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Terrorism in Israel has a new face, and it’s not what it used to be

Alexander O'Riordan
By Alexander O'Riordan
11 Sep 2023
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Settler violence is a comparatively new phenomenon and little understood because a new cast of characters is perpetrating it, some of them South Africans.

Early this week a Scandinavian diplomat was confronted by a group of violent South African settlers in Hebron. The incident is unlikely to be reported on, not because of some broader bias in the media, but rather because settler terrorism has become a daily feature in the West Bank – as much so as Palestinian terrorism.

The BBC reports more than a hundred settler terrorist attacks on Palestinians monthly; The Times of Israel reported 591 settler attacks in the first six months of 2023.

To be clear, the number of settler terrorist attacks is still markedly lower than reported Palestinian terrorist attacks. The government of Israel has also noted a marked increase in Palestinian terrorism, almost doubling from 2021 to 200 incidents a month in 2023.

New cast of characters


This settler violence though, is a comparatively new phenomenon and little understood because a new cast of characters is perpetrating it. Israel’s settler movement was in the past dominated by political and security policy, whether that was in establishing cooperative (moshavs) or socialist (kibbutzim) farming communities in the occupied territories. In most cases these settler communities were non-religious. 

There were some communities of modern orthodox Jews, and a few settlements like in Shilo and Hebron that were located on sites of religious importance. These settler communities included pious Jews most visibly wearing black hats and coats as is commonplace with Haredi Jews.

Haredi Jews mostly do not support Zionism; it is their perspective that a modern Israel that enables premarital sex and a secular lifestyle is religious abomination. Rabbi Breitowitz of Ohr Somayach, an influential Jerusalem-based seminary (yeshiva) with an international network that includes presences in Johannesburg and Cape Town, explains that the primary obligation for pious Jews is to protect themselves from exposure to secular influences… this rationalisation transfers into a refusal to serve in the Israeli Defence Force.

The combination of settlements established through government policy and religious non-Zionist doctrine meant that in the past, violence in the West Bank was the monopoly of Israel’s security services. Today this is no longer the case.

The South African settlers threatening the Scandinavian diplomat in Hebron this week, as with most of the settler terrorists visible in this Channel Four clip, appear at first glance to be pious, similar to Haredi Jews. However, theirs is a distinctly different uniform.

The black hat is replaced by an oversized crochet yarmulke (head cap) and the black overcoats replaced with white button-up shirts. Unlike the Haredi, these are not religious Jews who live just for their faith, willing to live in poverty and out of sight as long as they are left alone. 

Infiltration


No, this newly emerging group of settlers has decidedly material interests. And, like the emergence of radical Islamic terrorists, they are the direct result of the security services infiltrating religious institutions.

Sadly, too many political commentators appear to have never been involved in organising, thus leading to nonsense concepts like religious extremism as being the driver of terrorism. Any liberation or political movement needs to build a constituency that will march, vote and voice the priorities of the movement.

The foundation of organising is identifying organisers who can bring together disaffected people and articulate how their individual frustrations are caused by the political reality. These organisers need to be articulate and compelled to do the work of organising. Usually, these are misfits in one shape or form and necessarily so because those who are happy with their lot in life tend not to care about changing the political reality.

The best places to find these misfits are on factory floors, in universities and in religious institutions. These misfits are easily identifiable because they are already organising, whether that be in the local religious youth movement or in acting as a shop steward or participating in university clubs.

This is what the influential US-based labour organiser Koebel Price calls “pre-existing organising capacity”. In short, identify those with pre-existing organising capacity, provide them social, ego or other incentives, and you have the building blocks of a social movement. 

In the past few decades, deindustrialisation and anti-union tactics in modern factories has made it increasingly difficult to identify organisers from the factory floor. Universities are excellent sites for recruitment, but not so much if the cause is illiberal.

In South Africa, France, Russia and the US, the birthplace of many of these new settler terrorists, Israel is no longer supported on university campuses and has no factory floors to recruit from. Thus the logical solution is to recruit through religious institutions. 

SA Jewish youth movements


In South Africa, this was done by Israel and its political elites through the Jewish youth movements, namely Netzer Maginim, Habonim-Dror, Betar and to a different extent Bnei Akiva (more of a religious rather than Zionist youth movement).

South Africa has a unique and peculiar Jewish community dynamic in that most Jews are not religious, but are firmly committed to their religious institutions. Accordingly, largely secular Zionist youth movements were able to infiltrate the synagogues and temples and recruit youth activists and organisers in support of Israel.

In the 1970s and 1980s, this created a funnel of young secular Jews supporting and moving to Israel. But in the 1990s, a structural change ripped up the old playbook.

First with increasing threats of terrorism against Jewish communities in South Africa and across the world, a new Jewish youth movement was on the rise under the name of the Community Security Organisation (CSO). This youth movement, officially neither Zionist nor religious, excelled where all the others failed – it organised young Jewish adults and was associated with getting Jews to marry one another.

One South African rabbi even complained at a community meeting in the mid-nineties that the funding the Jewish community provided to the traditional Jewish youth movements was a waste because unlike with the CSO, it did not result in any new Jewish marriages.

New Jewish identity


While CSO has no easily defined ideology, the unwritten rules are that to be a Jew means to carry arms and defend the community interests against outsiders. The rise of the CSO and a Jewish identity embedded in the ability to commit violence coincided with the demise of Israel as a point of pride for young Jewish intellectuals. 

Over time, South Africa’s Jewish youth organising started to produce a new Jewish identity that was shaped by being armed and willing to use violence to defend one’s interests and religious leanings. Along with other white men, many young Jewish men have struggled to find the place in the modern economy that they were raised to believe was their right. Many of these disaffected young men found a home in this new Jewish identity.

There is one more toxic dynamic that has come into play. Israel has increasingly become a bifurcated country because of its economic success. With a GDP per capita of $52,000, Israel is now wealthier per citizen than the United Kingdom. But this wealth is concentrated in liberal bastions like Tel Aviv that are home to new tech and/or largely inherited wealth. The average price of an apartment in Tel Aviv is now close to R25-million. 

On the other side of the country is Mea She’arim in Jerusalem, the cramped and impoverished Haredi neighbourhood that looks more akin to what you would imagine an Eastern European ghetto is than the shiny skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. 

The disaffected, somewhat religious, and armed young Jewish men moving from countries like South Africa to Israel tend to have neither the skills nor the wealth to make a life in Tel Aviv, nor are they of the ideological bent to live in poverty in Mea She’arim.

Put together, the solution is obvious: move to the settlements, push the Palestinians further out and build, build, build. DM

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