Max Blumenthal has been talking about the connections between the Jewish terror underground responsible for the murderous attack on the Palestinian family over the weekend and official Israel government organizations. Today for instance:

And two days ago:

Through terror, Meir Ettinger is doing the same as his grandfather [Meir] Kahane: Create new far-right political space to legitimize RW parties [referring to Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party among others]

Bernard Avishai, the liberal Zionist, largely agrees with Blumenthal here. He spoke to public radio station WBUR yesterday about the larger political support network for the Jewish terrorist underground:

What we’re dealing with here are a bunch of young people who are extremely marinated in a political culture in which both religiously and ideologically they view the ancient land of Israel as being theirs by promise… The question is what are the social atmospherics that produces the ideology…. The question is, what are the concentric circles around them?

We have to remember, Ettinger is sort of small potatoes. The Kahanist movement in the Israeli right is a kind of side show. I mean, you had a member of the Israeli right assassinate an Israeli prime minister 20 years ago this fall. And by the way if you take polls in Israel, somewhere between a quarter to a third of Israelis want to see the assassin freed. So you have a pretty large number of people in the country who are quite sympathetic to the ideology of these settlers even if they would never endorse an act of terror like this….

I think the Israeli right is feeling both oddly triumphant on the one hand because so many of them are crucial parts of the Netanyahu coalition, but also very defensive on the other, because they know that there is a kind of mobilization internationally against the settlement movement both in Europe and even in the United States.

So there’s a sense that any action that the Israeli government takes to constrain the settlements has got to be answered with some kind of act of dramatic resistance. Now very recently, last week, the Netanyahu government evacuated a little settlement called Beit El which was started by groups like the Hilltop Youth, and the action by these young people who perpetrated this horrible crime was they would say simply a response to the government’s treachery.

Netanyahu then turned around and authorized 300 new settlement units in other parts of the West Bank. So you have this kind of push pull in the Netanyahu government….

Naftali Bennett, who’s a crucial member of the Netanyahu government, showed up at Beit El, which the government had just evacuated… a couple of days later, and told the young activists and cadres, who were forced off that settlement, We’re with you, you’re our brothers, the government acted precipitously, under pressure, they should never have caved in.

I mean, you have this sort of curious government response to this, which is, We condemn the action, but the ideology that is presumably producing the action is actually in a way official business.