The price is wrong

Tension rise as authorities fail to respond to the 'price tag' campaign against Palestinians."No one supports them,” says one settler leader “But they have succeeded in creating such an atmosphere of fear around them that no one wants to take action against them.”

By KAMOUN BEN SHIMON
Price 480 (photo credit: Judith Sudilovsky)
Price 480
(photo credit: Judith Sudilovsky)
THE SCENES ARE OMINOUSLY familiar. Beginning in early October, apparently in response to news reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might consider extending the moratorium on construction in the West Bank as part of peace contacts with the Palestinians, small groups of settlers have been engaging in acts of vandalism against Palestinians.
In early October, unidentified vandals set fire to a mosque in the West Bank village of Beit Fajar, near Bethlehem, burning holy texts, including the Koran, and leaving slogans reading “[far-right nationalist Rabbi Meir] Kahane was right” and “price tag.”
A fews weeks later, vandals desecrated a Muslim cemetery in the village of Kadum, near the city of Qalqilya, again leaving the same “price tag” and “Kahane was right” graffiti as well as spray-painted Magen Davids. The next day, in Luben a-Sharkya, vandals chopped down 14 olive trees.
While the perpetrators of the “price-tag” events have not been identified, the signs they left provide obvious clues. “Price tag” is the name that a loosely-organized network of youths, most of whom live in quasi-communes in remote illegal outposts throughout the West Bank, have given to their policy. According to the price tag campaign, settlers should respond to any and every move by the Israeli authorities against settlements or illegal outposts by attacking Palestinian property. Their goal: to make the “price” too high, and therefore not worthwhile, for the government to take action against settlers.
“When the government acts in an anti-Jewish way against Jews, don’t be surprised if loyal, proud Jews respond. And allow me not to express any dismay or concern for Palestinians,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, an open supporter of the rabidly anti-Arab policies of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, and widely regarded as at least a supporter, if not a participant in, price tag activities, tells The Report icily, before slamming down the phone.
The number of actual activists remains unknown, although it is thought that they number, at most, several dozen. “No one supports them,” Pinchas Wallerstein, a veteran settler leader, tells The Report, referring to the founding generation of settlers.
Seemingly near despair he adds, “But they have succeeded in creating such an atmosphere of fear around them that no one wants to take action against them.”
According to data provided by B’Tselem, a watchdog group monitoring human rights violations in the West Bank, settlers associated with the price tag policy have committed nearly a dozen acts of violence against Palestinian property since 2008.
Palestinians have continued to act with deadly effect in the West Bank, south of Hebron. In late August, four Israelis, from the settlement of Beit Hagai, were killed in a shooting attack believed to have been aimed at torpedoing the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In late September, a ninemonth pregnant Israeli woman and her husband were wounded in a terror shooting on Route 60. The woman underwent surgery for her wounds after giving birth by Cesarean section to a healthy baby boy.
However, the price tag policy is not intended primarily as a response to Palestinian violence. Rather, it is intended to prevent the authorities of the State of Israel from implementing any policy that impinges on the settlement enterprise – from the demolition of a trailer to the evacuation of an entire settlement.
THE PRICE TAG POLICY WAS first publicly mentioned by Itai Zar, the bereaved brother of the charismatic Gilad Zar, a settler who was murdered in a terrorist attack. Speaking with the press after his brother’s murder, in July 2008, Zar was quoted as saying, “Every time that there is any evacuation of any kind – and it doesn’t matter if it’s a bus, a house trailer, or a settlement – we will respond.” Another settler, who refused to be identified, was quoted in the Haaretz daily at the same time as saying, “It’s time that there were some crazy people on our side, too – to have some people on our side who can’t be controlled, whose actions will be ‘insane’ so that the Arabs and the army will say that they don’t want to mess with them.
That’s what will bring some order around here… The Arabs will think twice before they try to hurt us.”
Others tie the group’s founding to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, in August 2005, or to the violent reaction to the imposed withdrawal from illegal settlements in the West Bank, in February 2006.
