It hangs from a tent on one of three main Tel Aviv’s main boulevards that have mushroomed into in the past month, symbols of a social protest movement sweeping the country that has taken everyone by surprise by its enormity – most of all the young people leading the charge.

That staying power is being tested of course by the resurgence of political violence including rocket-fire into southern Israel this past week.

But as Ayelet Kol, a 37-year-old graphic designer I interviewed in Tel Aviv during one of the largest demonstrations in the country’s history where over 250,000 people clogged the streets in sweaty, impassioned solidarity earlier this month suggested, a new group, the middle class, has found its voice.

In American proportions that would be as if about 14 million people hit the streets.

Here in an innovative video is a glimpse of some of the faces of the Israeli demonstrators.

“Until now most people thought it was their fault that they could not get by but now they are realizing it’s hard for everyone and that they are not alone,” said Kol who has seen the earning power of her salary dwindle in recent years to such an extent that she cancelled her  subscription and gym membership, has entirely cut out eating out.

“We now know there are a lot of us out there and that’s important. That’s power,” said Kol.

In recent years it has been the Right-wing settlers and ultra-Orthodox sectors that have used their muscle in street demonstrations, not the largely secular middle class.

Standing near Kol was a young woman who held high over her head that read, “We will not go to sleep again.”

Further echoing such sentiments at the main tent camp that has transformed Tel Aviv’s upscale Rothschild Boulevard into a Woodstock-like setting, Amir Ben-Cohen, a young graduate student told me, “For years Israelis have been like zombies because of the security situation and did not speak out when other areas were ignored like education and the economy, but enough. We are a new generation. “

Meanwhile, across the sea in New York, watching on with distress as the American economy and the American Dream again seem to be spiraling out of reach, my friend Gretchen links to this piece by Michael Moore on the death of the American Middle Class and asks out loud on Facebook, “So why aren’t the streets filled with pissed people?”

Moore writes:

“Ever wonder what it would look like if 200 million got truly upset and wanted their country, their life, their job, their weekend, their time with their kids back?

Have we all just given up? What are we waiting for? Forget about the 20% who support the Tea Party — we are the other 80%! This decline will only end when we demand it. And not through an online petition or a tweet. We are going to have to turn the TV and the computer and the video games off and get out in the streets (like they’ve done in Wisconsin).”

So perhaps Americans can take a page from the emerging new Israeli playbook.

The background of the problems may be different. There is no tax burden in the U.S. being sucked into an occupation or state support for a large and growing ultra-Orthodox population of men to study Torah in religious seminaries instead of joining the workforce, but there is the common issue of a middle-class feeling like its drowning and a country, that like Israel, might just long to feel like a community as the Israeli author Etgar Keret describes here.

Or as a Bloomberg editorial concluded: “One universal lesson from the Israeli protests might be that economic prosperity for some, at the expense of social inclusion for many, is a nonstarter in a democratic society.”

A recent piece on The Atlantic website is a good overall primer to what is being dubbed J14, a reference to the movement’s start on July 14th. Rafael D. Frankel writes:

“When 25-year-old Daphne Leef pitched a tent on historic Rothschild Boulevard in the heart of Tel Aviv … along with a few hundred friends from a Facebook group she formed, she did much more than start the protest against housing prices in Tel Aviv which she intended. She touched on a strong undercurrent in Israeli society that has been brewing for years–the feeling, mainly among the secular majority, that the social compact upon which the Jewish state was founded had been broken.

Israel is a land that for 100 years has been preoccupied with issues of life and death. To build a state here demanded sacrifice from everyone and it was understood that everyone had to share in the many burdens.

But over the last 20 years, rapid market liberalization and privatization, coupled with the high birth rate of ultra-Orthodox citizens (who mostly do not pay taxes and serve in the army) have created a situation where the middle class, mainly secular majority of the country feels that it is carrying a very large, and very unfair load on behalf of everyone else. It is a situation wholly antithetical to the original Israeli ethos and it has struck a nerve.”

That “nerve” is palpable.  It’s as if a group of traumatized people all of a sudden woke up and realized they were not alone in their inability to make ends meet every month even when they have relatively well paying jobs and the country itself, buoyed by an innovative hi-tech sector, is thriving.

Among the demonstrators I met was a South African-born woman in her thirties who immigrated (or made aliyah as it is called in Hebrew) to Israel.

She says she can no longer afford to stay.  Despite her good salary working in a senior position in marketing, she cannot afford to buy a car or a modest apartment. She makes do renting a small, cramped apartment with cracked floor tiles.

High in the night air she held a sign with a curt rebuke of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, more commonly known by his nickname Bibi:  “Five Years Aliyah, Now leaving. Thanks Bibi.”

(Photo by Shlomi Yosef)

The question of what will become of Israeli-Egyptian relations now that Egypt has officially entered a post-Mubarak era seems as long and open as the border itself and the uncertainty has made Israeli officialdom jittery at best.

But on Sunday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pushed aside the gloom  — and chants from the Chorus of Doom that the Muslim Brotherhood is coming--  to welcome assurances by the Egyptian military that all international agreements would be honored.

“The Government of Israel welcomes the Egyptian military statement that Egypt will continue to honor its peace agreement with Israel,” Netanyahu said at the weekly Cabinet meeting. “The peace agreement with Israel has stood for many years.  During this period, all Egyptian governments have upheld and advanced it and we believe that it is the cornerstone of peace and stability, not only between the two countries, but in the entire Middle East as well.” 

He stopped short of wishing the Egyptian people the best as they embark on the road towards democracy, which perhaps would have been nice, but doubtless would not have been so appreciated by the Egyptians themselves. They are not traditionally big fans of the rather icy, but stable 32-year peace with Israel. 

Nevertheless a group of Israeli musicians sent their hopes for a successful revolution via youtube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6eW_V3ph94

And the Israeli newspapers, publishing Sunday for the first time since Mubarak stepped aside on Friday night acknowledged the new reality in banner headlines hailing “A New Middle East” .

“The Israeli government is quickly adjusting to the day after Mubarak. The transition was from panic to resignation, from doomsday prophecies to a sober effort to get along with things as they actually are,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist for the daily Yediot Achronot.

To that end Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister, held a series of meetings in Washington last week in an effort to forge a joint policy on events in Egypt.

Barak also spoke by phone over the weekend to Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, head of Egypt’s higher military council, the first conversation between an Israeli and Egyptian official since the uprising began in which he said they had the responsibility to stop bloodshed like the 1973 Mideast War, known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War.

During their conversation Barak pointed out that during that war at the same time Tantawi was commander of a division in the Sinai Peninsula Barak also was there  nearby as the commander of an Armored Corps reservist battalion.

 Israeli officials are concerned less about the short and medium term as they are on the uncertainty of the long-term, particularly if Egypt’s military loses its central role. And in a transforming landscape it is seeking new ways to gather intelligence and rethink ways to protect its southern border with Egypt that for decades has not been a concern even as Israel went to war in Lebanon or Gaza. 

 Among the Israeli residents of the cluster of sleepy farming collectives that line the the border about 30 miles south of Gaza the mood is decidedly low-key. 

Like the politicians they too have nothing to do but wait and watch.

Dusty military Hummers pull up into the main square of the village of Kadesh Barnea, a grassy knoll with a small grocery store, and soldiers in helmets and fatigues load up on cigarettes and bottles of Coke between patrols of the border which have been stepped up since the unrest in Egypt.  Nearby children climb a tree.

 ”We hope the stability stays,” said Robert Fisher, 59, looking beyond the children towards the soldiers. “It’s all very strange all this because until now it’s been the quietest place in the country.”

(photo by Dina Kraft)

The siren wailed at exactly 11 a.m. I knew it was coming. How could I not? The Israeli public has been bombarded with reminders for the past week about a national home front drill intended to simulate the event of a massive missile attack on the country.

“Just for preparedness, we’re not saying war is at hand or anything,” was the effective message of the powers that be, winking and nodding enthusiastically towards the direction of Iran and the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Three days of pulling people out of the imagined wreckage of rocket attacks, hospital drills, etc and today – Wednesday – a nation-wide siren during which dutiful citizens were told to quickly make their way to the closest safe room, bomb shelter, or underground parking  garage.

In my case the nearest bomb shelter is about a four-minute walk away in a nearby square. I got there fast, ready to fling myself down a long flight of stairs into a dark underground netherworld of safety. Breathless, I looked up only to see a big fat silver lock on the shelter’s door.

Within moments I was surrounded by others.

“Chutzpa!” shouted the woman with long curly hair.

“What a joke,” snapped the immigrant from the Ukraine. “We are serious about this drill but the authorities aren’t.”

A religious man in a beard and black coat taps his foot angrily as he calls the Home Front Command to complain. “They hung up on me,” he cries. “I’m not even on hold. They hung up on me!”

