JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli authorities kicked off a promised crackdown on Jewish extremists following last week's deadly arson attack on a Palestinian family, arresting a high-profile activist accused of leading a new movement of defiant settler youths who embrace violence and reject the rule of law in the name of the purity of the Holy Land.
Meir Ettinger, whose arrest Monday was extended in court Tuesday, is the grandson of U.S.-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, Israel's most notorious Jewish extremist, whose ultranationalist party was banned from Israel's parliament for its racist views in 1988 and who was killed by an Arab gunman in New York in 1990.
According to the Shin Bet security agency, the 23-year-old Ettinger was arrested for "involvement in an extremist Jewish organization." The agency would not say if he is also suspected in the July 31 arson attack, but it has accused Ettinger of heading an extremist movement seeking to bring about religious "redemption" through attacks on Christian sites and Palestinian homes.
Israeli media have dubbed Ettinger as the Shin Bet's "number one" most wanted Jewish extremist. He has been arrested several times before and banned from the West Bank. Ettinger is also the grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist whose party was banned from Israel's parliament for its racist views in 1988. Kahane was killed by an Arab gunman in 1990.
Ettinger has denied leading an extremist movement. His lawyer, Yuval Zemer, told Israel's Army Radio that authorities arrested his client to appease an Israeli public outraged by the arson attack.
"There was no urgent need to arrest here, other than some kind of desire to show, 'Here, we're doing something, here, we're arresting,'" said Zemer. "Of course, what is better than the number one most wanted target?"
The arrest comes on the heels of a violent spate of attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories that threatened to ignite widespread violence in the region.
The Shin Bet would not say whether Ettinger had anything to do with the attack on the West Bank home, which killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and severely injured his parents and 4-year-old brother.
However, the agency singled out Ettinger two days before the attack, when it announced it had uncovered a Jewish extremist movement of young settler activists responsible for a June arson attack of the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, a prominent Catholic church near the Sea of Galilee, and a number of other hate crimes. The Shin Bet at the time accused Ettinger of heading the movement.
Ettinger, in a large skullcap, scruffy beard and sidelocks, smiled at the swarm of news crews before his hearing. In a July 30 blog post before his arrest, he denied the Shin Bet's accusation that he leads an extremist group.
"There is no terror organization, but 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," Ettinger wrote. "The laws they are bound by are not the State's laws ... but laws that are much more eternal and real."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged "zero tolerance" for Jewish terrorism following two deadly attacks by extremists. The attack that killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and severely injured his parents and 4-year-old brother in the West Bank came a day after an anti-gay ultra-Orthodox man stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli girl during a rampage against marchers at Jerusalem's gay pride parade. The girl later died of her wounds.
Authorities are expected to crack down much harder on suspected Jewish extremist cells, particularly among West Bank settler youths.
"I have heard from the fringes of our society that there are those who say there is a supreme law above the country's laws. I wish to clarify that there is no law above the country's laws," Netanyahu said Tuesday. "Whoever breaks them, whoever champions hate crimes, whoever carries out violence, whoever carries out terror, we will act against them with all the weight of the law."
Israeli media have dubbed Ettinger the Shin Bet's "No. 1" most-wanted Jewish extremist. He has been arrested several times before and banned from the West Bank. His lawyer, Yuval Zemer, told Israel's Army Radio that authorities arrested his client to appease an Israeli public outraged by the arson attack.
"There was no urgent need to arrest here, other than some kind of desire to show, 'Here, we're doing something, here, we're arresting,'" Zemer said. "Of course, what is better than the No. 1 most-wanted target?"
The Shin Bet singled out Ettinger two days before the attack on the West Bank home when it announced it had uncovered a Jewish extremist movement of young settler activists responsible for a June arson attack of the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, a prominent Catholic church near the Sea of Galilee, and a number of other hate crimes.
Authorities indicted two other young extremists and arrested three others in connection with the church arson attack. The Shin Bet said Ettinger's group vandalized a number of Christian religious sites in the past two years, tried to disrupt Pope Francis' 2014 visit to the Holy Land, and committed "more significant terrorist attacks of arson" against Palestinian homes in the West Bank in the past year.
