Ideology
Meir Ettinger is said to have become a disciple of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, after meeting settlers from the Israeli settlement of Yitzhar. Around 2011, he studied under Ginsburgh at the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva. Ginsburgh is on record as being opposed to price tag assaults on Palestinians and their property. Meir Ettinger is said to have disagreed with Ginsburgh's pacifistic approach in this regard, as Ettinger advocated the adoption of violence in order to undermine the foundations of Israel.
Comparisons with Meir Kahane
Meir Kahane, according to Ehud Sprinzak, espoused a view of the world, based on his reading of Kiddush Hashem, called catastrophic messianism, requiring the exaltation of Jews and the humiliation of their enemies. According to this vision of the "sanctification of God's name",
the Messiah will come in a great conflict in which Jews triumph and praise God through their successes.
Ettinger has been called the "ghost of Meir Kahane". Many similarities between Meir and his grandfather, once dubbed "Israel's Ayatollah", have been noted: the cheerful outlook, articulateness, the absolute self-assurance of being right, the shared belief that most Palestinians must be expelled in order to make way for a Jewish state and accomplish Biblical prophecy. His words echo closely those of his grandfather. In Brooklyn, as in Israel and the West Bank, posters and graffiti proclaim that "Kahane was right", a slogan characteristic of the Hilltop Youth movement.
As with his grandfather's example, Meir Ettinger's messianic Zionism dismisses the idea that Zionism was to establish a secular state, a state he detests. In a work written when he was 19, The Rebel Manifesto, he declared his refusal to have anything to do with Israeli political formations, [lower-alpha 2] since the state itself, and its multiculturalism, was an impediment to the recreation of Biblical Israel. [lower-alpha 3] To this end, the state, as constituted, had to be destroyed, and the coming of the Messiah was imminent. According to Mark Juergensmeyer, Ettinger's grandfather's extremist message influenced the execution of terroristic acts like the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre carried out by the Kach militant Baruch Goldstein and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir. Juergensmeyer argues that the visions for a future Jewish religious state of both Meir Kahane and his grandson Meir Ettinger parallel the kind of an idealized Islamic society subscribed to by Mahmud Abouhalima, the perpetrator of the World Trade Center bombing.
Activism
Meir became a charismatic leader among the militant settler movement known as Hilltop Youth. Shlomo Fischer, a sociologist at Hebrew University, states that Ettinger represents violent activists who trust themselves to be endowed with prophetic authority, and compared the group to the militant 1980s Jewish Underground, Ettinger's rise to dominance, also as leader of a movement called The Revolt , was earmarked by acts, observed at the time by Israeli security officials, such as attacking a Palestinian shepherd's flock, stoning a sheep, and then slaughtering it in front of the terrified herder. He has played a leading role in setting up illegal Israeli outposts on Palestinian land, and attracted police attention for his militancy in two outposts - one, Ramat Migron, just outside the settlement of Migron, and another, Givat Ronen, near Har Brakha. He was part of a group that infiltrated Joseph's Tomb in 2011, against explicit IDF orders to keep away from the site. Migron was dismantled by force, and Ettinger served a spell in jail for his disruptive attempts to hinder the military's evacuation of such outposts.
According to the Shin Bet, the internal Israeli security service, Ettinger set up in September 2013 an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the state in four stages by striking it where it was most vulnerable. In 2012, Ettinger was arrested for complicity in what Israeli media termed the "spy affair". According to the indictment, 5 settler youths had organized an "operations room" for monitoring IDF movements in the West Bank in order to intercept communications and forewarn settlers in outposts of IDF plans to evacuate the sites. Ettinger was subsequently sentenced to a 6-month term for "conspiracy to collect information of military value". Israeli media regarded Ettinger as "the most-wanted figure by the Jewish division of the Shin Bet".
Ettinger was known to undertake price tag assaults on nearby Palestinian villages. On 7 January 2014, he and a band of between 8 and 10 other settlers were surrounded and detained at Qusra, which had already lost half of its land to Israeli settlements, had hundreds of olive trees destroyed, 18 sheep killed and 6 cars torched. Settlers at the Esh Kodesh outpost had planted olive trees on privately owned Palestinian land, and the Israeli civil administration had them removed. From 20 to 30 youths set out to attack Palestinian villages in protest at the army's action. On descending a hill, while "stoning" farmers and damaging olive trees at Qusra, they were cornered, and either "retreated" or were "pushed" into a partially built local house. Village elders ensured their safety for 2 hours until a Palestinian liaison officer contacted the IDF which sent a platoon to escort them out of the village. The group said they were on a harmless unarmed hike in the hills when assaulted by Palestinians. A prayer leader of the local mosque replied that they were masked and armed with pipes and clubs, showing a reporter a sledgehammer. [lower-alpha 4] A week later, on 15 January, the door of a mosque nearby was set alight after being daubed with graffiti reading "Blood for blood, Qusra". Ettinger laid the blame for the incident on the army for refusing to allow them to carry weapons, commenting:
"Sometimes there are also losses in a war, but our miracle was not due to the army, but due to God... We acted with tremendous courage, but because of the conditions in the field, the numerical advantage of the Arabs around us and the negligence of the army, who won't let us possess arms, we realized that the battle was lost, we suffered injuries and were trapped inside the house."
