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New York Times: "Radical Settlers Take On Israel"

"...the authorities found fliers near (Professor Sternhell's) home offering nearly $300,000 to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now"
Itamar Settlement in the West Bank
This story has received major international coverage.  Additional articles can be read by going to PEACE NOW IN THE NEWS.
Articles from the JERUSALEM POST, HA'ARETZ, and WASHINGTON POST are posted below this NY TIMES article, while others have been published in those and other Israeli newspapers as well as in the U.S. (WASHINGTON POST, L.A. TIMES, ...), and Internationally (SKY NEWS, GLOBE & MAIL, INDEPENDENT in the UK, THE AGE in Australia,...).

9/26/08

New York Times: "Radical Settlers Take On Israel"

By ISABEL KERSHNER

YITZHAR, West Bank - A pipe bomb that exploded late on Wednesday night outside the Jerusalem home of Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor, left him lightly wounded and created only a minor stir in a nation that routinely experiences violence on a much larger scale.

But Mr. Sternhell was noted for his impassioned critiques of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, once suggesting that Palestinians "would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements." And the authorities found fliers near his home offering nearly $300,000 to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli advocacy group, leading them to suspect that militant Israeli settlers or their supporters were behind the attack.

If so, the bombing may be the latest sign that elements of Israel's settler movement are resorting to extremist tactics to protect their homes in the occupied West Bank against not only Palestinians, but also Jews who some settlers argue are betraying them. Radical settlers say they are determined to show that their settlements and outposts cannot be dismantled, either by law or by force.

There have been bouts of settler violence for years, notably during the transfer of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005. Now, though, the militants seem to have spawned a broader, more defined strategy of resistance designed to intimidate the state.

This aggressive doctrine, according to Akiva HaCohen, 24, who is considered to be one of its architects, calls on settlers and their supporters to respond "whenever, wherever and however" they wish to any attempt by the Israeli Army or the police to lay a finger on property in illegally built outposts scheduled by the government for removal. In settler circles the policy is called "price tag" or "mutual concern."

Besides exacting a price for army and police actions, the policy also encourages settlers to avenge Palestinian acts of violence by taking the law into their own hands - an approach that has the potential to set the tinderbox of the West Bank ablaze.

Hard-core right-wing settlers have responded to limited army operations in recent weeks by blocking roads, rioting spontaneously, throwing stones at Palestinian vehicles and burning Palestinian orchards and fields all over the West Bank, a territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. They have also vandalized Israeli Army positions, equipment and cars.

In Jewish settlements like Yitzhar, an extremist bastion on the hilltops commanding the Palestinian city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, a local war is already being waged. One Saturday in mid-September a Palestinian from the neighboring village of Asira al Qibliya climbed the hill to Shalhevet, a neighborhood of Yitzhar, set fire to a house whose occupants were away for the weekend and stabbed a 9-year-old settler boy, the Israeli Army said.

Hours later, scores of men from Yitzhar rampaged through the Palestinian village, hurling rocks and firing guns, in what the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, described as a "pogrom." Several Palestinians were hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

"The army was complaining that we were bothering them in their efforts to catch the terrorist," said Ephraim Ben Shochat, 21, a resident of Shalhevet Ya, an illegal outpost consisting of three permanent houses and a trailer halfway down the slope between Yitzhar and Asira al Qibliya.

"To us, deterrence is more important than catching the specific terrorist. We're fighting against a nation," Mr. Ben Shochat said.

As he spoke, soldiers were in the process of reinforcing a small army post at the end of the path with concrete slabs. "We would rather fight and kill the enemy," Mr. Ben Shochat said, adding scornfully that the army, which guards Yitzhar and its satellites from the lookout post, "would rather hide."

Ten months ago in Annapolis, Md., Israeli and Palestinian leaders pledged to make every effort to reach a historic agreement for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza by the end of this year. The Palestinians further promised to dismantle all terrorist networks, and the Israelis agreed to freeze all settlement activity and immediately remove settlement outposts erected since March 2001.

