“Price-tag” vandals struck again in Jerusalem overnight Monday, attacking a
monastery and an Arab-Jewish school in Jerusalem.
Two cars and a stone
fence at the Valley of the Cross Monastery, below the Israel Museum, were
covered with anti-Christian graffiti, and the cars’ tires were slashed. The
vandals wrote “Jesus drop dead,” “Death to Christians” and “Kahane was right.”
They called themselves “The Maccabees of Migron” and left the words “price
tag.”
“Everyone knows the people who did this are not regular people.
Ninety-two percent of the people in Israel respect Christians and
Greeks.
It’s just the 8% who don’t,” said the monastery’s Father Claudio.
“I am a priest, I pray to god, and I say I forgive these people.”
Sister
Thekla said it was the first time in recent memory that the monastery had been
vandalized, but that extremists sometimes threw stones at the entrance. The
graffiti was removed by the municipality by 9 a.m.
Vandals also attacked
the Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education elementary school in the Patt
neighborhood, where they spraypainted “Kahane was right” and “death to Arabs” on
the wall. The executive director of Hand in Hand, Shuli Dichter, had appealed to
the Knesset after a spate of price-tag incidents in December, including at a
mosque in Jerusalem.
Activists and politicians slammed the latest
attacks.
“This is hooliganism and racism that damages the authority of
the law and endangers the attempt to live in cooperation and safety,” said MK
Shelly Yacimovich, head of the Labor Party.
“This is an attack on a place
that represents the wish of Arabs and Jews to build together a better future for
their children,” said Tom Mehager, spokesman for the Abraham Fund, an initiative
that operates educational programs for Jewish and Arab students.
The
latest incidents followed a price-tag attack that occurred overnight Saturday in
the West Bank village of Al-Janiya, near Ramallah. Vandals spray-painted “Death
to Arabs,” “revenge” and “closed military zone” on a building and
taxi.
Police have launched an investigation.
Price-tag attacks are
a tool used by Jewish extremists to protest government and army policies they
perceive as anti-settlement. The use of the word comes from their claim that
vandalism against Arab property is the “price” that must be paid for the
evacuation of settlements and the demolition of housing.