ABSTRACT
Introduction On September 25, 2008 a small pipe bomb exploded at the entrance of the home of Professor Zeev Sternhell, one of the best-known and honored academics in Israel. Sternhell, a political philosopher from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who had in the past been awarded the most prestigious prize granted by the State of Israel to its own academics, the Israel Prize, was slightly injured (Ben David 2008). The Israeli security forces assumed that the perpetrators were religious Jews, apparently affiliated to a religious, right-wing, radical group. They also concurred that the perpetrators had wanted to retaliate to the harsh criticism leveled by the aging professor against the settlement movement and the religious Zionist Jews, which had been appearing constantly on the pages of many Israeli and international media outlets (Ben David and Goren 2008). Israeli politicians and journalists pointed out that once again the Israeli religious Right had targeted a prominent figure on the Israeli Left and that, more than anything else, these acts endangered the stability of the fragile Israeli democracy (Bender 2008). Others rejected these views, claiming that Jewish political violence has always been marginal in Israel. Unfortunately, we have to agree with the former opinion. More than 250 acts of Jewish terrorism and several thousand more minor acts of political violence have been conducted by Jews, mostly due to religious convictions, during Israel’s 60 years of existence, and the numbers have been rapidly mounting in the past two decades (See Figure 7.1). Is it a coincidence that the proliferation of Jewish terrorism occurred parallel to the emergence of religious terrorism worldwide in the past three decades?1 Or does Jewish terrorism actually represent a unique phenomenon? While David Rapoport’s seminal work on holy terror was an important step forward in answering such questions (Rapoport 1984), more up-to-date work is needed. This chapter is based on Rapoport’s groundwork and strives to answer these questions by introducing the reader to the main features of Jewish terrorism, as well as comparing it to other manifestations of religious terrorism of the past three decades. We have been researching Jewish terrorism for over ten years, and along the way we have gathered thousands of official documents, mostly court protocols,2 interviewed 25 former terrorists, politicians, and spiritual
leaders as well as law enforcement officials,3 and conducted six comprehensive surveys of the communities in which Jewish terrorist groups have originated; all told, our surveys included more than 4,800 respondents.4 The compiled information will enable us to effectively portray the montage of Jewish terrorism and compare it to other types of religious terrorism, hence answering the questions we have raised above. Moreover, we believe this will also eventually enable us to better understand other manifestations of religious terrorism such as the jihad networks emerging during the past two decades in the West (see Sageman 2004 and Chapter 5; Pedahzur and Perliger 2007) which, as we will show, have many similarities with the processes that distinguish Jewish terrorist networks. In both cases we are dealing with social networks that slide gradually into political violence and are driven by religious convictions.