In practice, only a handful of the 100 or so outposts, at least half of which were erected since 2001, have been removed, and construction in the official West Bank settlements goes on.

At the same time, the religious, ideological wing of the settlement movement has grown more radical. Those on the extremist fringe - like Mr. Ben Shochat, who belong to the so-called hilltop youth - are increasingly rejecting any allegiance to the state, backed up by an older generation of rabbis and early settler pioneers.

In Samaria, the biblical name for the northern West Bank, and in Binyamin, the central district around the Palestinian city of Ramallah, settlers recently ousted their more mainstream representatives in local council elections, voting in what they called "activist" mayors instead.

These new mayors, like the Samaria council's Gershon Mesika, reject what they see as the more compromising policies of the Yesha council, the settler movement's longstanding umbrella group. They are particularly incensed by the Yesha council's willingness to negotiate with the government over the removal or relocation of some West Bank outposts in exchange for official authorization of others.

"We are taking our fate into our own hands," Mr. Mesika said of the price tag doctrine. "We won't go like sheep to the slaughter." He added that the recent settler violence was something he understood, though did not support.

For many in the religious, ideological settler camp the rude awakening came with the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005. Then, under the premiership of Ariel Sharon, a driving force of the settlement-building enterprise who turned more pragmatic, Israel evacuated all 21 Jewish settlements there, and razed four official settlements in the northern West Bank. Another watershed came in early 2006 when thousands of settlers clashed with Israeli police officers who had come to destroy nine houses built without government permission in Amona. Traumatized by the resistance, the government put plans for further evacuations on hold.

"Amona pretty much divided this public into two parts, the more militant activist part and the more passive part," said Mr. HaCohen, an Orthodox hilltop youth pioneer and a founder of Shalhevet Ya. The people, he said, "have to decide whether they are on the side of the Torah or the state."

Mr. HaCohen was speaking from a cousin's house in Jerusalem. Identified by the Israeli security services as one of the authors of the price-tag doctrine, he has been banned by the army from entering the West Bank for four months.

Born in Monsey, N.Y., Mr. HaCohen came to Israel with his parents as a child. He dropped out of yeshiva, or religious seminary, at 16 and went to settle the hilltops, he said. He got married at 18 and has since been living in and around Yitzhar.

Representing the messianic, almost apocalyptic wing of the settler movement, Mr. HaCohen peppers his speech with talk of redemption and makes it clear that in his land of Israel, there is no place for Arabs.

Like Mr. Ben Shochat, Mr. HaCohen, who is disarmingly soft-spoken, said he was not drafted into the army because of his religious beliefs. As a member of Yitzhar's first response security team, though, he receives regular combat training and has a personal weapon.

More than 250,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank among roughly 2.4 million Palestinians, not including East Jerusalem. The Samaria council represents 30 official settlements and 12 unauthorized outposts that it says were all founded before 2001; others, like Shalhevet Ya, have sprung up since then, at least partially on private Palestinian lands.

Local settler leaders argue that the only difference between an authorized settlement and an illegal outpost is the lack of the defense minister's final signature on the planning papers, and that in any case, full authorization did not help the settlements razed in 2005.

They complain of government hypocrisy. Rahelim, a Samarian community of 45 families founded in 1991, has been labeled an illegal outpost even though the state Housing Ministry built 14 permanent homes here in 1998.

Avri Ran, a charismatic guru of the hilltop youth, formulated the concept of the outposts around the time that Israel started negotiating with the Palestinian leadership in the early 1990s. The idea was to populate empty spaces of the West Bank with Jews to preclude their being handed over to the Palestinians.

Mr. Ran and his wife, Sharona, started out in Itamar, a settlement just south of Nablus, and moved from hilltop to hilltop, finally establishing a private ranch more than a mile east of the mother settlement majestically named Givaot Olam, or hills of the universe.

Like many of the settlers in this area who see themselves as guardians of Joseph's Tomb, a site sacred to Jews that lies in the heart of Nablus, the Ran family exudes a deeply religious, almost mystical attachment to the land.

