Settler thugs shock the US


August 8, 2015
Sarah Benton

Responses to the idea of Jewish terrorists from:
1) JT: U.S. Jewish groups call on Israel to rein in its Jewish extremists;
2) NY Times: Naftali Bennett on Israel’s Jewish Terrorists, as the writer of their chief opinion piece on Jewish extremism Naftali Bennett seems an odd choice – unless the point is to draw a clear line between pro-settlers like Bennett and violent thugs;
3) LA Times: Israeli policies sparked the deadly Duma fire, Sandy Tolan links the arson to the bullying of Palestinians that is the occupation;
4) WP: Q&A: A look at the history of Jewish extremism in Israel, sadly, not a history that mentions the terrorism before and after the foundation of Israel;
5) Jewish Forward: The Problem With Netanyahu’s Response to Jewish Terror JJ Goldberg on the many aspewcts of Israeli policy which tell Palestinians they are worthless;;
6) New Yorker: Israel’s Jewish-Terrorist Problem, a ‘radical minority’ of settlers over whom no earthly power has any authority;


A charred and heat-warped photo of 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha and his family. The baby and father have now died; the mother is in intensive care. Photo by Rex Features

U.S. Jewish groups call on Israel to rein in its Jewish extremists

By JTA
August 03, 2015

Jewish groups in the United States called on Israel to more forcefully rein in its Jewish extremists.

The call came in messages condemning two attacks: the firebombing of a Palestinian home in the West Bank, which led to the death of a sleeping 18-month-old baby; and the stabbing of six people at the Jerusalem gay pride parade, which led to the death of a 16-year-old girl.

The attacks “must be met with determined action to prevent violence, apprehend perpetrators, and hold to account those who engage in incitement,” Stephen Greenberg and Malcolm Hoenlein, the chairman and executive vice chairman, respectively, of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said in a statement.

The statement also “expressed their profound sorrow to the Dawabsha family on the death of their child, Ali Saad Dawabsha.”

AIPAC in a statement also expressed condolences to the family and condemned the attack.

“Terror — whatever the source — must be given no quarter,” said the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbyist. “The deliberate and heinous targeting and murder of innocents cannot be tolerated.”

David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, wrote in a statement, “Setting ablaze the home of an innocent Palestinian family, of any such family, is frightening in its pure evil. Whoever carried out this appalling deed must be apprehended and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and additional steps must be taken in an effort to prevent any future such attacks.”

The Anti-Defamation League condemned what it called the “shocking terror attack” and called for the perpetrators to face more stringent penalties.

“For seven years, extremists have perpetrated acts of violence and hate, targeting mosques, churches, and private property,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s national director, and Carole Nuriel, director of the group’s Israel Office, said in a statement. “Now these unacceptable acts of hatred and unbridled zealotry have resulted in the murder of an innocent child.

“Expressions of outrage are no longer enough. The perpetrators of these crimes need to face specific, enhanced consequences for these despicable acts of hate and terrorism. Community and religious leaders must make unquestionably clear that any act of hate and violence is unacceptable, un-Jewish, and that anyone involved in such incidents will be shunned by the community, let alone prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The Orthodox Union said in a statement: “Such a heinous act offends all people of good will and violates basic Jewish values. We commend Prime Minister Netanyahu for his unequivocal repudiation of this act and his commitment to bring the perpetrators to justice.”


Anonymous generic punishment: IDF and border police put the 7000 residents of the village of Hizma in the West Bank under siege in April – no-one but Israeli security forces could get in or out – because youths from the village had thrown stones at them. Photo by Tamar Fleishman, +972.

Naftali Bennett on Israel’s Jewish Terrorists

By Naftali Bennett, NY Times
August 07, 2015

JERUSALEM — Israel is under attack. This time though, the threat is not from Iran, Hezbollah or Hamas. It comes from a fringe group within Israel, which needs to be eradicated swiftly and forcefully.