Next to the shelter that isn’t providing any shelter is a small playground where two young mothers sit. What if the Armageddon scenario comes to be and Israel is really attacked by a nuclear Iran, or more locally, attacked by Hamas or Hezbollah?

One mother rocks her baby in a red stroller and says in a surprisingly calm voice: “We’ll pray.”

The religious man, only half-joking, motions towards the locked shelter, “Don’t let the Iranians know about this.”

The film, which just picked up a second place award at DocAviv, the annual Tel Aviv documentary film festival, tells the story of a Jewish Israeli filmmaker named Noa Ben-Hagai who discovers her family has been hiding a secret: Over sixty years ago, just as Israel became a state, her great aunt married a Palestinian man and spent most of her life living in a refugee camp in the West Bank.

Ben-Hagai sets out to reconnect the two branches of the family, but following the hugs, tears, and comparing of genealogical notes over faded black and white family photographs, comes the frustration. They are two families trying to find a way to become one again in the midst of the reality of the conflict that has a nasty way of rearing its head into their would-be merry reunionizing.

Her uncle Shmuelik, a former colonel in the Israeli army (who was once in charge of all intelligence gathering activities in the West Bank) at first forms what appears to be a  strong bond with his re-discovered first cousin, a woman named Selma.

But their relationship is anything but equal. He’s the one in the position of power as an Israeli with the connections and money to help bail out her son and husband when they are caught illegally in Tel Aviv without work permits and thrown into jail. She’s the one from a refugee family that has trouble making ends meet and cannot legally enter Israel although her mother was a Jew. And as requests for help from the Palestinian relatives on the other side of the political divide continue, Uncle Shmuelik grows bitter and distraught. He accuses his niece, the filmmaker, of opening a “Pandora’s box that holds a festering wound.”

Hearts broken, wounds fresh again, I look at these cousins moving across the screen in obvious anguish and wonder how if relatives of one family cannot find reconciliation what is the hope for the two peoples they represent?

Heck, they can’t even share a road.

Meanwhile, a type of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were launched this week. They have a fancy new name now, “Proximity Talks”.  But no one is holding their breath for their success.

Long-time Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher writes:

“The Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks beginning now will almost certainly end in failure. There is little room for optimism regarding these talks or any other form of peace process that brings together the political camps of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas. The gap between the core beliefs of Netanyahu and Abbas is simply too wide.”

And a report from Time Magazine offers this:

Unfortunately, that shared goal is not to reach a final agreement on a two-state solution to their conflict … Instead, the mutual goal in the latest round of talks is to avoid being blamed for their failure.

One wonders when the leadership on both sides will remember to try to really start making peace.

As Uncle Shmuelik says after making the first phone call to the relatives in the refugee camp after 40 years of silence , “The thing is, perhaps we remembered too late”.

Here’s one of the stories in the Israeli daily Haaretz that was traced back to Kam and led to her eventual arrest.

Until today her story – and the fact that she has been under house arrest for over three months – had officially been under censorship in Israel. But this being the 21^st century, the story had spread like wildfire on-line, first on Hebrew-language Israeli blogs before it was broken by JTA, a news agency covering the Jewish world, and then other international media.

The scandal over the censorship and its background itself was laid out by Judith Miller in The Daily Beast, in The Forward and dissected again here by Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin who takes issue with Israeli security officials’  determination to keep the Kam story quiet.

She writes critically of what she describes as a near blind reverence many Israelis have for the army:  ”Israel lives in a cult of securitism, a glorification of the army and security matters. Its believers are suffused with nothing less than full-blown religious awe, including deep reverence for the unknowable aspects of this deity.”

But now that the charges are public (television broadcasters broke into noon-time programs to air the news), the discourse will quickly shift from the public’s right to know to what the public thinks of Anat Kam. It’s likely to be a polarizing discussion.

“She’s an Israeli, she’s a Zionist,” said Nissim Duek, a spokesperson representing Kam on Israel’s Channel Two after the gag was lifted. She had, he said, “no intention of harming the security of Israel. This is a dangerous precedent.”

Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the FBI, meanwhile told journalists in a rare briefing today that the information she smuggled out could have fallen into enemy hands.  ”We see this is a very serious matter in terms of the potential security damages it could save caused.”

In the television footage she looks like a bookish college student with thick dark glasses and a chin-length bob. Israelis are now set to debate the meaning of the severe charges laid against her and the prospect she might spend many long years in prison.