The farm is said to be the largest Israeli producer of organic eggs. Mr. Ran's son-in-law, Assaf Kidron, an artist who works in stone, says the inclement winds that used to whip around the mountain have dropped significantly since Jews came to live here, proof of a divine hand.

Outside the settlement of Har Bracha on Mount Grizim, settlers have taken over a former army lookout post on the ridge overlooking Nablus and Joseph's Tomb, and just started operating a yeshiva to ensure a permanent presence there. Nobody has tried to remove the settlers, although there is an army position a short distance along the ridge.

In general, the relationship between the religious settlers of the area and the army is an ambiguous, if symbiotic one. Most young ideological settlers serve in the army and now make up an increasing portion of the elite combat units and the officers corps.

At the same time, two soldiers have been lightly wounded in recent settler riots.

"To go out and assault soldiers is wrong," said David Ha'ivri, who handles foreign relations for the Samaria council. But, he said, "It is to be expected that when force is used, there will be counterforce."

The army is appreciated when it sticks to providing security, Mr. Ha'ivri added, but, "We don't respect them in the role of enforcing building codes."

The army refused to comment on the effects of the price-tag doctrine, saying it was too sensitive.

A spokesman for the Israeli police, the party responsible for law enforcement among the settlers, said that in the last two months, at least half a dozen arrests had been made.


Jerusalem Post: "Sternhell 'not intimidated' by attack"

Sep. 25, 2008

Lying in his Shaare Zedek Hospital bed on Thursday night, lightly wounded by a pipe-bomb allegedly planted on the doorstep of his Jerusalem home by right-wing extremists, Israel Prize winner Prof. Ze'ev Sternhell said he was not intimidated, and warned in ominous terms of the perils he believes the country faces from within.

"If this act was not committed by a lone lunatic, but by elements representing a political persuasion, this is the beginning of the way to the crumbling of democracy," he said.

Sternhell, 73, a political scientist well-known for his work on fascism and an ardent critic of the settlement movement, fell victim to one of the worst incidents of political violence in recent years early Thursday morning but defiantly pledged that he would not be deterred.

"If the intention was to terrorize, then it must be made clear that they won't frighten me!" he said.

The attack, which police suspect was "ideologically motivated," was widely denounced by politicians and academics on both the Left and Right as a heinous crime and a blow to the very heart of Israeli democracy, which Sternhell said was in urgent need of protection.

"The act in itself points to the fragility of Israeli democracy, to the need to mobilize in its defense with determination and decisiveness," he said.

The Hebrew University professor was in good condition at the hospital, where he had arrived at 1 a.m. Thursday with wounds to his thigh and leg.

He didn't need surgery, but only bandaging and antibiotic treatment. He may be released on Friday from the orthopedics department. His wife, Ziva, was at his bedside, and a number of professors visited him. He refused to be interviewed or photographed.

Police noted that fliers offering a NIS 1.1 million reward for killing anyone associated with Peace Now had been found near the scene of the attack.

"We have no doubt that this attack is a step up in violence against members of the left-wing in this country," Jerusalem Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said on Thursday. "That much is apparent to us, and we are investigating it as such."

One of Sternhell's neighbors said she heard the blast, and saw Sternhell's terrified reaction.

"I heard a 'boom' and went outside to see what was going on," she told The Jerusalem Post. "[Sternhell] looked terrified, but he was walking around on his own, and shortly afterward he went to the hospital. It was a surprise for all of us, though. [The Sternhells] are such nice, social people - it had to be ideologically motivated."

A special Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) unit that deals with right-wing extremists has reportedly joined the investigation into the attack.

Sternhell, who survived the Holocaust in Poland, is celebrated for his research on fascism and known for his vocal support of the Left.

As a regular contributor to Haaretz, Sternhell has expressed his objection to any Israeli settlements in territories beyond the pre-'67 borders, and has voiced comments seeming to advocate the use of violence by Palestinians against residents of such settlements.

In one of his articles for that paper he wrote:

"Had the Palestinians the least bit of sense, they would have concentrated their struggle against the settlements and would not plant explosives on the western side of the Green Line. In this manner, the Palestinians would themselves draft the solution that will be reached in any case."

The professor, who returned to Israel on Wednesday after a long period overseas, had reportedly been receiving threatening phone calls for several months.

Within two hours of the attack, officers arrived at the Tel Aviv home of Peace Now's secretary-general Yariv Oppenheimer. They performed security checks around his apartment and posted officers there until mid-morning.

"It was a bit intense," Oppenheimer said.

Sternhell is not a member of Peace Now, but he is a veteran supporter of the organization and recently addressed the audience at an event marking 30 years of Peace Now. He also wrote in Haaretz about a tour he had taken to Hebron with the group.

In a statement released to the press, Peace Now said Israeli authorities shared responsibility for the attack, for not cracking down on settler violence in the West Bank.

"Those who don't enforce the law on violent settlers... will find themselves with a Jewish terror organization in the heart of Israel," the statement said.

Oppenheimer told the Post that right-wing violence had been escalating over the past few years, particularly in the West Bank.

Far-right activist Baruch Marzel denied that his organization, the National Jewish Front, had been involved in the attack against the professor, but stopped short of condemning it.

"We are not condemning the incident, because in the past Prof. Sternhell expressed his view - that it was legitimate to hurt settlers," Marzel said.

News of the attack reached President Shimon Peres in New York, where he is attending the UN General Assembly meeting.

Peres said he condemned the perpetrators of so undemocratic and intolerant a demonstration of disapproval, and called Sternhell at Shaare Zedek Medical Center to express his shock and sympathy.

Peres stressed the urgency of bringing the attackers to justice before attitudes of this nature got out of hand, declaring that law enforcement officials must use every means at their disposal to locate them as quickly as possible.

"We must not allow such extreme and dangerous people to take the law into their own hands," he said.

Peres called on Israelis from across the political spectrum, from far right to far left, to rise as one against this kind of behavior.

Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann also sharply condemned the attack, warning that "a politically motivated attack could undermine Israeli democracy and reopen wounds that have still not healed, and may never heal. This phenomenon must be uprooted."

David Ha'ivri, a spokesman for the Samaria Regional Council, said he suspected the flyers were part of a smear campaign on behalf of the Left.

"I wouldn't be surprised," he said by phone on Thursday. "It's been done in the past, and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to do it again."

Ha'ivri cited an incident during the premiership of Yitzhak Rabin in which two youths who had been arrested for handing out similar pamphlets were linked to Avishai Raviv, a Shin Bet operative who was accused of creating false extremist opposition groups to discredit the Right.

If extremists were behind the attack, however, it would be one of the worst instances of internal political violence since the assassination of Rabin in 1995.

Scores of politicians released statements condemning the attack.

Kadima leader Tzipi Livni called the bombing "intolerable," adding that the government and the public should join in condemning such behavior.

"This is state of law, and Israeli society has firm values," Livni said.

Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu called the attack "sickening," in a conversation with Sternhell's wife, saying it had been perpetrated by "abominable people who are not part of the public debate in Israel."

"They need to be distanced from society and placed under lock and key," Netanyahu said.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak responded to the attack at a Labor faction meeting on Thursday morning, saying, "This is a case where an intellectual came under attack because of his views. We are returning to a dark period."

"We won't allow anyone, from any dark corner of Israeli society, to harass people," Barak continued. "Not in general, and especially not when it comes to people with a voice as rare and as clear as Ze'ev Sternhell's."

Kadima MK Menahem Ben-Sasson, who visited Sternhell in the hospital, said such attacks must not be taken lightly, calling it a blow to the heart of Israeli democracy.

"The combination of extreme nationalism and religious fanaticism leads to bloodshed," Ben-Sasson, the head of the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, told the Post. "This can cause the destruction of the State of Israel, not just the destruction of great individuals such as Prof. Sternhell."