Last week, an ultra-Orthodox man brutally stabbed six participants at the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, including 16-year-old Shira Banki who a few days later died of her injuries. The attacker, Yishai Schlissel, had been released from prison just weeks before for committing a similar attack at a gay pride parade a decade earlier. This should never have happened.

A day later, Israelis awoke to news that an 18-month-old Palestinian boy, Ali Dawabsha, had been burned to death in a firebomb attack on his home in the West Bank village of Duma. His family is still hospitalized, fighting for their lives.


Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett and Jewish Home member Col. (ret.) Moti Yogev survey the Beit E1 area – essential for a contiguous Palestinian state – to discuss where Jewish homes could be built. “Building Israeli homes between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim is a completely natural thing to do, and should not be taken as ‘anti-Palestinian’,” said Bennett, as reported by Arutz Sheva, his fan mag.

Shira’s murderer and the suspected perpetrators of the heinous and unforgivable firebombing that killed Ali are radical Jewish extremists who claim to act in the name of God but do the exact opposite — they desecrate God, our religion and the Jewish people.



Security forces control all who want to enter or leave Hebron, 2011. Photo from Agencia EFE

Israeli policies sparked the deadly Duma fire

By Sandy Tolan, LA Times
August 06, 2015

Friday’s horrific arson attack on a Palestinian home by suspected Israeli extremists, in which an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler was burned to death, was, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “a terrorist crime.” What he did not say was that the attack on the Dawabshe family home, in the West Bank village of Duma, fits into a larger pattern of settler violence and domination over Palestinian civilians that undermines any chance for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The fire in Duma cannot be seen as a random event. Rather, it is the outcome of decades of Israel’s expansionist policies in the West Bank. Since the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, the number of settlers has more than tripled, to 350,000, not including East Jerusalem — growth the so-called peace process failed completely to curtail.

The transformation of the West Bank includes military posts, surveillance towers and buffer zones to enforce Israel’s colonization. Israel’s military directly controls more than 60% of the West Bank. In April, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported hundreds of fixed and “flying” checkpoints and other obstacles — in a land smaller than Delaware — that limited or discouraged Palestinian travel in the West Bank. Settlers face few such restrictions.

The settlers, drawn to “Judea and Samaria” by religious fervor or enticed by Israeli subsidies, are emboldened by the army that protects them. In Hebron, where about 1,500 soldiers protect some 800 Jewish settlers, Israelis and Palestinians are segregated. Palestinians have been barred from once-bustling Shuhada Street, now nearly vacant, and the “separation principle,” B’Tselem declared, “led to the economic collapse of the center of Hebron.”

In the Jordan Valley, and throughout most of the occupied West Bank, residents are barred from making improvements on their homes; unapproved structures are systematically demolished by the army.

Jordan Valley settlers use an estimated 18 times more water than local Palestinians, who watch their farms wither. According to Human Rights Watch, Palestinian children, some as young as 11, pick vegetables in the Jordan Valley’s Jewish settlements, many for less than half of Israel’s legal minimum wage, to help support their families.

The dominion settlers claim over the West Bank only becomes darker and more violent as their numbers sharply increase and Israel’s occupation grows more entrenched. Extremist settlers have attacked Palestinians during the annual olive harvest, burning their orchards and even some village mosques. In the South Hebron Hills, Palestinian schoolchildren have been stoned by settlers. In June, the Dutch government issued a travel advisory for the West Bank, warning of security risks because of the violence of “Jewish colonists.” Israel called the advisory slanderous.

Netanyahu and other Israeli officials promise to bring the perpetrators of the Duma killing to justice. That would be the exception.

Yesh Din, another Israeli human rights organization, monitored police activity from 2005 to 2014 and found that just 7.4% of Israeli investigations of Palestinian complaints about such settler attacks resulted in indictments. By contrast, the conviction rate for Palestinians charged with crimes of all kinds is 99.7%.

