretending to go along with the plan so he could scupper it. The court did not believe him, and he was imprisoned for 30 more months. The "Hasmoneans" numbered a few dozen teenaged boys and girls, mostly residents of the Old City of Jerusalem, as were Lerner and Segal themselves. Lerner would hold pledges of allegiance to the Hasmoneans by the "Little Western Wall," and the young members printed posters and pamphlets that walked a fine line between public calls for revolution and a legitimate ideological platform.
The "new Hasmonean" movement's documents listed seven goals, including: Honoring God through devotion to the Torah, the people, and the Land; rewriting the country's legal code based on the Torah and Jewish law; and founding "a kingdom of Israel with the Jewish people fully redeemed in their land."
Those who came next
After he was released from prison for the fourth time, Lerner was somewhat calmer and clearer-minded. He set up research institutes, edited journals, and spurred with ideological opponents. At one point, he joined another unusual organization – State of Judea, whose goal was to replace the state of Israel in parts of Judea and Samaria in the event of an Israeli withdrawal from those territories. At another point, he and some friends had the idea of smuggling a sacrificial altar onto the Temple Mount to carry out the ritual Passover sacrifices. The plan was not executed.
I encountered Lerner occasionally at conferences having to do with the Temple Mount. He was getting older, but always sharp, and clung to his views. As the years passed, various followers took up his torch: members of the Jewish Underground planned were also planning to "act" on the Temple Mount and even tried to assassinate some members of the Palestinian National Steering Committee. After that plot was exposed in the early 1980s, there were a few more less-known attempts to attack the Mount.
Ahead of Israel's disengagement from Gush Katif in the 2005, for example, the Shin Bet and the Jerusalem District Police uncovered a plot by Jews who were planning a terrorist attack on the Temple Mont with the goal of thwarting the disengagement. Five young men, all Breslev Hassidim, were at the core of the plot. According to the Shin Bet, they had been involved in a plan to fire a Lau missile at the Dome of the Rock from the roof of the Shuvu Banim Yeshiva in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.
These suspects were never tried, both because they had misgivings and never carried out their scheme, but also because it appeared that it would be difficult to compile evidence that would be strong enough to convict them. The Shin Bet was also afraid that putting them on trial would burn informants.
Throughout the years, the Shin Bet has continued to track radical Jewish figures seen as potential hazards on the Temple Mount. Sometimes, because of plans designed to interfere with government policy. Other times, detectives discovered variations of a kind of "Jerusalem Syndrome" – mentally unstable young people who slid into criminality and ideology, and mixed the two into dangerous plans.
The case of Yoel Lerner and the Gal and Hasmonean undergrounds reflected a third kind of issue – a deeply-held belief that Israel's civil government must be replaced by a theocracy, and the Temple Mount always took center stage.