"Prof. Sternhell miraculously survived the Holocaust and climbed his way to the top of the international scientific community. Assassination attempts such as this shouldn't be dismissed as scare-tactics, but should rather be treated as a threat to Israeli society." Ben-Sasson said.

MK Effi Eitam of the National Union/National Religious Party also denounced the attack, saying "the attempt to harm Prof. Sternhell was unacceptable [both] morally [and] legally, and was against the Jewish spirit and law. The people behind this atrocious act don't represent Jewish values or the love of the Land of Israel."

He said that despite his disagreements with Prof. Sternhell's political views, he rejected the use of violence to resolve such differences. "I call on the police to find the attackers and [on] the justice system to judge them severely," Eitam said.

Meretz chairman Haim Oron termed the attack a "dangerous, barbaric act," and said it was the "result of the continual overlooking of violence against soldiers, policemen and anyone else who doesn't see eye-to-eye with this hooligan group of extreme right activists in Israel."

The left-wing Yesh Gvul movement charged that right-wing activists who "use brutal violence against Jews and Arabs, members of the security forces and political rivals, as well as those who send them, know nothing will happen to them. The police and the army, past and present governments and the courts have always been very lenient toward them."

Yesh Gvul said the cycle of violence must stop, and that the movement would take every possible legal action to put the perpetrators and their leaders on trial.

The Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee will meet in the next few days in emergency session to discuss the attack.

"This act was one of cowardice, committed by scoundrels," committee chairman MK Ophir Paz-Pines (Labor) said. "I call on the police and the Shin Bet to locate these terrorists and ensure they are put behind bars for many years."

Tovah Lazaroff, Greer Fay Cashman, Dan Izenberg, Judy Siegel and AP contributed to this report.


Ha'aretz: "Dichter: Jewish terrorists tried to murder Professor Zeev Sternhell"

By Haaretz Correspondent and Agencies , By Jonathan Lis

Israel Prize winner Zeev Sternhell was lightly injured yesterday when a pipe bomb exploded outside his home in Jerusalem, in what police suspect could be a new campaign by right-wing extremists to target prominent left-wingers.

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter called the incident "a nationalist terror attack apparently perpetrated by Jews" and said the police would not rest until "those terrorists" were behind bars.

"We should see the explosive as aimed at killing," Dichter said, adding that the attack "takes us back to the days of [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin's assassination."

Professor Sternhell walked out of his home in a quiet Jerusalem neighborhood shortly after midnight to shut a courtyard gate when the bomb went off, lightly wounding him in one leg, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.

Outside Sternhell's home and in nearby streets yesterday, the police found fliers offering NIS 1.1 million to anyone who killed members of left-wing human rights movement Peace Now. This led to the suspicion that Jewish terrorists were behind the pipe-bomb attack, due to Sternhell's harsh criticism of West Bank settlers and their harassment of Palestinians.

The police stressed that the bomb was not meant to intimidate but was a murder attempt.

After the attack on the professor, the police have beefed up security around the home of Peace Now head Yariv Oppenheimer.

"If this was not an act committed by a deranged person but by someone who represents a political view, then it is the beginning of the disintegration of democracy," Sternhell said yesterday from his hospital bed in the capital's Shaare Tzedek Medical Center.

He said that "the incident illustrates the fragility of Israeli democracy, and the urgent need to defend it."

"On the personal level, if the intent was to terrorize, it has to be very clear that I am not easily intimidated," he said. "But the perpetrators tried to hurt not only me, but each and every one of my family members who could have opened the door, and for that there is no absolution and no forgiveness."

Sternhell, an internationally renowned expert on the history of fascism, was awarded the country's highest honor, the Israel Prize, earlier this year. The award drew fire from West Bank settlers and their supporters, who unsuccessfully petitioned Israel's Supreme Court to block it.

Kadima leader and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni condemned yesterday's attack, saying that the incident was "intolerable, and cannot be glossed over."

At a ceremony marking the Rosh Hashanah holiday at the Foreign Ministry, Livni said that "Israel is a lawful state and is populated by a society with values. It is the responsibility of the government and Israeli society to renounce such phenomena as soon as they rear their heads."