See here for an English translation of the indictment.

A month after the successful hit which Israel is widely presumed to be behind (but which Israeli officials will neither confirm nor deny, maintaining a policy of  purposeful vagueness when it comes to the world of cloak and dagger) the passport photos of a surprisingly large band of alleged operatives have been released. The Dubai police say as many as 27 agents were sent to their glittering city to kill off al-Mabhouh, a founder of Hamas’ military wing who was considered  Hamas’ liaison with Iran in the weapons smuggling business into Gaza.

The storied Mossad (check out their website)  is one of Israel’s last holy cows and most of the public here was not sorry to see someone like al-Mabhouh’s out of the picture. But what is being asked is whether such escapades (presuming again that it was a Mossad hit) are worth it – especially in a technological age which make getting a clean get-away a near mission impossible.

The alleged operatives in the al-Mabhouh assassination were taped by hotel closed circuit television cameras. And new passport technology such as those using biometric systems including retina scans to confirm a person’s identity will make such efforts even more of a challenge.

As Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv write in a piece on the website of The Atlantic:

“While these security measures were designed to foil terrorists and international criminals, they also serve to hamper counterterrorism agents-the good guys using undercover methods to chase the bad guys. And when it comes to the undercover method of assassination, no espionage agency has more expertise than Israel’s Mossad.”

And then there is also the diplomatic fall-out. The passports used were a mix of British, French, Irish, German and Australian, some forgeries, others perhaps stolen.  Those governments are now demanding answers. Many of the passports belonged to duel citizens of those countries living in Israel, pulling back a bit of the curtain on how the Mossad operates abroad.

Such operations are obviously extremely risky but theoretically score points in the psychological warfare department and cause some operational damage as Hamas arming efforts will be slowed while it grooms someone new to replace al-Mabhouh.

But with arguably short-term results and a new level of risk for their agents being exposed by the latest technology, the Mossad and other intelligence agencies may have to reconsider the efficacy of such assassinations.

In the meantime, Israelis are being banished from Dubai. The UAE has no ties with Israel but Israelis who were duel citizens of other countries had previously been allowed in. No longer, announced Dubai’s police chief this week.

Officials will be able to sniff out Israelis without too much trouble boasted Gen. Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim:

“It is easy for us to identify [Israelis], through their face or when they speak any other language.”

I guess that means Zohan will not be dropping by.

Israel’s top diplomat is anything but, well, diplomatic. After almost a year in office Avidgor Lieberman appears to be in the habit of lighting fires in one of the world’s most flammable neighborhoods.

Last week he helped fuel a war of words with Syria that his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu worked quickly to quell.

And just two weeks before that his ministry’s efforts to humiliate the Turkish ambassador about a Turkish television show that depicted Mossad agents as child killers collapsed into an embarrassing row.

In the Syrian flap, Lieberman made his threats to the Syrian government personal, saying, “In the next war not only will you lose, you and your family will lose control of the government.”

Lieberman, leader of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party (literal translation,  the “Israel is Our home” party) has made his name in Israeli politics as the resident tough guy. He immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet republic of Moldova as a teenager and he retains a thick Russian accent and Sovietesque sternness. His campaign in last year’s elections questioned the loyalty of Israel’s Arab citizens, he’s said Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak “can go to hell” and last spring he publicly clashed with  the U.S. over Jewish settlement building during joint press conference with Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps most significantly Lieberman recently gathered all 150 Israeli ambassadors posted around the world  in Jerusalem to give them a run-down on his new “national pride” foreign policy.

“The time of groveling is over … we will not turn the other cheek,” Lieberman was reported as telling the diplomatic corps. He said now was the time to restore Israel’s national honor by answering every criticism with a counter-attack. Diplomatic niceties should be secondary to standing up for Israel, he told the ambassadors.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu continues to send Defense Minister Ehud Barak abroad to represent Israel instead of the controversial Lieberman especially when it comes to talking about peace efforts. And back home in Jerusalem it’s Barak that does Israel’s talking with U.S. Mideast Envoy George Mitchell. The obvious snub is one  in which Lieberman has been uncharacteristically — and diplomatically — mum.

[State Department photo by Matty Stern U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv / Public Domain]

The long back and forth on the issue has strained Israel-U.S. ties.

The Yesha Council, the umbrella body of the settler movement, is advertising its planned mass rally against the freeze next week with a symbolic ice pick breaking through the tundra. Underneath are various slogans including one calling the freeze “shameful capitulation to American demands.”

