The words “Jewish” and “terrorist” are not easily uttered
together by Israelis. But just occasionally, such as last week when one of the
country’s leading intellectuals was injured by a pipe bomb placed at the front
door of his home, they find themselves with little choice.
The target of the attack was 73-year-old Zeev Sternhell, a
politics professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem specialising in European
fascism and a prominent supporter of the left-wing group Peace Now.
Shortly after the explosion, police found pamphlets nearby
offering 1.1 million shekels (Dh720,000) to anyone assassinating a Peace Now
leader. The movement’s most visible activity has been tracking and criticising
the growth of the settlements in the West Bank.
Mr Sternhell, whose leg was injured in the blast, warned that
this attack might mark the “collapse of democracy” in Israel. He has earned the
enmity of the religious far-right by justifying the targeting of settlers by
Palestinians in their resistance to occupation.
Earlier in the year the professor was awarded the Israel Prize
for political science. The settlers’ own news agency, Arutz Sheva, ran a story
at the time headlined “Israel Prize to go to Pro-Terror, Pro-Civil War Prof”.
The shock provoked in Israel by the bombing partly reflected the
rarity of such attacks. Most Israelis regard the use of violence by Jews against
other Jews as entirely illegitimate, which partly explains the kid-glove
approach generally adopted by the security forces when dealing with the
settlers.
There are a handful of precedents, however, for these kind of
attacks. In 1983, Emile Grunzweig was killed when a right-winger hurled a hand
grenade into a crowd of Peace Now activists marching against Israel’s invasion
of Lebanon. And 12 years later Israelis were left reeling when a religious
settler, Yigal Amir, shot dead their prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Violence directed at the Jewish Left typically peaks during
periods when the religious far-right believes a deal with the Palestinians may
be close at hand. Rabin paid the price for his signing of the Oslo accords.
Equally, Mr Sternhell appears to be the address for settler grievances over the
government’s ongoing talks with the Palestinians over a partial Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank.
Certainly, the mood among the religious settlers has grown darker
since the disengagement from Gaza three years ago. A significant number
subscribe to the belief that, in betraying what they perceive to be the Jewish
people’s Biblical birthright to Palestinian territory, the government proved
itself unworthy of their loyalty. Others believe that the settlers themselves
failed a divine test in not facing down the government and army.
Either way, many far-right settlers are turning their backs on
those secular laws that clash with their own convictions. One Israeli observer
has noted that these settlers no longer see their chief loyalty to the state of
Israel but to the Land of Israel, a land promised by God not politicians.
The pamphlet found near Mr Sternhell’s home, signed by a group
called the “Army of Liberators”, read: “The State of Israel has become our
enemy.”
The Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, have a Jewish department
dedicated to tracking the activities of Jewish terrorists. Unlike the Shin Bet’s
Arab department, however, it is small and underfunded. It has also proved
largely ineffectual in dealing with the threat posed by the far-right.
Jewish extremists who attack Israeli soldiers or Palestinians in
the occupied territories, openly incite against Palestinians or express unlawful
views rarely face charges, even when there is clear evidence of wrongdoing.
The general lawlessness among the West Bank settlers has reached
new peaks, underscored when settlers from Yitzhar went on what was widely
described as a “pogrom” against Palestinians in the neighbouring village of
Asira al Qabaliya. The settlers were caught on film firing live ammunition at
the villagers, but the police have so far failed to issue indictments.
Also, often forgotten, the so-called Jewish underground has a
history of targeting Palestinians inside Israel, including those with
citizenship. A car bomb narrowly avoided seriously injuring the wife of Arab
Knesset member Issam Makhoul in 2003. Two years later, in the run-up to the Gaza
disengagement, a settler soldier, Natan Zada, shot dead four passengers on a bus
to the Israeli Arab city of Shafa’amr.
Groups such as the Temple Mount Faithful, which seek to blow up
the mosques of Al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock in the Haram al-Sharif of
Jerusalem’s Old City so that a third Jewish temple can be built in their place,
also face little recourse from the Shin Bet.
By contrast, the Shin Bet’s Arab department runs an extensive
network of Palestinian informers in the occupied territories and is reported by
human rights groups to use torture to extract information from Palestinian
detainees.
Israel’s leading columnist Nahum Barnea noted last week that the
Shin Bet’s inability to find and arrest Jewish terrorists stemmed from
“deliberate policy” and “emotional obstacles” – his coy way of suggesting that
many in the Shin Bet share at least some of the settlers’ values, even if they
reject their methods.
In this vacuum of law enforcement, the far-right regularly and
openly engages in unlawful activities, often without serious threat of
punishment. Many of its leaders, such as Noam Federman, Itamar Ben Gvir and
Baruch Marzel, all based in Hebron, are believed to have close links to the
outlawed Kach movement, which demands the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from
the region.
Mr Ben Gvir, who leads a group known as the Jewish National
Front, denied that his faction was involved in the attack on Mr Sternhell but
refused to condemn it.
Although the head of the Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, immediately
branded the attack on Mr Sternhell as “a nationalist terror attack apparently
perpetrated by Jews”, it is noticeable that no Israelis are demanding the
demolition of the perpetrators’ homes.
That contrasts strongly with the response last week after a
Palestinian youth drove a car at a group of Israeli soldiers near the Old City
of Jerusalem. Israeli politicians called for the youth’s home to be destroyed
and his family to be made homeless.