Both of these activities seem to have divided the settler public into two broad camps – the “mainstream” which, while opposing any withdrawals, moratoriums, or demolitions, pragmatically believes in what it refers to as non-violent measures and continues to declare its loyalty to the state and its institutions; and a more radical, largely younger, fringe group, led by charismatic rabbis, which places loyalty to their interpretations of the dictates of the Torah above loyalty to the state.
The price tag radicals appear to be an even more extreme subset of the “hill top youth,” a general term applied to the hundreds of disaffected settler youth who have set up camp on isolated illegal outposts in the West Bank. Deeply religious, many of these youths have adopted New Age-like clothes and speech. They are largely disengaged from most normative activities; many of them have dropped out of school and have been rejected for conscription by the Israel Defense Forces because they are psychologically ill-suited. Ensconced in makeshift mobile units on wind-swept hills, taking power from generators and toiling their self-appropriated fields in what they refer to as organic methods, they live without supervision and accept no authority other than that of their rabbis.
And they choose to turn to rabbis who will endorse their behaviors and motivations.
Although no rabbis have officially claimed to have given them approval, it is clear that they gravitate to a number of rabbis who encourage their thinking, if not their actions. These include Rabbi Itzhak Shapira from the settlement of Yitzhar, coauthor of “Torat Hamelekh” (see “The Murder Midrash,” issue of September 27), who provides ostensible religious justification for the killing of innocent gentiles, and especially the charismatic Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva, located within the heart of the Palestinian city of Nablus (identified as the ancient Hebrew city of Shekhem). Ginsburgh is well-known for his racist pronouncements regarding Arabs and other non-Jews as well as Jews who are not part of his religiousspiritual world. In 1994, Ginsburgh authored a book praising the acts of Baruch Goldstein, a resident of the settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, who murdered 29 Muslims while they were at prayer in the mosque located within the Cave of the Patriarchs.
“Rabbi Ginsburgh is a high-level intellectual and a very spiritual person, but he is also a racist who encourages despicable actions,” says poet Eliaz Cohen, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Kfar Etzion, near Bethlehem, and a vocal opponent of the “price tag” actions. “He is the head of this movement, and this has to be said once and for all, without fear of retribution.”
“EVERYONE KNOWS HOW IT works,” says Abraham (not his real name), who was born and raised on a settlement in the West Bank.
Abraham claims that he is close to the hill top youth but not an activist; he speaks with The Report on condition of anonymity.
“There’s a set pattern: after a terrorist attack, there’s unrest among the settlers, demonstrations and such. And then there are attacks on Palestinians. Or we establish a new outpost, the government tries to dismantle it, and then there is vandalism against Palestinian villages.”
After each activity, government officials denounce the lawlessness and pledge to take action. In response to the torching of a mosque in 2009, Netanyahu declared to the press, “There is no place for violence of any sort, neither Jews against Palestinians nor Palestinians against Jews.” And after each incident, politicians and left-wing activists call on the security services to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice.
In late October, MK Nahman Shai (Kadima), former spokesperson for the IDF, called on Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to take immediate action against these groups. “Dozens of religiously significant targets in Arab villages in Judea and Samaria have been attacked,” Shai wrote to Weinstein, in a letter made public. “The perpetrators are causing irreversible damage to the fabric of relationships – which is in any event very fragile – in the territories, as well as to Israel’s deteriorating position in the world… Despite the inflammatory character of these acts, not a single indictment has been handed down against anyone.
I request that you use your authority… to demand that the army investigate the incidents of ‘price tag’ and make this investigation into the highest priority of the law enforcement and security services… It is utterly unacceptable that the State of Israel should resign itself to the existence of an area that is like the ‘Wild West,’ in which anyone can do as they please.”