A month before the church attack, Ettinger called on his blog for more attacks on Christian religious sites. He had lived in recent months in unauthorized Jewish settlement encampments in the West Bank set up by the "hilltop youth," the Shin Bet said, using a term referring to radicalized Jewish teen squatters on West Bank hilltops who have been known to attack Palestinians and their property.
Six months ago, authorities signed a yearlong order preventing Ettinger from entering Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements, saying he posed a danger. He moved to the northern city of Safed, a hub for Jewish religious mystics.
Shlomo Fischer, an expert on Jewish extremism, said the recent attacks appeared to be the work of those acting without the explicit blessing of rabbinic figures, as has been the case in the past.
"They seem to represent a relatively new kind of religious authority — that of the violent activists themselves," Fischer said. "The violent activists conceive of themselves as having a sort of charismatic-prophetic authority and what authorizes these extreme actions is 'the voice of God' within them."
Also Tuesday, Israeli security forces demolished a Jewish settlement house in an outpost of the Eli settlement that had been built illegally on private Palestinian land in the West Bank. COGAT, the defense body that handles civilian issues with the Palestinians, said the demolition was coordinated with the settlers and there were no protests.
Last week, settlers clashed with Israeli troops as Israeli bulldozers demolished a contested housing complex in another Jewish settlement in the West Bank — an action that has previously drawn reprisals from settler youth.
Take a good look at the photographs of the suspects in the new Jewish underground being taken into custody. Look at them grinning with their unruly, never-shaven beards and payot flowing from under the soup-bowl kippot. Seriously, they’re rock stars, they don’t give a damn what anyone thinks and they’ll have a whale of a time in prison, emerging even bigger heroes. Once you’ve slipped the earthly bonds of mortal judgment, nothing can touch you.
They (allegedly) burned mosques and churches and a home with a sleeping family inside, killing an 18-month-old baby boy, and now just look at them, blissfully happy. I bet you saw those photographs and felt a burning shame; how could Jews do such a thing? Don’t they realize the harm they are doing all of us? The shanda, the hillul Hashem, desecration of God’s name? This is what True Jews look like – Jews who don’t care what you or anyone else thinks because they’re true Jews exercising Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. They’re keeping it real.
Look at the photos again
I suppose to feel a bit better with yourself, you had to go and read on one of the many websites, like this one, where bromides were offered by assorted rabbis explaining why these young hooligans are perverting Judaism and bringing our Torah, whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace, into disrepute. Only they’re not. Look at those photographs again. That’s what Jews who are not afraid or ashamed to go to prison for being faithful to the original unvarnished values of Torah look like. And once you’re done forcing yourself to look again at their faces, take a gander as well at Yishai Schlissel stabbing the marchers last Thursday at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade. You want to believe he’s mad, don’t you? He isn’t, he’s just the true embodiment of Jewish values. A lone, but brave and resolved kana’i, the zealot ridding the streets of God’s city from abomination.
It took nearly 2,000 years of exile and fear of the nations but finally, a generation of true Jews is once again rising. Don’t listen to the cowardly words of media-friendly rabbis, false prophets who haven’t got the guts to say that they wish the 22nd verse of the 18th chapter of Va’yikra (Leviticus) had never been written. Well, they’re not about to excise it and other unpalatable verses from their Torah scrolls, so they may as well own it. Yes, a man lying down with another man as if with a woman is an abomination. It says so in the book of life. Don’t try to pretend it’s not written there and fob us off with nice cuddly quotes of pleasantness and peace. Ours is not a religion of peace and our God demands vengeance and ethnic cleansing.
Lehava founder Bentzi Gopstein has every bit as much scripture to rely on as they do, when he says that we should be going out to destroy every church in the Holy Land. Or have they conveniently forgot Maimonides’ ninth principle of faith, that this Torah shall never be replaced? Of course, nice rabbis love quoting Maimonides, but just the more cosmopolitan bits, not those about the Messiah and wars and destroying all the houses of alien worship.