“We are shocked,” Netanyahu declared of the Duma attack. But really, he shouldn’t be surprised. He has championed the building of Jewish settlements, the network of exclusive roads for settlers only and the fragmentation of Palestinian land in the name of security and protection of the settlers. It all adds up to a casual sense of domination and impunity among the settlers.

Perhaps because of the extreme cruelty of the Duma case, this incident will end differently. But one case can’t erase the reality of two separate and unequal peoples on one land — one free, the other under indefinite and punishing confinement. The challenge now is to recognize Duma as the terrible byproduct of a Jim Crow-like system of occupation. And to finally dismantle that system for good.

Sandy Tolan is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. His latest book is “Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land,” about the building of a music school in the occupied West Bank.



No remorse then. Head of a Jewish extremist group Meir Ettinger appears in court in Nazareth Illit , Israel, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2015. Israel said Tuesday it was interrogating the suspected head of a Jewish extremist group in the first arrest of an Israeli suspect following last week’s arson attack in the West Bank that killed a Palestinian toddler and wounded his brother and parents.  According to Shin Bet, 23-year-old Ettinger was arrested late on Monday for “involvement in an extremist Jewish organization.” Photo by Ariel Schalit/Associated Press

Q&A: A look at the history of Jewish extremism in Israel

By Aron Heller AP / Washington Post
August 05, 2015

JERUSALEM — The arrest of a well-known Jewish extremist marks Israel’s first concrete step in its new “zero tolerance” approach toward what the government describes as Jewish terrorism. A recent pair of attacks brought into the open long-standing fears about a radicalized and ultraconservative fringe that had been operating below the radar but now appears to be intensifying its violence.

Israel’s Shin Bet security service says 23-year-old Meir Ettinger, grandson of the late ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, was arrested for “involvement in an extremist Jewish organization” that was seeking to bring about religious “redemption” through attacks on Christian sites and Palestinian property.

With its focus primarily on preventing Palestinian attacks, Israeli authorities now pledge to direct more resources toward domestic assailants who have been allowed to operate with relative impunity. The threat is nothing new, but authorities indicate they can no longer overlook the violence.

Here’s a look at the phenomenon and what it means for Israel.

____

WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

On Wednesday, the Shin Bet singled out Ettinger when it announced it had cracked the June arson attack on the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, a prominent Catholic church near the Sea of Galilee. It accused Ettinger of heading a movement of young settler activists who were responsible for the torching and a number of other hate crimes. Two of them were indicted for burning the church.

The next day, an anti-gay ultra-Orthodox extremist stabbed six revelers at Jerusalem’s Gay Pride Parade, and one of them — a 16-year-old Jewish girl — later died of her wounds. Then, on Friday morning, suspected Jewish assailants set fire to a West Bank home, burning a Palestinian toddler to death and seriously wounding his parents and 4-year-old brother.

Israel has responded with outrage. President Reuven Rivlin visited the Arab victims in hospital and expressed his shame over those who “have lost their humanity.” Extremists have since threatened him and posted images of him in Nazi garb and a Hitler-like mustache, invoking memories of the kind of incitement that preceded the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

____

WHO ARE THE ATTACKERS?

No one knows for sure who exactly was behind Friday’s arson but because of the target and Hebrew graffiti found on the charred home, suspicion immediately fell on Jewish settler extremists. So-called “price tag” attacks have been used by Jewish settlers for years to avenge both Palestinian attacks and also official Israeli steps they see as favoring the Palestinians.

The suspects generally belong to a group known as the “hilltop youth,” radicalized Jewish teen squatters on unauthorized settlement encampments on West Bank hilltops. Members of the group have been behind a series of vandalism attacks against Palestinian homes, agriculture and livestock, as well as mosques, churches and even Israeli schools and military bases.

