 Menachem Livni, an engineering graduate of the Haifa Technion and commander of a reserve battalion of combat engineers, had moved to the Jewish settlement in Hebron in 1970, and in 1977, he had been elected chairman of the Kiryat Arba Council.Yehuda Etzion, a co-founder of the Ofra settlement, had been student of two rabbis, Zvi Yehuda Kook and Yehuda Amital, but was deeply influenced by the writings of Shabtai Ben-Dov, and was dedicated to organizing the destruction of the Dome of the Rock mosque, whilst Livni, a student of Moshe Levinger from Kiryat Arba, was opposed to an attack on the Haram al Sharif and was primarily concerned with mounting actions against Arabs in the Palestinian territories.The group that crystallized around them as an activist vigilante group adopted the symbol of the Stern Gang as their emblem.