The Palestinians for their part are not impressed by the freeze. They blast it as a hollow posturing because it does not include a cessation of Jewish building in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem or a stop work order for some 3,000 construction projects in advanced stages of building.

But whether the freeze is a fig leaf gesture or a turning point in Netanyahu’s policy, Israelis seem to view Obama warily, fearing in this eternal game of “taking sides” in Mideast diplomacy land, that he favors Palestinian interests over those of Israel.

Last week Cabinet member Limor Livnat, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, was quoted as calling the Obama White House “a terrible administration”.

In the past there were unseemly whisperings reported that Netanyahu (frustrated at the time that the Americans did not give him more a fuzzy embrace for publically declaring is support for an eventual Palestinian state) had given to calling Obama’s senior Jewish aides Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod “self-hating Jews”.

A pair of surveys earlier this fall found that a mere 6 percent of Jewish Israelis polled viewed the Obama adminstation as “pro-Israeli”.

Meanwhile, Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. wrote this week in the daily Yisrael Hayom against overly harsh rhetoric from Israeli figures against Obama lest the focus on the “real” problem of Iran be lost.

“Our target audience at the moment is not Ramallah but, rather, Washington,” he wrote. “ We should also remember that the U.S., under Obama, and Israel under Netanyahu, have unprecedented cooperation on security matters. With the clock hands of the Iranian nuclear threat ticking quickly ahead, anyone who criticizes the prime minister’s latest decision (on a settlement freeze) and anyone who has harsh criticism, sometimes overly harsh, of the American administration-should also take this fact into account.”

(White House Photo)

This past weekend, for the second Saturday in a row, some 3,000 ultra-Orthodox did battle at the plant to protest the international computer chip giant’s employment of Jewish workers over the Sabbbath, saying such employment desecrates the holy day and violates Jewish law.

Ultra-Orthodox protesters chanted, “Shabbos, Shabbos” (Yiddish for the Sabbath) and called the policemen “Nazis” and – gasp – “Lefties”. The confrontations are being waged by an extreme sect within the ultra-Orthodox movement even after a deal was reportedly struck with more moderate religious elements not to employ Jews for Sabbath shifts at the plant.

Part of the irony of the protests (aside from the fact that a deal was already made that should answer the issue) is that most of those protesting do not work, living instead off government subsidies to study Torah. The presence of Intel in Jerusalem (it also has offices and a large chip-making factory in the country) is considered an important economic boon for the city which has seen its economy shrink and its secular population flee in recent years, partially in response to the rise in number and influence of the city’s most religious residents. Jerusalem, for all the talk of its political and historical importance by successive governments, now ranks as Israel’s poorest city.

Uri Regev, a reform rabbi who now heads Hiddush, an organization that promotes religious freedom and equality, told The Faster Times that one of the most disturbing factors of the protests is that “they threaten the continued operation of the Intel plant in Jerusalem, though it is one of the most important sources of employment and income for the city and the country.”

Writing yesterday in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest daily, senior columnist Nahum Barnea asks the question being asked by many secular Israeli Jews lately of the ultra-Orthodox about the series of confrontations they have been launching recently, of which the Intel plant is one example.

He suggests the answer is the larger battle over the very character of Jerusalem itself,  “whether it will be a city that is friendly to its visitors, pluralistic, a city that offers residents work and leisure, or whether it will be Bnei Brak (an almost exclusively ultra-Orthodox city).  Since this is the capital, the battle goes beyond the interests of the residents of the city.  It belongs to Israeli society as a whole.”

“The Israeli government speaks in high-flown terms about Jerusalem, but does very little for it.  In this, it is no different from previous governments.  In 1977, when the Likud replaced the Labor Party in the leadership of the state, then-mayor Teddy Kollek said, “We have gone from hostile rule to foreign rule.”  What would he have said about the silence of the current government?  He would probably have said that we have gone from foreign rule to no rule at all,” Barnea continues.

And Rabbi Regev, whose NGO recently did a survey of Israeli public attitudes on such issues adds, “It is unfortunate for Judaism and for Israel, that the debate over the nature of Shabbat in the modern democratic and Jewish State of Israel is dominated by the Ultra Orthodox. We should all respect Shabbat, as a key contribution of Judaism to world, as a day of rest and nourishment of the soul. The discussion as to the desirable boundaries and accommodations should invole the labor unions, the trade and commerce associations,  secular, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike (and non-Jewish Israelis as well). Shabbat is far too important to be left to the extremist religious fundamentalists alone.”