The attacks have been condemned by the entire political spectrum as well as the mainstream settler leadership. Jewish assailants have traditionally drawn their inspiration from a small group of zealous settler rabbis. But Shlomo Fischer, senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and an expert on radical Jewish extremism, said these new-age messianic attackers “conceive of themselves as having a sort of charismatic-prophetic authority and what authorizes these extreme actions is ‘the voice of God’ within them.”

____

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

It’s not entirely clear. Initially seen as a pressure tactic on the government to cease making concessions to Palestinians and support settler expansion, the movement has now taken on more of a religious bent, going so far as to call for a revolution that alters the nature of Israel.

The Shin Bet says Ettinger’s group vandalized a number of Christian religious sites in the past two years and tried to disrupt the 2014 visit by Pope Francis to the Holy Land. Through a blog peppered with biblical references, Ettinger rails against Christians and other “idol worshippers” that undermine Israel’s Jewish nature. He also attacks the country’s liberal and pluralistic foundations. “There are many, many Jews, many more than people think, whose value system is completely different than that of the Israeli Supreme Court or the Shin Bet,” he wrote in a July 30 post. “The laws they are bound by are not the State’s laws … but laws that are much more eternal and real.”

____

WHAT IS “JEWISH TERRORISM?”

In many ways, Ettinger’s grandfather is the godfather of modern Jewish militancy. Kahane’s Kach party was outlawed in Israel and labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. While the Orthodox rabbi himself mostly preached for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, his followers took on more tangible forms of violence. The most prominent was Baruch Goldstein, who shot and killed 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994 at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. A handful of others either planned or carried out attacks on Arabs.

Until recently, Israel has been reluctant to deem “price tag” activists as terrorists. Their attacks have mostly not been deadly and they’ve generally been regarded as teenage vandals and thugs, an embarrassment more than an actual threat.

____

HOW IS ISRAEL RESPONDING?

Across the board, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and grief. Thousands took to the streets to protest the attacks and well-wishers have flocked to the hospital where the wounded Palestinian family is being treated. All the political parties have condemned the attack and parliament convened a special session Tuesday to discuss the latest events, calling for soul searching.

The government has also provided security services more tools at their disposal. The Cabinet officially called the firebombing “a terrorist attack in every respect” and authorized the Shin Bet greater leeway to hold suspects without trial or charges, a tool that has been deployed against Palestinian militants.

Yoav Limor, a military columnist at the conservative Israel Hayom newspaper, said the latest moves suggest Israel “has decided to drop the kid gloves” and will likely round up more activists to “shake the tree in hopes that some fruit will fall to the ground” in the form of intelligence that helps solve the latest arson attack and thwart future ones.

Netanyahu has also urged the world to be as forceful in its condemnation of attacks against Jews as it was in the deadly attack against Arabs.

Follow Aron Heller on Twitter at www.twitter.com/aronhellerap



The Armon HaNatziv neighbourhood of E. Jerusalem, a founding settlement in the neighbourhood, where all the streets are named after Jewish terrorists. Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90

The Problem With Netanyahu’s Response to Jewish Terror

By J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Forward
August 04, 2015

When you leave Jerusalem’s Western Wall plaza through the Dung Gate out of the Old City, your gaze turns naturally southward toward another hill glimmering in the distance, across the Valley of Hinnom.

Christian tradition calls it the Hill of Evil Counsel, where the high priest Caiaphas consulted his aides before ordering Jesus arrested.
In Hebrew it’s known as Armon HaNatziv, “the Commissioner’s Palace,” after the gleaming white mansion on the crest. It once housed the British mandatory government and is now United Nations headquarters, giving new life to the name Hill of Evil Counsel. Looping the hillside is the Tayelet, the lovely promenade built by the Haas and Goldman families, heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune.

Stretching southward behind the palace is East Talpiot, a nondescript middle-class Jewish neighborhood built in 1973. It’s one of the earliest Jerusalem suburbs to rise on land captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. What sets it apart are its street names: In a wry, one-finger salute to the palace’s onetime British overlords, nearly all the streets in East Talpiot are named after Jews convicted and hanged as terrorists by the British before 1948.

