Meet Israel's Homegrown Fascists

If anyone knows about fascism, it's Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell. As a boy in Poland, he fled the Nazis who killed his mother and older sister. After arriving in Israel, Sternhell joined the tough Golani Infantry Brigade and fought in three wars defending the Jewish democracy, while pursuing his ground-breaking studies on the rise of fascism in Europe.

On early Thursday morning, Sternhell became a victim of home-grown Israeli fascism. A pipe bomb exploded outside his Jerusalem home. The historian, who teaches at Hebrew University, was only lightly injured, but ominously, the explosive didn't seem to be the handiwork of a deranged student.

Scattered around the street were leaflets offering a 1.1 million shekel ($300,000) reward to anyone who killed a member of Peace Now, a leftist human rights organization to which Sternhell belonged.

Interior Minister Avi Dichter condemned it as “a nationalist terrorist attack apparently perpetrated by Jews”. And Sternhell himself, when he limped out of hospital on Friday, said he was convinced that extremists had carried out the terrorist attack. In his lectures and columns in the daily Haaretz, Sternhell was a fierce critic of the illegal Jewish settlements inside the Palestinian territories. “It's possible that this was done by a lone crazy person, an organization or an entire settlement,” he told Israel Radio.

Most Israelis, especially secular Israelis, think that if there's any chance of living peacefully, side-by-side with a Palestinian state, the Jewish settlements will have to go. The international community thinks so, too. These religious-Zionist settlers are feeling the heat, and preemptively trying to fend off any attempt by the Israeli government to pull them out. These extremists have taken to calling the Israelis security forces “Nazis” and are threatening to spill blood if the authorities try to evict them. Lately, they've come into increased confrontation with Palestinians, stealing or destroying their olive harvest, and even rumbling with the Israeli police.

But until the pipe-bombing, they confined their attacks to the far side of the Green Line, the old 1967 border that demarcates Israel from what was then Jordanian land. No longer. As Sternhill says: There are two populations in the territories and there are two systems of law, and if settlers are allowed to beat Palestinians, to uproot their orchards and demolish their houses, why shouldn't this happen across the Green Line?"

Let's hope that Shin Bet, the internal security service, goes after the professor's would-be murderers with more enthusiasm than they've shown in tracking down those responsible for attacking Palestinian farmers and shepherds. In the West Bank, the arrest record of Jewish lawbreakers is appalling. Referring to his attempted murder, Sternhill put it best: “the incident illustrates the fragility of Israeli democracy, and the urgent need to defend it.”

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem