Jewish Religious Terrorism - After The Creation of Israel

After The Creation of Israel

According to a study by the political scientist Noemi Gal-Or shows that since the creation of Israel, Jewish terrorism has been assessed as "far less significant" than Arab terrorism. It lasted a few years during the 1950s and was directed at internal Israel-Jewish targets, not at the Israeli Arab population. Gal-or, Noemi (Editor). Tolerating Terrorism in the West: An International Survey. Routledge, 2004. ISBN 978-0-415-02441-9. p.61-62 There was then a long intermission until the 1980s, when the Jewish Underground was exposed.

It has been suggested that a striking similarity between the Jewish groups, and jihad networks in Western democracies is their alienation and isolation from the values of the majority, mainstream culture, which they view as an existential threat to their own community. Other similarities between these groups are that their terrorist ideology is not exclusively religious, as it attempts to achieve political, territorial and nationalistic goals as well, e.g. the disruption of the Camp David accords. However, the newer of these Jewish groups have tended to emphasise religious motives for their actions at the expense of secular ones. In the case of Jewish terrorism most networks consist of religious Zionists and ultra-orthodox Jews living in isolated, homogenous communities.

The following groups have been considered religious terrorist organizations in Israel:

• Gush Emunim Underground (1979–84): formed by members of the Israeli political movement Gush Emunim. This group is most well known for two actions. Firstly, for bomb attacks on the mayors of West Bank cities on June 2, 1980, and secondly, an abandoned plot to blow up the Temple Mount mosques. The Israeli Judge Zvi Cohen, heading the sentencing panel at the group’s trial, stated that they had three motives, ‘not necessarily shared by all the defendants. The first motive, at the heart of the Temple Mount conspiracy, is religious.’

• Keshet (Kvutza Shelo Titpasher) (1981–1989): A Tel Aviv anti-Zionist haredi group focused on bombing property without loss of life. Yigal Marcus, Tel Aviv District Police commander, said that he considered the group a gang of criminals, not a terrorist group.

• The "Bat Ayin Underground" or Bat Ayin group. In 2002, four people from Bat Ayin and Hebron were arrested outside of Abu Tor School, a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem, with a trailer filled with explosives. Three of the men were convicted for the attempted bombing.

• Brit HaKanaim (Hebrew: בְּרִית הַקַנַאִים, lit. Covenant of the Zealots) was a radical religious Jewish underground organisation which operated in Israel between 1950 and 1953, against the widespread trend of secularisation in the country. The ultimate goal of the movement was to impose Jewish religious law in the State of Israel and establish a Halakhic state.

• The Kingdom of Israel group (Hebrew: מלכות ישראל, Malchut Yisrael), or Tzrifin Underground, were active in Israel in the 1950s. The group carried out attacks on the diplomatic facilities of the USSR and Czechoslovakia and occasionally shot at Jordanian troops stationed along the border in Jerusalem. Members of the group were caught trying to bomb the Israeli Ministry of Education in May 1953, have been described as acting because of the secularisation of Jewish North African immigrants which they saw as 'a direct assault on the religious Jews' way of life and as an existential threat to the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel.'