Israel confronts terrorists within
Attack on Palestinian home forces government to grapple with Jewish extremism
For Israelis, conflict between Jewish settlers and Palestinians is an almost daily fact of life, usually involving felled olive trees and thrown stones, with no loss of life. But last week’s arson attack on a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Duma, which killed an infant and critically injured his brother and parents, has jolted the nation into an uncomfortable realization.
The terrorists are not just on the outside, launching rockets or planning suicide attacks. Like the alienated youth drawn to ISIL ideology, a radical fringe of young ultra-Orthodox Israelis is increasingly turning to violence in the name of religion.
The killers of 18- month- old Ali Saad Dawabsheh left Hebrew graffiti reading “Revenge” and “Long live the Messiah King ” on the victims’ house alongside a Star of David. The murder came a day after an ultra- Orthodox man attacked Jerusalem’s Gay Pride parade, stabbing to death 16- year- old Shira Banki.
The attacks prompted the Israeli government to authorize draconian detention and interrogation tactics that are frequently used against Palestinians but rarely against Jews. “We decry it as a terrorist crime,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the arson attack. “Terrorism is terrorism.”
Observers say the wellspring of the latest wave of Jewish extremism is the settlements, populated by ultra- Orthodox Jews who believe they are fulfilling God’s command.
Shlomo Fischer, a sociologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said those driven to violence are the “fringe of a fringe.” They tend to be young men who have adopted a counter- cultural lifestyle. They have swallowed whole the teaching of radical rabbis that the Israeli government is invalid because it is not following religious ideas, but they ignore the same rabbis’ proscription of violence.
Their attitude is, “The land belongs to us and to nobody else,” Fischer said, and they interpret religion to justify violence. They see society as sinful and the government as weak, making concessions to foreign powers and permitting idolatry in the form of Christian churches.
“This is part of a theology that says, insofar as my reaction is spontaneous and pure for the sake of heaven, it’s really God moving me,” he said.
The deadly arson followed a long string of what have become known as “price tag ” attacks against Arabs and Christians. They were mostly crimes against property, accompanied by racist slogans, in response to a perceived offence. For example, last November, arsonists torched a Hebrew- Arabic bilingual school in Jerusalem, spray- painting the slogan, “There’s no coexisting with cancer.” Extremists, who consider Christianity a form of idolatry that has no place on Israeli soil, have also targeted prominent churches. The perpetrators often spray the word “price tag,” a message that they are exacting a price, both from the targets and from the government.
Israel has been hesitant to label the attacks as terrorism, but in its 2014 country report on terrorism, the U. S. Department of State included price tag attacks in its catalogue of terrorist incidents. The report noted that Israeli investigations of the “violent ex- tremists” responsible for the attacks did not result in prosecutions in the majority of cases. Yesh Din, an Israeli human- rights group assisting Palestinians, reported in May that of 1,000 complaints filed for alleged violence committed by settlers between 2005 and 2014, only seven per cent led to charges.
The anti- Arab sentiment fuelling many of the attacks can be seen as a legacy of Meir Kahane, whose Kach Party was banned in Israel in 1988 as racist and undemocratic. Kahane, who was murdered in New York in 1990 by an Arab assassin, called Arabs “dogs” and insisted there was no place for them within Israel. “I don’t want to kill Arabs. I just want them to live happily elsewhere,” he said. “Give me the strength to take care of them once and for all.”
Kahane retains appeal 25 years after his death, with the slogan “Kahane was right” sometimes s pray- painted on vandalized mosques and churches. Kahane’s 23- year- old grandson, Meir Ettinger, has emerged as a disciple of his grandfather, and on Tuesday an Israeli court ordered him held as the suspected head of an extremist network. His movement is believed to have been behind the June arson attack on the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish near the Sea of Galilee.
Don Seeman, a professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Jewish extremists responsible for the attacks are a “loose federation” and not a structured organization.
“They are responding to what they perceive to be an insult, an insult where somebody got hurt, or somebody got killed or a settlement got uprooted,” he said. “They immediately interpret any insult or humiliation of themselves to be a humiliation of God.” No rabbi is telling them to destroy property or attack people. “But there is in certain corners an atmosphere created — Meir Kahane had a lot to do with this initially — there’s an aura of the exercise of power being a sanctification of God’s name, and it almost doesn’t matter how the power is exercised,” he said.
Ami Pedahzur, director of the Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said Jewish terrorism has surfaced from time to time throughout Israel’s history. But more recently, there has been a disturbing move toward brutal attacks on civilians. “We see how terrorism is escalating, every generation has to show something more shocking in order to gain attention,” he said. Still, he does not see the extremists as a major threat. “Of course it’s horrific, but from a national security point of view, unless they do something really shocking that would escalate the situation with the Palestinians and with the rest of the world, they are not as dangerous as their predecessors,” he said.
The latest attacks have provoked universal condemnation in Israel, which could backfire on the political agenda of the terrorists, Seeman said
“What is happening now within Israel is a growing willingness to castigate and criticize them, including from this current government, which is a centre- right government,” he said. “I think everybody realizes it’s bad for Israel.”
Fischer said the way is clear for Netanyahu to crack down without antagonizing the settlements. “What happened over the past week is that when the extent of the damage was exposed, people who might have otherwise been sympathetic ( to the extremists), distanced themselves,” he said. “People said, ‘ I don’t want to kill babies. That’s not who I am.’ ”