Much of the "right-wing incitement" of recent weeks, attributed by the media to the national camp, was initiated by none other than an undercover police informant. So reports Maariv today, in an article featured in a front-page headline.

The paper states that the police agent has initiated some of the more extreme protest acts of recent weeks - acts that were widely attributed to the entire national camp. The activities thus cast a cloud of illegitimacy on the entire anti-disengagement cause.

The agent provocateur was behind a recent bumper sticker which implied that Prime Minister Sharon's death was near. The sticker read: "Sharon, Lily [the PM's late wife] is waiting for you." He also recruited people to attend the road-blocking protests of last week, which brought much public wrath upon the anti-disengagement cause.

The police informant resides in a community in Judea and Samaria (Yesha). Armed with police "protection" because of the information he transmits to them, the agent initiated extremist acts, ostensibly to "entrap" protestors. He reportedly said he plans more violent activities over the coming months, including vandalizing or setting fire to courthouses and other public buildings.

The media have routinely attributed such activities to "extreme right-wing" elements. Etgar Lefkovits of the Jerusalem Post, for instance, wrote on Friday, "For the second time in as many days, suspected Jewish extremists spray-painted graffiti Thursday against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in central Jerusalem, police said... Police said that they suspect far-right activists, affiliated with the outlawed Kach movement, were behind the vandalism. Similar slogans appeared on city streets and billboards prior to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin."

In fact, the revelation of the police agent-provocateur was reminiscent of the Avishai Raviv case in 1995. An agent of the General Security Service (Shabak), Raviv was paid to inform on the activities of his right-wing neighbors, and in fact instigated some of the more violent and extreme activities himself. Tzvi Hendel, speaking in the capacity of Deputy Education Minister, said that Raviv was "a sick provocateur who did all he could to sow hatred for the Jews living in Judea and Samaria by Israeli citizens."

Raviv goaded Yigal Amir into murdering Rabin, according to testimony of at least two people. Raviv himself later admitted that he not only knew of Amir's intention to murder Rabin, but that he gave Amir the impression that he concurred with Amir's conclusions. "The main point is," said Prof. Hillel Weiss of Bar-Ilan University at the time, "that the GSS was behind a cruel, heartless plan to besmirch an entire public and frame them with the crime of attempting to murder the Prime Minister."

Raviv was later indicted in April '99 – 18 months after it was officially released that he was a GSS agent, and only following court suits and public pressure demanding that Raviv be put on trial. The charge sheet specified not that Raviv encouraged Amir, but rather that he did "not prevent" the murder. After the trial was delayed many times over the course of more than three full years, the trial began in earnest only in July '02. Eight months later, Raviv was acquitted of all charges.

Likud MK Michael Eitan, one of the strongest advocates at the time of a public inquiry into the Raviv-Amir connection, said something then that might easily be said about this morning's revelations. Eitan said that the verdict "was a personal, legal vindication of one man - but the entire public interest issue still remains a tightly closed secret. No one has investigated those on behalf of whom GSS-agent Raviv was operating. No one has investigated the incitement against Jewish citizens and Arabs living in Judea and Samaria. No one has investigated the smear campaign against Jewish leaders that came before and after the murder. All this and much more remains closed and shut."