Israel's soon-to-retire police commissioner, Mr Assaf Hefetz, is a no-nonsense kind of guy - a burly, bullet-headed man who doesn't mince his words. Yesterday he brought his plain-talking into a field few Israeli leaders ever enter: the dangers posed by Jewish right-wing extremists.
Never mind the fact that Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron in 1994 - providing Hamas with a focus for the series of suicide attacks that followed and never mind that, in 1995, a Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinated the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Israeli leaders, when they talk of violent extremism, are almost always referring to the Islamic, not the Jewish variety.
Mr Hefetz, in interviews and speeches to mark his imminent retirement, has warned that the Jewish militants continue to pose a highly potent threat. There are hundreds of them, he said in an address yesterday, ready to break the law to destroy Israel-Arab peace hopes.
he told the Ha'aretz newspaper that he could envisage the formation of a Jewish "terrorist underground", a full-fledged organisation of extremists bent on violent "provocation".
Such a grouping, of course, would not be unprecedented either - a right-wing organisation that had carried out shooting attacks on West Bank Arab mayors was exposed in the 1980s as it finalised plans to blow up Arab buses and the mosques on the Temple Mount.
Mr Hefetz's warnings are particularly well-timed. Earlier this month, two right-wingers, Avigdor Eskin and Haim Pakovitch, were arrested for planning to throw a pig's head onto the Temple Mount during the forthcoming holy month of Ramadan.
Given that another Jewish extremist's pig stunt in June - pasting up leaflets in Hebron that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad as a pig - prompted Muslim protest worldwide, the consequences of the Eskin-Pakovitch plan, had it come to fruition, are horrifyingly predictable.
The fact that Eskin was at liberty to plan the Temple Mount move, however, suggests something flawed in the Israeli authorities' perception of right-wing terrorism, for it was the same Avigdor Eskin who, a month before the Rabin assassination, conducted a kabbalistic ceremony placing an ancient death curse on the prime minister - an apparent incitement to murder for which he was sentenced to only a four-month jail term.
Almost in parallel with the latest right-wing arrests, meanwhile, has come news of the detention of Mr Stephan Josef Smyrek, a German national whom Israel alleges was despatched by the Lebanon-based Hizbullah movement to car ry out a suicide bombing in Israel.
Mr Smyrek is said to have converted to Islam in 1994, been recruited to a Hizbullah unit in Europe, trained in Lebanon and despatched to Israel in November. He is said to have confessed to planning a suicide attack, but his lawyer claims that, after three weeks in Israeli solitary confinement, "the conditions were fertile for producing a false confession".
Israeli planes twice rocketed areas in south Lebanon yesterday thought to be occupied by Hizbullah guerrillas, Lebanese security sources said. They said two Israeli planes fired a total of four rockets into two areas in the Iqlim alToufah hills, north of Israel's south Lebanon occupation zone.