His colleague, Shahar Ilan, argues in an op-ed in today’s Haaretz newspaper that the ultra-Orthodox must urgently be acculturated into Israel’s workforce and their children taught subjects other than Torah study and their sons and daughters drafted into the army like other young Israelis. Otherwise, he warns darkly, nothing less than Israel’s future is at stake.

Without such changes, he writes, the phenomenal growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, “is liable to bring down Israel’s economy and society in 20 years, turning Israel into a third-world country with an atrophied economy and increasing disrespect for human rights. In the most pessimistic scenarios it could lead to a partition of the state, or to civil war. It has happened in other places. It could happen here.”

Ilan’s words may sound a bit alarmist, but as the Sabbath Wars threaten to rage on, driving a further wedge in the ever growing secular-religious divide here, one is reminded that Israel’s fate is not just about its relations with the Palestinians and its neighbors but the relations between its own citizens whose worlds increasingly seem to spin in entirely different orbits.

First hearing the news I thought: another American-born terrorist in Israel?

My immediate association was with Baruch Goldstein , the Brooklyn-born doctor who gunned down 29 Muslims worshippers in the middle of morning prayers in Hebron in 1994. I remember hearing first word of the attack while sitting in the dining hall of the kibbutz where I was then living and studying Hebrew. At first there was no word that Goldstein was American, but the crime seemed so out of place, even in this violence-soaked region. It seemed so, well, American, I thought to myself, in that “going postal” shooting up nameless, faceless strangers kind of way.

Teitel, 37, is suspected of two murders of Palestinians and string of other murder plots, including placing bombs near the homes of a prominent Jewish Israeli left-wing professor and a Jews for Jesus family. He allegedly carried out his first attack – the murder of a Palestinian taxi driver - during a visit to the country in 1997 , and now authorities suspect he may behind other unsolved crimes. Caught pasting leaflets praising the deadly shooting attack in August at a gay and lesbian center in Tel Aviv, he is being investigated for possible links to that crime as well, although he is not considered a prime suspect.

Living in a West Bank settlement, the father of four children, Yaakov has allegedly busied himself amassing an arms cache in his yard and creating a makeshift bomb-making facility inside his house.

Back to the American riddle — true, the sense that there are disproportionate amount of American-born Jews active in the most radical fringes of right-wing Israeli circles is hardly substantiated. But it was the arrival of the American rabbi Meir Kahane to Israel in 1971, an ultra-nationalist who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and whose political party was banned by the Knesset for being racist, who helped plant the ideological seeds of the extremism we see today.

Goldstein, for example, was a devout student of Kahane. And Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh, considered one of the more extreme ideologues in today’s ultra-nationalist scene, immigrated to Israel from St. Louis. (He even spent some time in jail after cheering on Goldstein’s murderous act in Hebron in an essay). He features in a series I wrote about Jewish extremism.

Granted, it’s only a hunch, but there is the feeling, speaking to some of the more hard-line American-born settlers one encounters in the West Bank, that they have possibly transferred some of their American-nurtured prejudices to the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. There is the sense that some have cut-and-pasted memories of tensions with African-Americans they may have experienced growing up in the streets of New York City, for example, with their newfound Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank. In Hebron I even remember seeing grafitti once on a stone wall that read, “Arabs = Blacks”.

Arriving to the isolated West Bank settlements amid terraced hills of olive groves and sweeping views, it is not only American-born Jews who get bitten with fever that they are part of some grand, historical and even mystical scheme. It’s a feeling shared by native-born Israelis too who move there too. But I cannot help but think that American born and raised Jews find especially appealing the image of the Messianic Marlboro Man, tsit-tsit (religious fringes) flapping under a flannel shirt, a gun slung over their backs. They feel empowered by the sense that they are no longer the pale-faced Jews of the Diaspora but are now something akin to the “Lords of the Land” (to borrow the title of a recent book on the settlers).

This Jack/Yaakov Teitel is being described as someone who acted alone in his attacks and planned attacks. But in an interview with Israel Radio yesterday, Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service (basically Israel’s FBI), said that even such loners need a spiritual or ideological base in order to thrive.

“The term ‘errant weed’ is very problematic because even errant weeds grow where they have water. They grow where the temperature and humidity help them grow,” he said, noting that Teitel lived in an ideological West Bank settlement where messianic ideas are embraced even if violence is not. “Terror grows in a place where ideologically it has a source of food.”