ISRAEL: terrorism and atrocities

 

Baruch Goldstein

He is the Brooklyn-born Kiryat Arba doctor who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. True, Goldstein was revered by hundreds if not thousands and still commands sympathy and respect among hardcore settlers and Kach-supporters.

Goldstein, in any case, was a native-born American, which renders him completely atypical. Baltimore-born Alan Goodman, who stormed the Temple Mount in 1982 in order to liberate the Temple Mount, killing two Palestinians in the process, is just as much your problem as he is ours. 

Nahshon Walls

He shot a pregnant 25-year-old Palestinian woman to death near Kiryat Arba in what he said was an act of revenge, was Ohio-born and bred. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was released in less than 10 years and spent his last years surrounded by friends in Tapuach who praise his good deeds to this very day.

Yehuda Richter

He isa disciple of Meir Kahane, who was a member of the radical group Terror Against Terror (TNT, naturally), together with other friends he made during summer camps in the Catskills. Richter was convicted of taking part in a 1984 bus attack in which 6 Palestinians were injured. Now he is a respected rabbi in the settlement Elon Moreh, but what does that prove?

Yaakov Teitel

He is originally of Florida and Virginia then of Shvut Rachel, an all-purpose man-in-one terror machine who killed Palestinians, tried to poison a village, bombed Christian churches, maimed Messianic Jews and planted the pipe bomb that injured Professor Ze’ev Sternhell in 2008. Ironically, in a chilling link to this week’s double tragedies, Teitel was later re-arrested posting flyers in praise of the 2009 Tel Aviv gay center shooting in which two people were killed - and just before he could carry out a plot to fly a bomb-rigged toy plane into the Tel Aviv gay parade. 

Yishai Schlissel

He is an orthodox Jew by pure coincidence, who murdered 16-year-old Shira Banki in Jerusalem last week and stabbed five others.

Yona Avrushmi

He threw a grenade at a Peace Now demonstration in 1983, killing Emil Grunzweig, was a fish out of water; Yisrael Lederman, who was convicted for killing a Palestinian in 1978 and then for scalding MK Yael Dayan with boiling tea, was an odd man out; David Ben Shimol, who fired an RPG rocket at a bus, killing a Palestinian and injuring others, was an alien aberration; Danny Eisenman of Ma'ale Adumim, who together with others killed a Palestinian taxi driver in 1985 revenge for the killing of an Israeli driver the previous day, was an exception who proved the rule.

Ami Popper

He killed seven Palestinians in May, 1990 near Rishon Letzion,was atypical; Gur Hamel, a Breslav Hasid who stoned an elderly Palestinian to death in 1998, was obviously a bit deranged; the Hebron residents who went on a rampage in 2001 following the killing of a Jewish baby were enraged, perhaps, but understandably so. Eden Natan Zada of Tapuach killed four Arabs on a bus in Shfaram in August, 2005 writing that “A Jew doesn’t expel another Jew”; Asher Weisgan of Shvut Rachel murdered another four Palestinians that same month near Shiloh: both had hoped to stop the Gaza disengagement,

***

The Jewish Underground that bombed Arab mayors in 1980, murdered three female students at the Islamic College in Hebron in 1983 and hoped to detonate the Temple Mount were a one-time fling. The fact that they were all pardoned by President Chaim Herzog and are now rabbis, educators, politicians, newspaper editors and other esteemed members of society doesn’t necessarily mean their actions are condoned. It could be simply be the remarkable rehabilitative powers of the pristine air in Judea and Samaria.

The Lifta Gang, a Chabad-trained messianic group who “were a step away from blowing up the Temple Mount” in 1984, as Nadav Shragai wrote in his book "The Battle for the Temple Mount," were absolute weirdos; The Bat Ayin Underground who wanted blow up a girls school in East Jerusalem and who police suspected of killing seven Palestinians may have lived in settlements were out of their effing minds, which is much more pertinent; and the Revenge Unit that threw a grenade into the Butcher’s Market in the Old City in 1992 were all disciples of Kach, which, you will recall, is outlawed in Israel. 

 

And everyone remembers the genuine outpourings of outrage and vows of “never again" at the gruesome burning alive of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July 2014, though his ungrateful parents did say that the killing of the baby Ali Dawabsheh in the village of Duma made them feel as if their son had been murdered all over again. 

CRIMINALS