BAT AYIN, West Bank -- Hours before dawn one morning in April, two men -- a teacher and a pianist from this small, devout Jewish settlement -- drove a trailer to East Jerusalem and parked it next to the wall of an Arab girls' school.
Wearing white gloves, they quickly tied bags of bricks and screws to propane tanks filled with gasoline and diesel fuel, attached army-issued detonator caps and hooked up an electronic timer.
They set the clock for 7:25 a.m., when the schoolyard on the Mount of Olives is typically packed with Arab students waiting for classes to start.
An Israeli police officer, suspicious of religious Jews parking a truck in an Arab neighborhood at 3 a.m., accosted them, discovered the bomb and prevented what authorities in Jerusalem said could have been a catastrophic explosion.
His police work gave the authorities evidence of something they had long feared but until that April morning had been unable to prove: the emergence of Jewish militants bent on carrying out retaliatory attacks against Palestinians.
Israel's security chief, Avi Dichter, has repeatedly warned that the increasing violence by Palestinians could provoke the extreme Jewish right and lead to the return of an underground that operated in the mid-1980s, plotting to blow up Arab buses and the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic holy site in Jerusalem's Old City.
Two men, Shlomo Dvir and Yarden Morag, are on trial on charges of attempted murder and possession of explosives. They have confessed to being at the scene with explosives, according to prosecutors and their attorney. Two others also have been charged.
Judge Reuven Shmiya called it a "miracle" that police discovered the bomb. Had it gone off, he said, "it would have caused great damage to the security of the state."
Leaders of the Bat Ayin settlement, a hilltop smattering of small homes and trailers founded 13 years ago southwest of Bethlehem, are defensive when asked about connections between their community and two men who police say were intent on killing schoolchildren.
A community of mostly new converts to Orthodoxy, Bat Ayin is occupied by religious Jews, rich and poor, lawyers and carpenters, who grow their own organic food. It is an unusual, countercultural community where some residents wear tie-dyed clothes reminiscent of an earlier era.
The settlement is on the far end of the Gush Ezyon settlement block, an area lost during Israel's War of Independence in 1948, when Arabs killed 240 of its residents. Israel reclaimed the land in 1967 when its troops conquered the West Bank during the Six-Day War.
About 110 families live and farm on the steep, thorny hillsides dotted with tall pine trees and fruit orchards. In keeping with their Orthodox beliefs, the men do not shave their beards and women dress conservatively. Most men carry assault rifles or side arms, do not take advantage of cheap Palestinian labor and refuse to build a security fence.
Daniel B. Winston, a Chicago native who immigrated in 1990, says his fellow residents "reject the idea of collective guilt by association" and that the community's way of life would never contribute to a bombing plot.
"There is no support of terror," says Winston, a 35-year-old family therapist. "Unlike when Palestinians kill Jews en masse and the murderers are celebrated as heroes, even by their mothers, our community is morally opposed to such acts and puts suspects in jail."
Notices on the community center's bulletin board seek donations to help the suspects' families and warn about infiltrators from Israel's internal security force, Shin Bet. A poster shows a woman saying, "Don't blab. Even the walls have ears." Residents, with the exception of Winston, declined to speak to a reporter.
Police, doubting that Dvir, 27, and Morag, 25, had the technical knowledge and experience to pull off an attack, bolstered their conspiracy theory by arresting Noam Federman, 33, and charging him with being the scheme's mastermind.
Also charged in the plot is a third member of the Bat Ayin settlement, Ofer Gamliel, 42, a carpenter and former munitions expert in the Israeli army.
Federman, a leader of the outlawed anti-Palestinian Kach movement, is a well-known extremist from Hebron who publicly advocates violence against Palestinians. He told reporters at one of his court hearings last month that the government should plant bombs in Palestinian hospitals.
"Unfortunately, the government doesn't do it, so it's up to the people to do those things," he said.
Naftali Wertzberger, an attorney representing Dvir and Morag, says they confessed after more than 60 hours of police questioning during which they were deprived of food and sleep.
The attorney says that although police caught his clients "with the bomb," the two men had no intention of blowing up the school. They were planning, Wertzberger says, to tell police about the bomb before it went off.
"They wanted to show the Arabs that Jews can make bombs and carry out revenge attacks just like the Palestinians do," Wertzberger said. "They wanted to make the students at the Arab school fear the same things that people fear on Jewish streets."
Wertzberger says the conspiracy theory of the police and fears about extremist threats are overblown. Dvir and Morag, he says, are hardly munitions experts or ardent militants. He says the plot was poorly planned and that the bomb was simple.
Police say they are trying to link the suspects to other attacks, including pipe bombs that were scattered in the courtyard of an Arab boys' school in East Jerusalem in March and roadside shootings that have killed several Palestinians.
A group calling itself the Committee for Road Safety has claimed responsibility for several attacks, and another group recently distributed pamphlets saying its members had killed eight Palestinians in the past year.
According to court documents, the school-bombing suspects were motivated at first by concerns that a gunman was planning to infiltrate their settlement. The plans slowly grew and involved up to six people before the actual bombing was attempted.
Police say the group had discussed filming the explosion from the roof of a nearby school and selling the tape to television stations. The bomb would have damaged not only the school and its 1,300 students, but also an adjacent 250-bed hospital.
Winston, Bat Ayin's spokesman, has been gracious to reporters who show up at the settlement's gates trying to understand the origins of hate groups.
He says he abhors the taking of innocent lives but draws a distinction between Israeli and Palestinian violence. The former is defending people, he says, and the latter advocates suicide bombings targeting innocents.
"The Palestinians have forced a process in which our army is morally obligated to stand up and defend the citizens of this country," Winston says. That does not mean, he says, that Israelis should turn to vigilantism or do what the Palestinian militants do.
Ehud Sprinzak, a university dean at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and author of books on Jewish extremists, says it doesn't matter whether the group from Bat Ayin was organized or not, or whether it was part of a larger militia.
"Sometimes a group of three people can wreak havoc to such an extent that it can undermine an entire political process," he says, mentioning Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 killed 29 Palestinians in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs.
"He was one person, without any assistance, who created a crisis," Sprinzak says. "Just imagine what would have happened if 20 schoolgirls had died in an explosion."
It is difficult for such groups to take hold in Israeli society, he says.
"The council of settlers is smarter than the Palestinians," Sprinzak says. "They know that terror will not get them very far. The majority of settlers know that what they need is the solidarity with the general public, and they can't get that with militant activities."
Israeli groups attracted to violence, Sprinzak says, "are small, marginalized segments of society."
Still, he warns, "never underestimate what three people can do."