That’s right: Israeli streets named after Jewish terrorists. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

There were 12 of them: nine members of the Irgun and three from the Stern Group, or Lehi. Two were hanged for assassinating the British minister Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1945. One unsuccessfully attacked an Arab civilian bus in the Galilee in 1938. Three participated in the 1947 Acre prison break. The rest attacked British security personnel.
In addition to streets named for each individual, the neighborhood’s main drag bears the name by which they’re collectively remembered: Olei HaGardom, “those who ascended the gallows.” Dozens more cities around Israel have an Olei HaGardom Street. Many have streets named for the individual members, too.

Two other streets in East Talpiot are named for Shmuel Azar and Moshe Marzouk, Egyptian Jews hanged in Cairo in 1955 for bombing the American and British libraries. The operation, known as the Lavon Affair, was a bone-headed plot by Israeli military intelligence meant to sour Egypt’s ties with the West. Elsewhere in Israel are streets named for Hirsh Lekert, hanged in Vilna in 1902 for trying to assassinate the tsarist governor; Sholom Schwartzbard, who confessed to assassinating Ukrainian rebel leader Simon Petlura in Paris in 1926, but was acquitted by a French jury; and Herschel Grynszpan, who assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris in November 1938, touching off Kristallnacht.

They’re all remembered with reverence and gratitude for their courage in facing death and their devotion to Israel and the Jewish people. But there’s another reason we should remember them. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a habit of declaring that Palestinians name streets after terrorists and Israelis don’t, and that this is an essential difference between the two. It’s not true. Facts matter.
“We denounce and condemn the murderers,” Netanyahu told his cabinet on August 2. “We chase them down. They name public squares after the murderers of children, and this difference can’t be covered up.”

He said the same thing a year ago, in his condolence message to the family of Mohammed Abu-Khdeir. The 16-year-old had been burned alive by Jewish thugs on July 2, 2014, in apparent revenge for the murders of three yeshiva students in June.

“I know that in our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers,” the prime minister said on July 7, after the suspects were arrested. “And that’s the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don’t. We condemn them and we put them on trial and we’ll put them in prison.”

There are three reasons why the prime minister shouldn’t be speaking this way. For one thing, it’s wildly inappropriate. Israelis rightly complain when Palestinian leaders express regret for attacks on Israelis, but then hedge it with excuses or trash-talk about what’s wrong with Israel. The second part undoes the good in the opening words. Israelis should know better than to do the same thing.

The Palestinian public feels, much as Israelis do, that an attack like the arson murder in Duma village is an attack on all of them. Palestinians need, just like Israelis at such a moment, to hear from the other side that it understands and shares their grief. Statements like Netanyahu’s — which boil down to “It’s too bad but it’s not our fault and anyway you’re worse” — don’t cut it. The moment calls for solace, not insult.

Second, it’s the wrong thing to say to the Israeli public. The vast majority of Israelis are appalled by the Duma arson-murder, but a dangerous minority objects to the public’s outpouring of grief. Police are investigating a flood of threats that greeted Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin when he spoke out this month against the “flames of hatred” threatening Israeli democracy. Protesters, incensed that he dared criticize Israelis and sympathize with Arabs, are calling him “traitor,” “terrorist,” “president of the Arabs” and worse. They mustn’t be allowed to feel the prime minister has their back.

Netanyahu has been complaining for years that Palestinian terrorism, even when perpetrated by lone wolves without organizational backing, draws inspiration from the inflammatory words of Palestinian leaders, starting with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president. Abbas’s incitement, it turns out, consists mainly of repeated harangues about Israeli ill will and mistreatment of Palestinians. Apparently, constantly telling your people that the other guys are out to get you can inspire some of your people to go get them. That’s something to watch out for.