The rabbis behind the Hilltop Youth argue that Jewish redemption must be positively assisted by acts to help bring it about. [lower-alpha 5] The Hilltop Youth is a radical group believed to be responsible for an arson attack on the Christian Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the 17 July 2015. Some in Israel regard them as a Jewish version of ISIS. [lower-alpha 6] Orthodox settlers speak of them as "hotheads", with some rabbis, among them the West Bank settlement leader rabbi Ezra Tubi, stating that, while troublemakers, these youths were correct in their belief that the West Bank formed an integral part of Biblical Israel, a territory Jews were entitled to claim possession because it was a right given to them by God.
Arrest
The Duma arson attack, near the outpost of Adei Ad, was defined officially as an act of Jewish terrorism, and was the most severe of at least 120 settler assaults on Palestinians that took place leading up to the incident. Duma is an amenable well-treed Palestinian village near Nablus. Close by is an Israeli settlement Ma'ale Efrayim, where many of Duma's residents, including the father of the Dawabsheh family was employed. One day before the attack, Ettinger wrote on his blog a disavowal he was in any way connected to price tag assaults, while stating that many Jews are not bound by the laws of the state, but only God's law. [lower-alpha 7] As to the Duma firebombing, he protested on his blog that the outcry of protests over the arson constituted a "terrorist attack on Judaism and Jewish values".
With a high profile as a religious ultra-nationalist, Meir, together with Eviatar Slonim [lower-alpha 8] and Mordechai Meyer, was arrested in a government crackdown as a suspect for the arson given his association with numerous prior attacks. The government withheld the reasons for his arrest. He was imprisoned under administrative detention laws, which are mainly applied to Palestinians, and rarely to Jews, for six months leading to widespread assumptions that he was the ringleader of several violent terrorist actions. Human rights groups in Israel like B'Tselem criticized the use of administrative detention. The confirmation of the decision was made by Judge Avraham Tal after reviewing 180 intelligence reports and an 82-page-long document of analysis provided by the Shin Bet. His lawyer complained that Ettinger had been subjected to tiltul methods, rough shaking and punching, during his interrogation. Moshe Yaalon also commented that the government was convinced the 3 youths in detention were linked to the Duma attack, stating that, '"We wouldn't conduct these administrative arrests if there wasn't any connection to the arson." His mother secluded herself after her son was arrested.
Later, his administrative detention was prolonged for four months. Eventually, two suspects were indicted, one of them a minor. Ettinger was not directly linked to the attacks, and was released in June 2016. He was placed under several restrictions, which included bans from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and he was barred from making contact with 93 people.
Meir David HaKohen Kahane was an American-born Israeli ordained Orthodox rabbi, writer, and ultra-nationalist politician who served one term in Israel's Knesset before being convicted of acts of terrorism. He founded the Israeli political party Kach. A cofounder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), he espoused strong views against antisemitism.
Baruch Kopel Goldstein was an American-Israeli mass murderer, religious extremist, and physician who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an incident of Jewish terrorism. Goldstein was a supporter of the Kach, a religious Zionist party that the United States, the European Union and other countries designate as a terrorist organization.
Hilltop, outpost or lot 26, was an illegal outpost, consisting of a mobile home, founded by Netanel Ozeri outside Hebron in the West Bank. It lay approximately 100 metres (330 ft) from the Kiryat Arba settlement, in the Beqa'a valley. At the time of its destruction. Despite court orders, he kept expanding his outpost, refused to bullet-proof the caravan, fence the area he claimed in, or accept protection from the IDF.
Hilltop Youth are hardline, extremist religious-nationalist youth who establish outposts without an Israeli legal basis in the West Bank. The ideology of the Hilltop Youth, a derivation of Kahanism, includes the claim that the Palestinians are "raping the Holy Land", and must be expelled. According to Ami Pedahzur, their work in establishing illegal outposts was not simply the result of individual initiatives, this was "a myth cultivated by the Yesha Council", and, in fact, forms part of a wider multi-faceted settler strategy. The term "hilltop youth" is regarded by Daniel Byman as a misnomer, since the movement was founded mostly by married people in their mid-twenties.
Baruch Meir Marzel is an Israeli politician and activist. He is an Orthodox Jew originally from Boston who now lives in the Jewish community of Hebron in Tel Rumeida with his wife and nine children. He was the leader of the far-right-oriented Jewish National Front party. He is now a member of Otzma Yehudit. He was the "right-hand man" of assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, acting as spokesman for the American-born rabbi's Kach organization for ten years. The mainstream Israeli press has described him as an "extreme right-wing activist".
The Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, also known as the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre or the Hebron massacre, was a shooting massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli physician and extremist of the far-right ultra-Zionist Kach movement. On 25 February 1994, during the Jewish holiday of Purim, which had overlapped in that year with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Goldstein opened fire with an assault rifle on a large gathering of Palestinian Muslims praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. He killed 29 people, several as young as 12 years, and wounded 125. Goldstein was overpowered and beaten to death by survivors.
