Israel Faces New Brand of Terrorism, This Time From Young Settlers

Israel Faces New Brand of Terrorism, This Time From Young Settlers
By ISABEL KERSHNERJAN. 11, 2016
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Youths from the encampment of Baladim studying at the Maale Shlomo outpost in the West Bank. Shin Bet, the security service, has identified Baladim as a base where young Jewish activists formulated their radical agenda. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
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MAALE SHLOMO OUTPOST, West Bank — To hear his father tell it, Mordechai Meyer, 18, a high school dropout, has spent the past few years camping out with his teenage friends in the rolling hills around Jewish outposts like this one in the northern West Bank. They want “to live simply, to build their own things and to commune with God,” said the father, Gedalia Meyer.
But Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, says the younger Mr. Meyer belongs to a Jewish terrorist network, some of whose members have been charged with grave crimes, including the July arson attack that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents in the West Bank village of Duma. The two suspects in that case also spent time in these hills.
The existence of the network, known as the Revolt for the title of its manifesto, became known about six months ago, after the arrest of several suspected members. This latest manifestation of Jewish terrorism is the creation of young extremists rebelling against what they view as the inertia of the Israeli establishment, and it has fermented in lawless outposts like Baladim, a tiny encampment outside Maale Shlomo, and Geulat Zion to the north.
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Mr. Meyer at his lawyer’s office in Jerusalem. Mr. Meyer was held in administrative detention for five months as a suspect in arson attacks before being released last week, and remains under house arrest at night. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Shin Bet says the group poses a continuing danger of violence, and the authorities have gone after it using extraordinary methods that were previously reserved for Palestinians accused of terrorism. Suspects have been imprisoned without charge under administrative detention orders, and have been denied meetings with lawyers for as long as three weeks.
But the attacks have not halted. One night last month, suspected Jewish extremists threw two tear gas canisters into a small house in the Palestinian village of Beitillu, according to the Israeli police. The owner said he nearly choked as he escaped with his wife and child. Hebrew graffiti on a nearby wall read “Revenge” and “Regards, the detainees of Zion.”
The Duma attack and the Revolt have roiled the pro-settlement establishment of religious Zionists. Settler leaders have vehemently condemned the arson and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Some in the settler community say Shin Bet has exaggerated the risk posed by a few dozen uneducated youths, and they fear that liberal and secular forces in Israel will exploit the Duma episode to discredit the settlers.
“In criminal terms, it is a terrible thing,” Yisrael Harel, a veteran leader of the settlement movement, said of Duma and the shadowy network exposed by Shin Bet. “In terms of significance, it is something that will disappear with the passage of time.”
Mr. Harel described the Revolt as “a metaphorical ticking bomb, not from the terrorist standpoint but from a sociological one, for our public because it hurts a whole community.”
Shin Bet says there are about 30 to 40 activists in the “hard core” of the Revolt, many of them from a radical fringe of settlers known as hilltop youths. They are said to operate in squads of two or three, using weapons like fire bombs and spray paint.
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Mordechai Meyer was placed in administrative detention five months ago when the authorities suspected him of involvement in arson attacks on two churches, but lacked enough evidence to charge him. A few days later, Meir Ettinger, a grandson of Meir Kahane, the American-Israeli rabbi considered the father of far-right Jewish militancy, was also detained; Shin Bet said Mr. Ettinger is the leader of the Revolt, although it says the network has no strict hierarchy.
Mr. Meyer was abruptly released on Jan. 3, after the Israeli authorities charged other suspects in the church arsons.
“From the beginning, I said that it was a lie,” Mr. Meyer said in a brief interview in his lawyer’s office in Jerusalem, accompanied by his parents and wearing a large crocheted skullcap and long, flowing side locks in the fashion of the hilltop youths.
“He was in jail for nothing,” said his lawyer, Itzhak Bam, from Honenu, a right-wing legal aid organization. “He did nothing wrong.”
Shin Bet said Mr. Meyer was detained because he posed a danger as an active member of a terrorist network. He remains under house arrest at night and is barred from going anywhere in the West Bank except Maale Adumim, where his family lives.
Asked whether he is involved in the Revolt, Mr. Meyer responded angrily, “Not answering.”
The Revolt extremists’ manifesto says they seek the collapse of the state of Israel, with its democratic government and courts, and the creation of a Jewish kingdom to replace it based on religious law, with all non-Jews expelled.
Shin Bet has made public a manual that it said was written by another activist, Moshe Orbach, with instructions on how to set fire to mosques and Palestinian houses.
The Revolt is a more extreme outgrowth of an older generation of hilltop youths following a doctrine known as the “Price Tag,” which called for attacks in the West Bank against Palestinians and the Israeli military for two purposes: deterring official moves against illegal settlement construction, and revenge for Palestinian attacks on Jews.
Shin Bet says the founders of the Revolt began formulating their ideas in the fall of 2013. Extremists began attacking Christian churches, which did not seem to have anything to do with deterring curbs on settlements, and later started setting fire to houses with families sleeping inside, not just empty ones, according to the agency.
Several Revolt suspects come from respected families in the core of religious Zionism. Mr. Meyer’s father is a rabbi and his mother, Sara, works with older adults. The main suspect in the Duma case, Amiram Ben-Uliel, 21, is the son of a rabbi and educator from Karmei Tzur.
The so-called Jewish Underground of the 1980s, which killed and maimed Palestinian mayors and students, was made up mainly of army veterans in their 30s. The Revolt, by contrast, is largely composed of young high school dropouts whom the army prefers not to draft.
“I think what we are dealing with is a case of juvenile delinquency that got out of hand,” said David Haivri, a veteran settler activist and a once-militant follower of Meir Kahane. He said he hoped the Duma would serve as a “wake-up call for parents and educators,” but he added, “I don’t think that a group of delinquents who don’t believe in taking showers are going to overthrow the country.”
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According to the charge sheet, Mr. Ben-Uliel and a minor accused of helping plan the Duma attack said they were trying to avenge an Israeli man, Malakhi Rosenfeld, 26, who was fatally shot by Palestinians as he rode in a car the previous month.
“They are very, very angry with Israel,” Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, a prominent voice in modern Orthodoxy, said of the hilltop youths. They believe the state does too little to protect Jews from Palestinian terrorism, he said, and “they do not even listen to the most extreme rabbis.”
On a recent weekday, donkeys stood at the entrance to Maale Shlomo, an unauthorized cluster of about two dozen trailers perched high on a stony ridge. Testy teenagers with long side locks milled about.
Yisrael Ben-Shlomo, who left New York 11 years ago, tended to the frisky lambs in his sheep pen, whose metal frame the younger Mr. Meyer helped to weld a year ago. He weighed his words carefully before giving his views on the Revolt.
“The Jewish people are in an era of redemption after almost 2,000 years in exile,” he said. “The Arabs are not going to kill our civilians and expect that no young kids are going to want to react and give them a taste of their own medicine.”