Israeli security services on high alert for extremist Jewish violence during Passover holiday
[Jerusalem] Twenty years after the murder by an extremist right-wing Jew of a prime minister of Israel, it took two particularly gruesome murders of children to kick the investigation of Israeli Jewish terror cells into high gear.
On Monday, Israeli authorities announced the indictments of seven members of a terror group responsible for attacks against Palestinians in the vicinity of Ramallah, including an Israeli army soldier and two minors.
Among other charges that were made public, the state prosecutor charged them with throwing tear gas grenades and firebombs into Palestinian homes. A gag order partially lifted on Wednesday revealed the arrests, made several weeks ago, and the charges.
All seven suspects are ultra-Orthodox Jews living in Israeli West Bank communities, including the soldier, who serves in the Netzah Yehuda infantry battalion, comprised of religiously-observant troops.
The warrant for their arrest states that the minors and two adults, the brothers Yisrael and Pincus Shendorfi, have confessed to the crimes for which they are charged. The prosecution claims that the soldier and the two minors, whose names are not allowed to be published, possessed a crate of ammunition, so-called “flashbang” grenades, a stun grenade, five M-16 rifle magazines and parts of an M-16 rifle.
In one of the attacks attributed to them, two tear gas grenades were thrown into the home of a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Beitillu last December. December 2015 is the month during which arrests were announced in the case of the murder of the Dawabsheh family, whose home was firebombed on July 31, 2015, killing the parents and an 18 month-old infant, and severely burning a 4-year-old son.
Weeks before that, on November 30, 2015, one adult man and two minors had been found guilty of the murder of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Jerusalemite who was shoved into a vehicle before being taken to the Jerusalem forest, where he was beaten and then burned alive.
So-called “Price Tag” attacks, which exist under that name since 2009 and are perpetrated by small cells of mostly young Jewish religious militants, have as their stated aim to exert a price from the state of Israel, which they hope to unseat.
Yoram Schweitzer, a consultant on counter-terror strategies for the prime minister and for the defense ministry and the director of the program on Terrorism & Low Intensity Conflict at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, told The Media Line that attacks against Arabs were “mere provocations in the hope that they’ll engender a much greater explosion of violence that will abolish a state they consider illegitimate.”
Schweitzer, like other Israeli security officials, estimates there are no more than “a few dozen” active members of such cells, often organized into two-man teams, but that the danger they pose is significant and that they are cushioned both by the ideology of extremist West Bank rabbis such as Yitzchak Ginsburg, an American-born preacher who heads a religious college in the post-’67 community of Yitzhar, who has defended the killing of non-Jews, and by “a larger community that does not take the law into its own hands, but tacitly supports the violent actors.”
“It is not a phenomenon specific to us,” he added, referring to Israelis. “In the 1970s the same thing was true about the Baader-Meinhof gang [in Germany] that was comprised of not much more than 50 people, but that enjoyed the quiet support of at least several hundred sympathizers.”
According to the indictment brought this week, the two minors packed grenades, making sure to wipe off their fingerprints, and wore masks as they headed to the Palestinian West Bank town of Beitillu. After confirming that people were in the home, they lobbed the grenades inside, shattering a window.
The family’s father was roused by a sense of burning in his eyes but managed to get his baby out of the home before any major injuries were incurred. In another November incident, the same minors decided to exact revenge for Palestinian attacks against Israelis by throwing stones, then firebombs, at a home in the village of Mazra’a Qibliya.
Possibly saving the family inside, one of the firebombs hit glass and bounced off it.
In yet another act of lawless revenge, three of the indicted suspects set fire to two Palestinian-owned cars and threw stones at other vehicles
The two minors, along with two of the adults, are also charged with battery against a 60-year-old Palestinian man who was moderately wounded when attacked with sticks and tear gas.
The soldier has been charged with permitting the minors to use his weapon.
Using the Hebrew acronym for Israel’s security services, Alex Fishman, an analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonot, wrote in a column entitled. “What happens when you let the Shin Bet do its work,” that “the moment politicians stopped turning a blind eye and the legal system quit buckling under pressure, Jewish terrorism finally started being handled properly.”
It is only after the cataclysm that befell the Dawabsheh family, he continues, that “our political and legal ranks sobered up, shook off the pressure exerted by the settler lobby, and internalized the fact that these were not hilltop punks, but Jewish terrorists who pose a danger to the state of Israel.”
Speaking with The Media Line, Dvir Kariv, a former senior official with the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency akin to the American FBI, and the author of a book on the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, told The Media Line that “you have to ask a psychologist” to understand why the Israeli political echelon has for so long resisted a more aggressive pursuit of Jewish terrorists.
“I think they’re afraid any serious crackdown may have political consequences. It may also be the desire of Israelis to see themselves as a singular people, as if we are better than this. It is hard to accept that within us we have these extremists.”
There are very few extremists capable of violent acts, Kariv asserts, but they exist, both on the left and on the right. He cited the case of Tali Fahima, an Israeli Jew who was convicted for committing acts of pro-Palestinian terror, as an example on the left.