Finally, the prime minister must surely know his words aren’t true. There’s all too much room in Israel for these creeps. As the Shin Bet security agency is now acknowledging , settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, largely discounted for years, is becoming a crisis. Property vandalism, burning of fields and cutting down olives trees have long been endemic. Most perpetrators are never caught . Most of those arrested are let off with a slap on the wrist or less. Now, though, the agency says the violence is morphing into an armed conspiracy. Law enforcement authorities recommended stepped up measures a year ago, but Netanyahu vetoed them .

Even if that crisis didn’t exist, there would still be those street names to rebuke the prime minister. Israel still celebrates the gunmen of pre-state Israel who attacked British soldiers and Arab civilians as well as defending Jews and were hunted down as terrorists. And no wonder. Like Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and our own George Washington, hunted terrorists and traitors all, those gunmen helped win their country its freedom. That’s the way of the world. Some are more bloodthirsty than others. Some become democrats, others tyrants. But the principle is the same. It’s only after independence, when there’s a state to monopolize armed violence, that folks will stop hailing their gunmen as freedom fighters and start calling them criminals.



Israel’s Jewish-Terrorist Problem

By Ruth Margalit, New Yorker
August 05, 2015

Early on Friday morning, two masked men entered Duma, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, where they smashed the windows of two houses, threw firebombs inside, and fled. One house was empty; the other wasn’t. Ali Dawabsheh, an eighteen-month-old baby, died. His parents and four-year-old brother remain in critical condition. On the house, the attackers spray-painted, in Hebrew, the words “Long Live the Messiah King” and “Revenge.”

Israeli politicians condemned the fire as an act of terror. “Terrorism is terrorism,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday, as he vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. “It is difficult to see that there are those within my people capable of such acts,” President Reuven Rivlin said. He added, “The shame is great, though the pain is greater.” Netanyahu and others said that they were “shocked” by the attack. They shouldn’t have been.

For nearly a decade, a radical minority among Jewish settlers has carried out “price-tag attacks” in response to Palestinian violence or any action by the police or military that these settlers deem unjust. The attacks have included the destruction of property—setting fire to cars, livestock, and homes—and the desecration of mosques and churches. Some attacks, such as the vandalism of a military base in 2011, have been aimed directly at authorities, but more often they target Palestinians. “These quote-unquote hilltop youths tried to form an equation that told us—‘You evacuate a settlement, we will hurt the Palestinians,’” Avi Mizrahi, the former head of Central Command, told Israel’s Channel 10, in a report on the phenomenon in 2013.

Friday’s attack came during the same week that an Israeli court ordered the demolition of two illegal apartment buildings in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. It has also been described as retaliation for the drive-by shooting of four Israelis in the West Bank last month, which left one dead. The price-tag attacks at once stoke Palestinian violence and feed off it; they are cyclical and create a chilling sense of déjà vu. The murder of Ali Dawabsheh took place a year after another Palestinian, a sixteen-year-old named Muhammad Abu Khdeir, was burned alive. That killing, too, was an act of revenge, for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teen-agers last summer, which led to a full-blown war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The first price-tag attacks took place in 2006, in response to Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and evacuations of Jewish outposts in the West Bank, which riled and radicalized the settler camp. The attacks grew rampant in 2008. The Yesha Council, the main body that represents settlers, denounced the attacks as immoral in 2011. But the Yesha Council’s authority has weakened dramatically in recent years, as violent far-right settlers, backed by extremist rabbis, have taken the law into their own hands. The group behind these attacks is estimated to range from a few hundred to some three thousand members. As it has become more radical, so have its attacks, which have evolved from property destruction to torching Palestinian homes at times when residents are likely to be in them. Last year, for the first time, the U.S. State Department included price-tag attacks in its annual terrorism report. It recorded nearly four hundred cases in 2013. In 2014, the number dipped slightly, to three hundred and thirty.