In an extensive telephone interview with The Report, Shai explains what he believes may be behind the authorities’ failure to act. “All these years, prevention of Palestinian terror has been the central goal, and…it’s also probably easier to get intelligence information about the Palestinians than it is about Jews. But the situation is urgent… and the potential is terribly destructive. The Muslim world is composed of 1.3 billion people in 57 countries, and therefore the danger is very great. This must be stopped before everything blows up.”
Furthermore, says Shai, the authorities have developed “a certain apathy, because they feel that it doesn’t matter what Israel does, the world is against us anyway, and everyone hates us anyway.” This abdication of moral and legal authority, he warns, “is terribly dangerous.”
In 2005, Attorney Talia Sasson, thenhead of the State Prosecution Criminal Department published, at prime minister Ariel Sharon’s request, a report which referred to “the blatant violation of the law” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The situation has not improved, she tells The Report. “The authorities… are supposed to react – to settlers’ violence as well as to the terrorist attacks. That is their job.
Instead they are letting the settlers react – but if someone were to break into my house, would that give me the right to act against my neighbor, who had nothing to do with it? Of course not. It is clear that there has to be at least a modicum of the rule of law in the territories, but that isn’t what is happening.”
Sasson is now in private practice, after a failed bid to run for Knesset in 2009.
According to the law, she explains, responsibility for law enforcement and maintenance of public order and safety in the territories is up to the defense minister, since the territories were never formally annexed to Israel. Thus, the issue of law enforcement in the territories is inherently political.
And the politicians have good reasons not to go up against the radical settler youth, says a source in the Defense Ministry, who spoke with The Report on condition of anonymity. “The politicians believe that most Israelis still have a ‘soft spot’ for the settler movement. For years, they have portrayed the settler movement as the new embodiment of the highest Zionist ideals of settlement and dedication to the Land of Israel. They think the public doesn’t make fine distinctions between mainstream settlers and the crazy youth so they don’t want to be seen as anti-settler.”
Wallerstein – who in his earlier days was involved in more than one
cat-and-mouse operation against the government in order to establish new settlements and figured prominently in the activities described by Sasson – is more blunt. “I think it’s very convenient for the politicians to say that they are afraid of them,” he says.
“It’s unreasonable that neither the army nor the police or the Israel Security Agency [Shin Bet] have been able to put their hands on these kids or the people who send them out.” The threat of violence, Wallerstein avers, provides government officials with the excuse not to act towards a peace agreement. And while Wallerstein, as a settler, also completely opposes those agreements and any compromises that might require evacuation of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he believes that the lawlessness will be the ultimate undoing of the entire settlement enterprise.
Indeed, a small settler group known as “Tazpit” (Observation) claims that the price tag activities are perpetrated by the Palestinians themselves, aided by left-wing groups such as Peace Now, in an effort to disparage the settlers and delegitimize the settlement movement.
In a written response to The Report, Gili El-Hadad, police spokesman for the Judea and Samaria District, asserts, “The events referred to as ‘price tag,’ intended to cause damage to Palestinian properties anytime the law is enforced, are considered a severe violation of any legitimate expression of protest.
They are are taken very seriously by the police, in accordance with the requirements of the law.” Although he was not specific, the spokesman adds that “dozens of suspects have been arrested during the year and have also been indicted, according to the law.”
IDF spokesman Peter Lerner tells The Report that he “rejects all attempts to say that the IDF is not doing its job in this context.”
Noting that the IDF regards these activities as both immoral and as endangering law and order in the territories, Lerner adds, “In too many cases, the IDF does get hold of the youths responsible for these acts and brings them to trial, but the judges release them on grounds that the officers’ testimonies were not clear enough or that the prosecutors did not bring enough proof.”
He concludes by saying that “these are young people, full of hormones and eager to perpetrate acts of vandalism as they are anywhere else, but, in addition, they have nationalistic backing and, in particular, backing from some of their rabbis, who encourage them.”