Avraham "Avri" Ran is an Israeli settler activist and businessman, with a record for repeated criminal offenses against Palestinians. He has been called the founding father and "undisputed symbol" of the Hilltop Youth movement. His approach to developing Palestinian lands has been described as "environmental racism", combining working the terra while applying terror.
Jewish extremist terrorism is terrorism, including religious terrorism, committed by extremists within Judaism.
Yitzhar is an Israeli settlement located in the West Bank, south of the city of Nablus, just off Route 60, north of the Tapuach Junction. The predominantly Orthodox Jewish community falls under the jurisdiction of Shomron Regional Council. In 2022, it had a population of 2,093.
Migron is an Israeli settlement (outpost) in the West Bank, located within 2 km of a former outpost by the same name, that was relocated to its present site on 2 September 2012. The outpost was located 14 kilometers north of Jerusalem, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council. It was the largest outpost of its kind, with a population of 300. The council says it was founded in 1999 and re-founded in 2001, on land registered before 1967 by the villagers of Burqa. The Israeli government contributed NIS 4.3 million from the Construction and Housing Ministry to build Migron. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law, whereas Israeli outposts, like Migron, are considered illegal not only under international law but also under Israeli law.
Yitzchak Feivish Ginsburgh sometimes referred to as "the Malakh" is an American-born Israeli rabbi affiliated with the Chabad movement. In 1996 he was regarded as one of Chabad's leading authorities on Jewish mysticism. He is the leader of the Derech Chaim Movement and founder of the Gal Einai Institute, which publishes his written works. His students include Charedim, religious Zionists, and Chabad Chassidim, as well as ba'alei teshuvah. He is currently the president of a number of educational institutions, including the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar in the West Bank. Ginsburgh has lectured in various countries, and throughout Israel. His teachings cover subjects including science, psychology, marital harmony and monarchy in Israel. He has published over 100 books in Hebrew and English, most of which are edited by his students.
Yitzhak Shapira is an Israeli rabbi who lived in Kiryat Moshe neighborhood in Jerusalem, and is head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva.
The price tag attack policy, also sometimes referred to as "mutual responsibility", is the name originally given to the attacks and acts of vandalism committed primarily in the occupied West Bank by extremist Israeli settler youths against Palestinian Arabs, and to a lesser extent, against left-wing Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Christians, and Israeli security forces. The youths officially claim that the acts are committed to "exact a price from local Palestinians or from the Israeli security forces for any action taken against their settlement enterprise".
Kahanism is a religious Zionist ideology based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach party in Israel.
David Ha'ivri is an Israeli and an independent political strategist, who focuses on foreign relations, he has worked closely with Christian Zionists and leading politicians in Washington DC. He emigrated as a child with his family from the United States to Israel at the age of 11, completed high school, and served in the IDF. Ha'ivri is an Orthodox Jew, and lives with his wife and eight children in Kfar Tapuach in the West Bank. He is a religious Zionist leader, writer, and speaker. In November 2018 Ha'ivri was elected to the Shomron Regional Municipal council and in May 2021 he was elected as Second to the Chairman of the Council.
Ben-Zion "Bentzi" Gophstein is a political activist affiliated with the far-right in Israel, a student of Meir Kahane, and founder and director of Lehava, an Israeli Jewish anti-assimilation organization. He was a member of the Council of Kiryat Arba, 2010–2013. In November 2019, he was indicted on charges of incitement to terrorism, violence, and racism. He was sanctioned by the United States Department of the Treasury and the European Union.
Palestinians are the target of violence by Israeli settlers and their supporters, predominantly in the West Bank. In November 2021, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz discussed the steep rise in the number of incidents between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, many of which result from attacks by residents of illegal settler outposts on Palestinians from neighboring villages. Settler violence also includes acts known as price tag attacks that are in response to actions by the Israeli government, usually against Palestinian targets and occasionally against Israeli security forces in the West Bank.
On 31 July 2015, Israeli settlers firebombed a Palestinian family home in late July 2015 in the village of Duma, killing three people; 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned alive in the fire, while both his parents died from their injuries within weeks. On 3 January 2016, 21 year old Israeli settler Amiram Ben-Uliel was indicted for the murder, along with an Israeli minor, for participation in planning the murder. In addition, along with two others, they were both charged with one count of membership in a terrorist organization.
The Revolt is an Israeli Jewish far-right terror group responsible for the Duma arson attack. The group advocates for dismantling the State of Israel in order to establish a Kingdom of Israel that follows Jewish Law. The group's membership numbers in the range of 30-40 people. Between the founding of the ideological origin of the group in 2013, and the Duma arson attack, the group was responsible for 11 other arson attacks. Another significant arson attack perpetrated by the group targeted the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in Tabgha, Northern district. The arson left important material damages in the church. In December 2017, Eyal Reuveni was sentenced to 4 years in prison for the attack.
