Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2016, pp. 44-45

Israel and Judaism

Religious Extremism in Israel Becoming Increasingly Mainstream

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The growth of Jewish extremism in Israel has been a reality for many years. In December, Amiram Ben-Uliel, 21, along with another young Jewish Israeli, was charged with murder in last July’s deadly arson attack on a Palestinian home in the West Bank village of Duma which killed toddler Ali Dawabsheh and his parents, Saad and Riham. (See September 2015 Washington Report, p. 11.) Their second child, Ahmed, 4, survived, but was left with burns on more than 60 percent of his body.

Ben-Uliel, who grew up in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and spent some of his teenage years living in outposts on West Bank hilltops, confessed to planning and carrying out the attack. A minor who was not named confessed to helping plan it. Israeli police said the two suspects were part of a group of Jewish youths who have been involved in nationalistically motivated crimes against Palestinians and other minorities. Police said the young extremists also have burned and vandalized churches and targeted Christians.

For some in Israel, those charged with this terrorist attack have become heroes. In December, a widely viewed video showed young Jewish extremists celebrating the death of Palestinians in Duma. A video filmed at a wedding shows a room full of jumping, dancing men wearing white skullcaps with the long sidelocks of Orthodox Jews. Some of them are brandishing guns and knives. According to The New York Times, “Two of them appear to be stabbing pieces of paper they held in their hands, which the television station identified as pictures of an 18-month child, Ali Dawabsheh, who was burned to death in a July 31 arson attack...Palestinians and their supporters say the arson attack and the celebratory video were inevitable, complaining that the Israeli authorities have for years dragged their feet on finding and prosecuting extremist Jews who have physically attacked them and their property.”

Recently there has also been an escalation of anti-Christian activity by Israeli Jewish extremists. The anti-Arab group Lehava, which opposes the presence of both Muslims and Christians in the country, has stepped up its activism, including a protest at a Christmas celebration in front of the Jerusalem YMCA. “The Arabs won’t defeat us with knives, and the Christians won’t buy us with presents,” the Lehava protesters chanted. In December, Bentzi Gopstein, the head of Lehava, wrote an opinion piece in Kooker, an ultra-Orthodox online publication, calling for the outright removal of Christians from Israel.

Gopstein wrote: “Missionary work must not be given a foothold. Let’s throw the vampires out of our land before they drink our blood again.” The Israel Religious Action Center, a religious rights group affiliated with the country’s Reform Judaism movement, has called on legal authorities to launch a criminal investigation into what it views as Lehava’s incitement to violence. Orly Erez-Likhovski, the center’s legal director, lamented that, “Unfortunately, against this blatant incitement, accompanied by unruly violence, there’s deafening silence by law enforcement.”

Israel’s religious right-wing seems to be growing both in numbers and militancy, and is an important part of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government. Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid declares that, “Israel’s religious right can no longer absolve itself of responsibility for the actions of radicals who grew up in its midst, and now finds itself at a critical juncture.…Sadly, these are not ‘wild weeds’ [referring to the Hebrew expression often used by the right to describe far-right extremists]. They grew in a well-cultivated patch of earth.”

American-born Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh has a history of racist incitement which sanctions violence against Arabs. In the past, he has spoken in support of the actions of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein, also American-born, who murdered 29 people and injured over 100 in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre in Hebron. An estimated 10 percent of those living in West Bank settlements are emigrants from the United States.

Rabbi Ginsburgh speaks freely of Jews’ allegedly genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews. “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” he says. “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”

Another militant rabbi, Dov Lior, was involved in publishing the 2011 text, The King’s Torah, which became a best-seller in Israel. It discusses when it is permissible for Jews to kill non-Jews. Lior considers Baruch Goldstein a hero. In a eulogy, Rabbi Lior declared that, “Goldstein was full of love for fellow human beings. He dedicated himself to helping others.” The terms “human beings” and “others,” in Orthodox Jewish law, refer solely to Jews.

Meretz leader Zahava Gal-on called on Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to open an investigation into rabbis who she says are supporting right-wing extremists. According to former Shin Bet head Carmi Gillon, the threat posed to Israel by a terrorist “underground” of religious far-right extremists has reached unprecedented levels, worse than in the lead-up to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, when Gillon headed the security service. He described far-right extremists such as those currently charged with the Duma firebombing as “a professional underground in every regard.”

Yet in the West Bank, police systematically close investigations of Israeli violence against Palestinians. Out of 1,104 investigations opened after Palestinians complained of violent injury or property damage over a 10-year period, from 2005 to August 2015, 940—or 91.6 percent—were closed without charges being filed, according to Yesh Din, a legal defense organization. In 85 percent of the cases, the closure was due to failure of the police to investigate.

A Typical Case

In one typical case, reports Haaretz, in October 2011 a few Israeli Jews from Combatants for Peace accompanied Palestinians from the village of Jalud on their first olive harvest in 10 years. In all those years the IDF had kept them from working their land to avoid friction with the messianic settlers from local outposts such as Esh Kadesh. Masked Israelis, accompanied by an armed, unmasked Israeli in civilian clothes, came, threw a stun grenade, fired into the air and attacked the harvesters with clubs, injuring three Israelis and two Palestinians. Soldiers and Border Police officers who were there fired tear gas and stun grenades at Palestinians. The case was closed despite the wounded Israelis and the presence of soldiers who were witnesses.

In Haaretz columnist Amira Hass’ view, “Thanks to the mainstream, the West Bank has become the land of unlimited possibilities for the average Israeli Jew...The messianism was born of the incessant secular Israeli disregard for international law and justice, which prohibit settlements in occupied territory. Their deranged messianism is fed by the consistent deranged political objective of the settlement enterprise: to thwart the possibility of living in equality and peace with the Palestinian people.”

Israeli commentators have begun to compare the rising Jewish extremism to ISIS. Liberal Zionist and Haaretz columnist Asher Schechter recently wrote a piece entitled “Meet Judeo-ISIS: The Inevitable Result Of Israel’s Presence in the West Bank.” Even so mainstream a figure as former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens wrote an article titled, “The Jewish Equivalant of ISIS.”

In the face of the growth of religious extremism in Israel, and its lack of religious freedom for non-Orthodox Jews, the organized American Jewish community has remained largely silent. Israelis concerned about the growth of intolerant religious extremism in their own country have noticed. Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev decries “the deafening silence of most American Jews in response to the waves of chauvinistic anti-democratic legislation and incitement in which Israel is increasingly drowning. The authoritarian campaign includes legislative assaults on free speech, incitement against dissenters, the withholding of government funds for regulatory measures against—and greater government control over—television and other media, compulsory changes to school curricula, reinforced Orthodox hegemony over religious affairs and repeated attacks on the Arab minority.”

Forward editor Jane Eisner wrote on Jan. 7 that Shalev “is correct in charging that many of us react to an assault on liberal values in the Israeli context differently than if it happened here. What if the U.S. government tried to ban a book because it promoted racial intermarriage? What if a desperate Republican Party candidate appealed to his white constituency on Election Day by warning of ‘droves’ of Hispanics swarming to the polls? Yet when the Israeli government banned such a book, or when Binyamin Netanyahu employed such a cynical tactic, there was a response from predictable sources, but no lasting campaign or outcry.” ◙

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.