Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has introduced a new criterion to the public debate. From now on we will have the “small terror” of Jews and the “large terror” of Palestinians. “The Arab terror that is assaulting us incessantly is of a far larger scope The group that appears there is extremist and marginal and doesn’t represent religious Zionism,” was how Netanyahu described the hierarchy of terror that from now on will be characterized by the number of attacks, their scope and the representation that the terrorists have taken upon themselves.

Netanyahu’s “small” lie is the attempt to reduce the value of “small terror” by comparing it to “large-scale” Palestinian terror. But size, for those who like comparisons, doesn't matter. The “small terror” that “does not represent religious Zionism” murdered Yitzhak Rabin, the child Mohammed Abu Khdeir, oh yes, and also burned the Dawabsheh family. It really is insignificant terror compared to Palestinian terror.

But the small lie has a big, far more threatening brother. It lies in the attempt to separate religious Zionism from its terrorist offspring. The enlightening commentary of Chaim Levinson to the effect that the “Jewish terror doesn’t happen because of radical rabbis, but despite them,” does not absolve those rabbis, the foundations of religious Zionism, of their responsibility for other crimes, or of the nod with which they reacted when they realized how poisonous fruit was growing in their garden.

Netanyahu prefers to make us forget the fact that the terrorists who emerged from the womb of the mother movement were educated at the feet of its rabbis, studied the book “The King’s Torah,” absorbed the legacy of the Jewish underground and finally decided to split from the mainstream and start a terror organization. They can be compared to Lehi militia, which left the underground paramilitary Etzel and was declared a terror organization by the British and the temporary pre-state government. It also had ideological parents, and just as it received recognition and national honor in 1980, when the state recognized its contribution to the revival of the state, today’s “small” terrorists will become the heroes of religious Zionism.

According to Netanyahu’s false terror league chart, religious Zionism is divided into two houses: terrorist religious Zionists and those who do not belong to that category. The same leaders of religious Zionism, including the founding fathers of the Jewish underground and the disciples of Baruch Goldstein “are the government,” according to Habayit Hayehudi chairman Naftali Bennett, and therefore no longer have to resort to terror.

But we should restrain our applause for their words of condemnation, because Jewish “small terror” does not reflect an internal struggle for control of religious Zionism. The Jewish terrorists want to banish religious Zionism, and even more so secular Zionism, from their status as representing the Jewish state – and they will succeed. The “martyrs” who are being interrogated by the Shin Bet security service now represent Netanyahu, the settlers, the secular Jews and the State of Israel.

It would be a big mistake to make religious Zionism responsible for uprooting those terrorists, a task at which it has failed dismally. The comparison being made between the Jewish terrorists and religious Zionism is a deliberate act of deception and repulsive self-righteousness, which will let religious Zionism emerge as pure as snow. The proper comparison is between religious Zionism, which interprets the essence of Judaism for the State of Israel in a radical and undemocratic manner, and the secular, liberal majority, which is fighting, without much success, for the survival of a few universal values.

The “hierarchy of terror” as presented by Netanyahu is the heart of a corrupt Zionism, which encourages the control of Rabbi Kook’s ideology over the state and its laws, in exchange for a declaration of cooperation against Jewish terror. And so, while the secular-liberal majority is excited by the shocked reaction of settler leaders to the wedding of revenge, Netanyahu and religious Zionism can dance at a wedding of their own, at which the yellowing picture of Zionism is pierced with a knife.