A thriller with real-life consequences: New book shines fresh light on Jewish terrorism

Baruch Goldstein’s funeral near Hebron in 1994.

Amos Harel writes in Haaretz on 12 May 2023:

Jewish terrorism, which usually targets Palestinians and sometimes churches and mosques, isn’t anything new. Israeli journalist Roy Sharon has just come out with a riveting book on the phenomenon in the three decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords.

Sharon, the military commentator at state broadcaster Kan, covered the settlements for five years. His Hebrew-language book “Ve’inakma” (“Vengeance”) traces the history of Jewish terrorism starting around the time of Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994.

Sharon reconstructs the cases with precision, providing many new revelations. His big advantage: He handles cases that he also covered as a reporter.

There’s the Kahalani brothers from Hebron suburb Kiryat Arba, who tried to kill a Palestinian before their neighbor Goldstein did. At the last minute they discovered that the Shin Bet security service sabotaged the triggers of the M-16 rifles they took from the settlement’s armory. Then there were the notes that the two brothers passed each other behind bars; the Shin Bet got their hands on them and used them to manipulate the Kahalanis during their interrogations.

There was also the instinctive gesture by a suspect in the murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir that was captured by a camera in an East Jerusalem store in 2014. The investigators realized that the perpetrator was actually ultra-Orthodox; he tried to straighten the kippa that he had earlier removed from his head.

Then there was the time members of the Bat Ayin underground unnecessarily drove in reverse; it led to their capture. They had left a booby-trapped wagon next to an Arab girls’ school in Jerusalem.

These are just a few incidents. The Jewish murderers include Goldstein, Jack Tytel, Eden Natan-Zada and Asher Weisgan (the last two tried to thwart the Gaza pullout in 2005). It turned out that some of these guys weren’t very smart, but they were fanatical, determined and dangerous.   Shin Bet investigators tried hard but didn’t have the resources or interrogation methods that they use against Palestinians. So the gloomy thought comes up: How many of the convictions of Palestinians are false?

Another shocking episode was the “wedding of hate” dance during which far-rightists stabbed a photo of the Palestinian toddler Ali Dawabshe, who was killed in an arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma in 2015.

The murder, for which Jewish terrorist Amiram Ben Uliel was convicted, is probably the book’s dramatic peak. For the first time, the Shin Bet used “exceptional means” against Jewish terror suspects. Undercover work by the agency at the detention facility got one suspect to break. (The ploy was first reported by Chaim Levinson in Haaretz.)

“Vengeance” reads like a thriller. Sharon understands the rabbinical world, whose extremists sometimes supplied confirmations by turning a blind eye.  He also documents the security services’ problems even acknowledging that Jewish terrorism existed. The head of the Hebron Brigade, Meir Kalifi, said that when he first heard about the shooting at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, he was sure the perpetrator was a Palestinian. As he put it, “Who believed that a Jew would take a gun and shoot Muslim worshippers?”

Events like the massacre at the tomb were an extreme response to attacks on Jews and provoked reprisal attacks by the Palestinians.

A theme running through the book is the battle of wits between Shin Bet investigators and far-right activists, some of them true killers. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the national security minister, turns out to be more of a showboat; this might not be much of a surprise. More important is Noam Federman of Hebron, formerly a leader of Kahanist group Kach. Federman wrote a manual for withstanding Shin Bet interrogations.

In the case of the Bat Ayin underground, the Shin Bet could only get a few operatives convicted; others responsible for murders are still free. Sharon heard, as I did in 2004, Shin Bet chiefs say they’re convinced the murderers were in their interrogation rooms but escaped punishment with the help of Federman’s advice.

A decade later came a terrorist group based in the hills of Samaria in the northern West Bank. According to the Shin Bet, the group’s leaders, among them Meir Kahane’s grandson Meir Ettinger, hoped to topple Israel’s democracy and establish a kingdom in the spirit of the Bible. Ben Uliel and others were influenced by these ideas.

The whole story is linked to two key issues: religion and occupation. Time after time the Israeli presence in the West Bank spawns these wild weeds. Even if the Yesha Council of settlements condemns some of their actions, the Jewish terror attacks enjoy a certain support in the settlements and definitely in some of the settler outposts.

Sharon’s book reads like a continuation of the late-’90s book by the journalist Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, “Murder in the Name of God.” Changes since then haven’t been for the better. What Sharon’s book lacks, I would say, is a broader exploration of the government’s role.

What was their part in the neglect that helped fuel the Jewish terrorist movements? Could the phenomenon have been quashed at the outset?  Rabin considered evacuating the Jewish neighborhood in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida quarter after Goldstein’s massacre but dropped the idea. Two decades later, Netanyahu allowed the use of harsh methods in the investigation into the Duma murder.

Sharon grew up in the Karnei Shomron settlement in the northern West Bank and went to religious Zionist schools. Some of the figures in the book are quite familiar to him. Two of the people he dedicated the work to are his parents, “who educated me to distinguish between good and bad and between love of the land and hatred of strangers.” That’s actually the whole story in a nutshell.

This article is reproduced in its entirety