New evidence shows that these attacks aren’t caused by a few “wild weeds,” as they are called in Hebrew, but are supported by settler councils, which have grown more extremist and are paid for, in large part, by taxpayer money. A report by the liberal think tank Molad revealed settler-council correspondence that describes price-tag tactics as a legitimate means of protest against the government. “What does this have to do with targeting Arabs?” the head of a Samaria settler council asked rhetorically in one document. He answered, “We believe that the borders of the struggle are wide,” and called on settlers to act “creatively.” Itzik Shadmi, another settler leader, justified the targeting of Israeli soldiers in a letter to settlement residents. “We must treat our opponent as a criminal—full stop. As a robber who wishes to uproot you from your home and hand it over to murderers and liars,” Shadmi wrote.


Settlers from the forcibly evacuated Dreinnoff apartment blocks in Beit E1 let the police know what they think. Photo Baz Ratner, Reuters.

While Netanyahu’s denunciation of Friday’s attack was swift, it seemed to exist in a vacuum. Two days earlier, as settlers rioted in response to the demolition of the illegal buildings in Beit El, Netanyahu approved the construction of three hundred new housing units in the buildings’ stead. That same day, Naftali Bennet, Israel’s education minister and the leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Home Party, showed up in Beit El; he called the rioting settlers “my brothers” and described the military’s removal of these apartment blocks as a “hasty, extremist, and inciting act.” There is now real, worrisome potential for conflagration. Hamas declared Friday a “day of rage” and stated that “every Israeli is now a legitimate target.” On Saturday, Palestinians and Israeli security forces clashed in Duma and in a refugee camp near Ramallah. On Monday, an Israeli woman was injured when a firebomb struck her car in Jerusalem.

Fifteen Palestinian homes have been set on fire in recent years, but not one of the arsonists has been put behind bars. While the police opened investigations into twelve of the cases, ten of them ended without indictments, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human-rights organization. (The three others were closed after the victims dropped charges.) It is undeniably difficult to gather enough evidence to bring the perpetrators of these attacks to trial: the settler community, which numbers more than three hundred thousand in the West Bank, covers assailants in a shroud of silence. In 2010, a far-right activist who spent hundreds of hours in the interrogation rooms of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal-intelligence agency, circulated a manual among settlers on how to avoid divulging any information that could be used as evidence in such cases. Tips included not talking to government-appointed lawyers.

Still, some on the left blame the police and military for the lack of prosecutions. In a statement on Friday, the human-rights group B’Tselem said that the latest attack was the result of “the authorities’ policy of not enforcing the law against Israelis who attack Palestinians and their property.” Others say that the government should be doing more to criminalize the attackers and the rabbis who hide behind them. “These rabbis have names, addresses, yeshivas,” Carmi Gilon, the former head of Shin Bet, said at a rally on Saturday in Tel Aviv. Gillon called on the government and the legal system to “deal with them just as you would deal with the religious leaders of Hamas.”

If Netanyahu is serious about stopping price-tag attacks, he should not only call the perpetrators terrorists but also treat them as such. Israel routinely holds suspected Palestinian terrorists for long periods of time without trial, under a controversial procedure known as administrative detention. Administrative detention has been used in the cases of just two Jewish Israelis, but this looks likely to change following an emergency meeting of the security cabinet on Sunday, during which it approved measures allowing the administrative detention of Israelis who attack Palestinians.

On Monday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon vowed that he would “fight Jewish terror without compromise” and recommended that the government “implement the drastic measure of administrative detention.” That same day, the police arrested Meir Ettinger, a far-right activist and the grandson of the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane, for suspected involvement in an extremist cell. Ettinger isn’t tied directly to the attack in Duma, but he is believed to be behind a group, calling itself “the Revolt,” which has plotted violent crimes against Palestinians in the past year. So far, he isn’t being held in administrative detention, but Haaretz reports that if he refuses to coöperate with the investigation, he will be.

“The idea of ‘The Revolt’ is very simple,” Ettinger wrote in a 2013 manifesto. “Israel has many weak spots: issues that are tiptoed around so as not to create riots. All we need to do is light up the explosives.”

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