By Jonathan Cook* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Settlers step up "price tag" policy

A rabbi from one of the most violent settlements in the West Bank was questioned on suspicion of incitement last week as Israeli police stepped up their investigation into a book in which he sanctions the killing of non-Jews, including children and babies.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira is one of the leading ideologues of the extreme wing of the religious settler movement. He is known to be a champion of the "price tag" policy of reprisal attacks on Palestinians, including punishing them for attempts by officials to enforce Israeli law against the settlements.

So far the policy has chiefly involved violent harassment of Palestinians, with settlers inflicting beatings, attacking homes, throwing stones, burning fields, killing livestock and poisoning wells.

It is feared, however, that Shapira's book, The King's Torah, published last year, is intended to offer ideological justifications for widening the scope of such attacks to include killing Palestinians, even children.

Although Shapira was released a few hours after his questioning on 26 July, dozens of rabbis, as well as several members of parliament, rallied to his side, condemning the arrest.

Shlomo Aviner, one of the settlement movement's spiritual leaders, defended the book's arguments as a "legitimate stance" and one that should be taught in Jewish seminaries.

But in a sign of mounting official unease at Shapira's influence on the settlement movement, the Israeli military authorities also threatened last week to enforce a decade-old demolition order on Yitzhar's seminary, which was built without a permit.

Dror Etkes, a Tel Aviv-based expert on the settlements, said the order was unlikely to be carried out but was a way to pressure Yitzhar's 500 inhabitants to rein in their more violent attacks.

He said the authorities had begun taking a harder line against Yitzhar only since Shapira and several of his students were suspected of torching a mosque in the neighbouring village of Yasuf last December.

"Shapira is trying to redefine the conflict with the Palestinians, turning it from a national conflict into a religious one. That frightens Israel. It doesn't want to look as though it is fighting the whole Islamic world," Etkes said.

He added that the rabbi and his supporters were closely associated with Kach, a movement founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane that demands the expulsion of all Palestinians from a "Greater Israel". Despite Kach being banned, officials have largely turned a blind eye as its ideology has flourished in the settlements.

"It may be illegal to call oneself Kach but the authorities are more than tolerant of settlers who hold such views and carry out violent attacks. In fact, what Kahane was doing in the 1980s seems like child's play compared with today's settlers."

In the 230-page book, Shapira and his co-author, Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, also from Yitzhar, argue that Jewish law permits the killing of non-Jews in a wide variety of circumstances. The terms "gentiles" and "non-Jews" in the book are widely understood as references to Palestinians.

They write that Jews have the right to kill gentiles in any situation in which "a non-Jew's presence endangers Jewish lives" even if the gentile is "not at all guilty for the situation that has been created".

The book sanctions the killing of non-Jewish children and babies: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."

The rabbis suggest that harming the children of non-Jewish leaders is justified if it is likely to bring pressure to bear on them to change policy.

The authors also advocate committing "cruel deeds to create the proper balance of terror" and treating all members of an "enemy nation" as targets for retaliation, even if they are not directly participating in hostile activities.

The rabbis appear to be offering justifications in Jewish law for collective punishment and other war crimes of the kind committed by the Israeli army in its attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008.

Pamphlets similarly calling on soldiers to "show no mercy" were distributed by the army's rabbinate as troops prepared for the Gaza operation, in which 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, were killed. Religious settlers have come to dominate many combat units.

An investigation last year by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found Shapira's seminary had received government funds worth at least 300,000 US dollars in recent years. American and British groups have also contributed tens of thousands of dollars in tax-deductible donations.

According to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, the Yitzhar settlers have responded to the demolition order against their seminary by threatening to publish documents showing that the housing and transport ministries were closely involved in the project too.

The settlers have repeatedly rampaged through nearby Palestinian villages, most notoriously in September 2008, when they were filmed shooting at homes in Assira al-Kabaliya, smashing properties and daubing Stars of David on homes. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the time, termed the settlers' actions a "pogrom".

The same year a religious student from Yitzhar was arrested for firing home-made rockets at Palestinian villages close by.

In April, Yitzhar's settlers marched through the village of Huwara and pelted a Palestinian family's home with stones in "reprisal" for the arrest of 11 of their number.

A settler from Yitzhar was questioned last month over the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Aysar Zaban, in May, reportedly after stones were thrown at the settler's car. The teenager was shot in the back.

Last week, the settlers attacked Burin, shooting at villagers and burning fields.

In most of these cases, the settlers who were arrested were released a short time later either by the police or the courts. In January, a Jerusalem judge freed Rabbi Shapira for lack of evidence in the arson attack on the mosque.

Yitzhak Ginsburg, an authority on Jewish law and a mentor to Shapira, was questioned by police on 29 July over his endorsement of the book. In the past Ginsburg has praised Baruch Goldstein, a settler who opened fire in Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque in 1994, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers.