Senior political figures also expressed outrage at the news of the attack on Sternhell, which has touched a nerve given the country's history of political violence, they said.

"We are returning to the dark era of pipe bombs aimed at people, in this case against a very gifted person who never hesitates to express his opinion," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said. According to the chairman of the Knesset's internal affairs committee, Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz: "The attack on Prof. Sternhell is a cowardly, terrorist act by those with no sense of justice." He urged the police and Shin Bet security service to strive to capture the perpetrators quickly and ensure that they receive hefty prison sentences.

"They'd better not talk to us about a few wild weeds," Meretz chairman Haim Oron said. "These people appear on the right wing."

"This thuggish and dangerous act is the result of the continuing see-no-evil approach toward the vicious violence against soldiers and police officers and anyone else who doesn't agree with the brutish section of the extreme right wing," Oron added.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, an activist with a fringe settler group calling itself the National Jewish Front, said Sternhell was an irrelevant figure and that he did not believe settlers were behind the attack. "I don't denounce this incident, but say categorically that we are not involved," Ben-Gvir said.

Sternhell had recently received threatening phone calls, but the bomb attack on him took the Shin Bet and police by surprise. They had no intelligence of a terror group targeting left-wing activists.

A special police team started taking statements from neighbors of the Sternhell family. The police believe the perpetrators stayed in a house nearby in the past few weeks, studying Sternhell's movements, and that passersby and neighbors must have seen them.

"There are hundreds of peace activists in Jerusalem. We have no sign of any intention to harm anyone specific and cannot protect so many people without more specific information," a police source said.

Ofri Ilani contributed reporting.


Washington Post: "Blast Injures Israeli Academic Critical of Jewish Settlements"

By Samuel Sockol

Friday, September 26, 2008

JERUSALEM, Sept. 25 -- Zeev Sternhell, a leading Israeli political scientist and a frequent critic of Jewish settlement of the West Bank, was lightly wounded early Thursday when a pipe bomb exploded outside his home in Jerusalem.

Police discovered fliers in Sternhell's neighborhood offering a $320,000 bounty for the killing of any member of Peace Now, an Israeli organization Sternhell has supported that opposes Jewish settlement of lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben Ruby said investigators attributed the bombing to "elements on the extreme right" -- Israeli shorthand for radical members of the settler movement. Violent attacks against Israeli Jews by Jewish extremists are rare, but Israelis opposed to the settler movement say they are receiving an increasing number of threats.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, an activist with a fringe settler group calling itself the National Jewish Front, said, "I don't denounce this incident, but say categorically that we are not involved," the Associated Press reported.

The attack provoked condemnations from Israeli leaders across the political spectrum. "We are returning to the dark spectacle of pipe bombs that are aimed at people, in this case against a very gifted person who never shies away from expressing his opinion," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said.

Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor in his early 70s, was injured after he came to his front door at 1 a.m. A hospital spokeswoman said several fragments were removed from his leg and that he would remain hospitalized at least until Friday.

Sternhell is a Holocaust survivor and an expert on fascism who won this year's Israel Prize, an honor bestowed by the government, for his work in political science.

In comments to Israeli news media, Sternhell said he would not be intimidated by the bombing. "If this act was not perpetrated by a lone madman, but rather by an element representing a political or public movement, this is the start of the road to dismantling democracy," he warned.

Sternhell has often criticized the settler movement and the government support it has received. "Since it was impossible to take control of the lands legally, a mafia-like culture of theft, lies and deception developed in the territories, in which the various government authorities are still wallowing," he wrote in the daily Haaretz last month. "Contrary to the rules of international and Israeli law, contrary to elementary rules of justice, contrary to all logic and every genuine Israeli interest, broad areas were confiscated for the sake of the settlers and huge sums were poured in."

Following the attack, police offered to protect the home of Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer and the group's offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. "We have been getting threats over the phone and through letters, but this time, with a bomb going off, it is very unpleasant," Oppenheimer said. "We have been warning that the radical right is growing and becoming more extreme."