ANOTHER SMALL GROUP HAS chosen to attempt to “make amends” to the Palestinians. Led primarily by Rabbi Menachem Froman, the rabbi of the West Bank settlement Tekoa, and a wellknown interfaith and coexistence advocate, its activities are centered primarily in the Gush Etzion bloc, south of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In response to the torching of the mosque at Beit Fajar in October, for example, Froman led a small delegation of Jews to provide the villagers with new books of the Koran.
Some residents appreciated the gesture. At least five Palestinians joined the small group of Jews, holding signs reading “Good neighbors and peace are God’s will.” But others responded dismissively. One Palestinian man, who refused to be identified, later tells The Report, “It’s like they are killing their parents and then asking us to pity them because they are orphans. They steal our land to set up settlements, then they come to comfort us when some of their own people burn our books. It doesn’t work that way.”
In contrast to Wallerstein, some settler and right-wing leaders express sympathy for the price tag activities. MK Michael Ben-Ari from the extreme right-wing National Unity party, a follower of Kahane and a resident of the settlement of Karnei Shomron, tells The Report, “These are the actions of people who feel that their backs are up against the wall.
They are saying that if you hurt me, I will hurt back, I can cause pain too. I don’t justify them, but I do understand their despair: The authorities are tearing down their yeshivas, they are destroying their synagogues, taking away their source of livelihood – the damage to the settlers is the greatest violation of civil rights in the State of Israel. They are forced to live in a twisted, destructive reality.”
Adds Abraham, the settler close to the hill top youth, “People don’t understand the sense of rage and insult that the residents of the settlements feel. We feel we are doing the right and proper thing for the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, and when the Arabs attack us, no one does anything.
Everyone is busy worrying about what the Americans will say and what the leftcontrolled media will say and we feel that we have been betrayed.”
Yet even Ben-Ari acknowledges that these youth have spun out of control, saying, “Despair is so great that they are not willing to listen to the voice of reason.” Recently, while he was meeting with some of the youths in an attempt “to reason with them,” some of them slashed the tires on his car.
Similarly, vandals – assumed to be hilltop youth – slashed the tires of a car belonging to Zeev Chever, popularly known as Zambish, a veteran settler leader who is widely credited with much of the construction in the West Bank. “Zambish has done more for the settlement project than anyone else,” complains Wallerstein. But Chever had pragmatically negotiated with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, agreeing to the dismantling of some of the smallest illegal outposts in exchange for Barak’s agreement to leave the others alone.
And parents complain that the price taglike behavior is taking root among the more normative youth as well. Recently, says a father from Beit El in the West Bank, one of the settlement movement’s veteran flagship settlements, the authorities tore down an illegally built shack on the outskirts of Beit El.
A group of boys from the nearby yeshiva marched down to the nearest intersection and began throwing stones at Arab cars passing by. One of the boys asked his local rabbi for permission. “The rabbi’s answer was clear,” the father, speaking with The Report on condition of anonymity, says. “He forbade it.
The boy did not want to disobey his rabbi, so he didn’t participate. But he also didn’t want to disrupt the activity, so he didn’t tell the others about the rabbi’s response. The rest of them, including my son, stood at the intersection for an hour or so, throwing rocks.”
But some charge that the complaints about the extremism are disingenuous, at best. Says Sasson, “This [kind of violent activity] has been going on for years. For years, it was regarded as ‘allowing the settlers to blow off some steam’ in response to acts of vandalism or terrorist attacks by the Palestinians.” Since the beginning of the settler movement, the method has been quite clear: Whenever the Palestinians committed an act of violence, the Jews would establish, somewhere, an illegal outpost. Most frequently, the Palestinians who suffered from the establishment of the outpost had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.”
Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for B’Tselem, tells The Report, “Settler violence against Palestinians and the authorities’ choice to refrain from preventing the violence and bringing the assailants to justice are not new, nor are they limited to so-called ‘price tag’ attacks. Over the years, settler violence has grown to immense proportions, primarily, it seems, as a result of such inaction. When Israeli civilians attack Palestinians, the Israeli authorities employ an undeclared policy of leniency and compromise toward the perpetrators.”