In 2003 Ginsburg was accused of incitement for publishing a book that called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories, but the charges were dropped after he issued a "clarification statement".

A group calling itself "Students of Yitzhak Ginsburg" recently distributed a leaflet urging Israeli soldiers to "spare your lives and the lives of your friends and show no concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us".

What is Kach?

Kach was founded in 1971 by the late Meir Kahane, an American rabbi who immigrated to Israel. He won a seat in the Israeli parliament in 1984 on a platform of expelling all Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories. As an MP, he drafted legislation to revoke the Israeli citizenship of non-Jews and ban sexual relations between Jews and gentiles.

The political party was banned from running for the Israeli parliament in 1988 and the movement was outlawed six years later. Although the group is considered a terrorist organization in the United States and most of Europe, its ideology has been allowed to thrive in the settlements.

Today, dozens of rabbis espouse an interpretation of Jewish religious law identical to or worse than Kahane's.

Michael Ben Ari, a former Kach leader, was elected as an MP last year for the far-right National Union party, which holds four seats in the 120-member parliament.

Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the parliament's third largest party and is foreign minister, briefly joined the party before it was banned. His own party's anti-Arab "No loyalty, no citizenship" programme includes echoes of Kahane's ideology.

* Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Occupied Palestine.

By Kawther Salam

The IDF criminal soldiers harassing me on my way to the old city near the entrance of my house in Hebron H2

Without further introduction, for what do you send me your death squads, you criminal morons? Exactly for what did you send me your fumbling, wannabe "agents" to follow me for hours like thieves, trying to provoke me, calling my friends? What do you want from a Journalist you have already kicked out of her country, you criminal terrorists? Are all the journalists you murdered in Palestine not enough, so that you now expand your terrorism into Europe? It would be easier if you kept these criminals at home instead of sending them to this quiet country, where decency exists and the law is respected.

Your fumblers call my colleagues in Palestine and my friends in Austria in the deep of the night, like bats, giving false names or none at all, hiding their phone numbers, asking stupid questions and telling inane lies to get answers. In Palestine your thugs pressure my colleagues with typical mafia methods: by denying work permits, ransacking their property or arresting and murdering them or their family members when they don’t "cooperate". Here in Austria, you send people who think that they can get any kind of results by using the same criminal methods.

What did your super-agent "Diego", the one who called my friend here in Austria, expect? Did this character think that identifying himself as "a jew" would make anybody tremble in awe? "Diego the super-agent" was scared to leave his phone number and his name. My friend told me that "Diego" came across as a petulant nincompoop who grew more angry the more it became clear to him that he was going nowhere with his bald lies, bad manners and arrogance.

All what you are doing, in Palestine or here, are crimes, and all what you are getting are lies and people who laugh about you behind your back. Of course your intimidation tactics get my acquaintances in Palestine to call me and ask questions on your behalf, but together we tell you lies and laugh about your stupidity behind your back. Is that what you like, you pitiful people?

You kicked me out of my homeland Hebron because the moral degenerates and terrorists from Kach and Jewish Underground, those who squat in the heart of my homeland Hebron don’t like my work as a journalist, and as a result I live in Austria as a refugee. I continue writing the truth, and what I write does not meet the taste of you criminals. So you send me death threats, try to hack my website several times, and since all of that does not make me shut up, you now send a team to intimidate, to harass me, and possibly to murder me. What results do you expect to get from committing such crimes?

In my homeland Palestine you called and threatened me constantly, you harassed me physically, psychologically, and sexually. You denied me the basic right to practice my work as a journalist. You stole my home, my ID, my work, my family, my friends; just like what you did to uncountable other Palestinians. Your crimes against me were so numerous and your threats came so often that I stopped fearing you, because all of your crimes against me blurred into one big picture of ridiculous insanity.

I still wonder why you are calling my friends in Palestine and Europe to ask about me. Why do you send your murderers to Austria to walk behind me? What dirty mission are your criminals planning here? Do you really think that you will get anything favorable at all by sending people to commit acts of state sponsored terrorism in a country where the law is respected? Do you really think that transferring your methods of state terrorism to Austria will bring you advantages? Do you think that murdering one of your victims, a journalist in good standing, will help make Israel look better? I think not. The image of Israel is already as bad as can be in many parts of the world, your so-called "state" is seen by increasingly more people as a bad joke and a disgrace to humanity. Sponsoring acts of international terrorism in a state of law will be a disaster for your failed "state" in every sense. One thing is clear: the incompetent people who you sent have been caught, but not captured, and Israel will be guilty for whatever happens to me from now. If the leaves of autumn fall on my head, Israel will be guilty.

Do yourself a favor and stop sending these cowards. For now your "super agents" have been exposed as laughing stock, but what will happen if next time around one of them is caught? It was enough to shout to have your "super-agents" run away like rabbits. I felt victorious to see you like that because that was your real face: coward, criminally insane petty thieves.