Face it, those bearded youths from the hilltops are more truly Jewish than you or I will ever be. Theirs is a true Torat Eretz Yisrael, unadulterated by goyishe crap. And who loves Jerusalem more than Schlissel? A man who was willing to go to prison in his quest to cleanse our city and upon release, accepted upon himself an inevitable second sentence to continue his mission? I like to present myself as the ultimate Jerusalemite but I can barely be bothered to pick up that cigarette butt.
Netanyahu should check out Kiryat Arba
Benjamin Netanyahu tried to salvage a bit of moral comfort on Sunday when he reminded us that while we unequivocally condemn our homegrown murderers, our neighbors name streets and squares after them. He should check out a Kiryat Arba street map. It’s just a matter of time. The way we’re going, the next generation of true Jews will stroll down Jerusalem’s Meir Ettinger Boulevard to Schlissel Plaza for a ritual stoning of heretics and perverts. You remember that scene with the blasphemer in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”? That was life in the good old Jewish Kingdom BCE and it could be our lives again if the true Jews have their way.
For all the protestations that Judaism is a religion of peace, there is absolutely no guarantee that our rabbis will be more successful in their crusade of moderation than their Muslim counterparts. They insisted for years that Islam is perfectly benign, only to be confronted now with ISIS and its true faith of beheadings and slavery. Netanyahu’s claim that we’re different from the rest of the region rings hollow when in the space of a few hours last week true Jews murdered both a Jewish girl and a Muslim toddler.
I honestly believe the Torah is the most wonderful book written by mankind. It’s the book of books I’d take to a desert island and a huge privilege to belong to the nation that carried it for all these centuries. But it was written more than 3,000 years ago and we’ve moved on a bit since. If the rabbis can’t bring themselves to admit that whole swaths of the Torah are simply not relevant today, and, more to the point, contain the antithesis of a functioning society, then they are abandoning us with their platitudes to the mercy of the true Jews.
Judaism did not survive by remaining true to its roots. It deliberately lost its authenticity and assimilated and adapted and evolved. The problematic bits of the Torah were explained away and put under a heavy pile of caveats precisely because they were inadequate and inappropriate for the changing times. Conversion of local spouses, friends and neighbors was allowed and for many generations encouraged, because racial purity was a self-defeating policy that would have led to extinction. Maimonides was a blessed hypocrite who with one stroke of his quill professed loyalty to the only immutable Torah, and with the next incorporated Aristotle into Jewish philosophy. We should recognize his brilliance in doing so.
It’s like Coca-Cola
The multiple obstacles the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate put today on conversion and interpretation, their unwillingness to change their “pure education,” are pushing the Haredi community out on an obscure limb of the evolutionary tree from where they can only plummet into the abyss. Luckily, most of their followers are too clever to fall for that trick, and they’re flocking to “alien” studies despite the rabbis’ admonishments. We should be pointing out that they aren’t even keeping true, instead of us trying to compete over whose Torah is the real thing. It’s like Coca-Cola: There is only one classic flavor, and it’s fattening and bad for your teeth.
True Judaism has only spelled disaster for Jews wherever and whenever it was practiced and forced upon us. We held on in spite of it all because we picked and chose the relevant and necessary parts of Torah and tradition and disregarded the rest. Our Torat Haim – code of life – was a bastardized hybrid of useful ancient traditions combined with whatever we could gather and adapt from our new surroundings and too-frequent travels. We learned to survive by abandoning any high-minded status of Hebrew thoroughbreds, becoming hardy Jewish mongrels instead. Analyze the culture of any Jewish community and its genetic makeup and you will find that it succeeded through mixing local cocktails, not by sticking to neat Jewishness.
We will never be pure enough for the true Jews and we should never try to be. The murderers of Shira Banki and Ali Dawabsheh will always win every contest for the real Judaism. You don’t care about alternatives and the disastrous results of your actions when you hold eternal truth. A truth that damns us all.
Anshel Pfeffer
Haaretz Correspondent
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