Arrest raises Jewish terror fears

TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- The arrest of a Jewish-American extremist for a 12-year string of murders and bombings has raised fears that a new breed of Jewish terrorist is emerging in the hard-line settlements of the West Bank that U.S. President Barack Obama wants to shut down.

Sunday's announcement of the capture of Yaacov "Jack" Teitel, 37, came as the nation marked the 14th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a messianic Jewish extremist on Nov. 4, 1995, for signing the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians and promising to give up the West Bank.

That murder in downtown Tel Aviv was a turning point for Jewish extremists. It demonstrated the lengths that they were prepared to go to fight what they see as the betrayal of the Jewish state by its leaders.

The 450,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank fear that the Obama administration will force the Israeli government to abandon the region that ultraorthodox Jews believe was given to them by God.

Teitel, an ultraorthodox Jew, was arrested Oct. 7 in a combined operation by the Shin Bet security service and the national police force's elite counter-terrorism unit, Yamam, in Jerusalem.

They also seized his personal arsenal that included several automatic weapons, sniper rifles and handguns that had all been smuggled into Israel.

Teitel came to Israel in 1997 from Florida. He lived with his wife and four children in the Shvut Rahel settlement in the West Bank, 30 miles north of Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Post said that if the charges against him are true, the authorities had apprehended "one of the most dangerous Jewish terrorists in recent years."

He is accused of killing two Palestinians, a Jerusalem taxi driver on June 8, 1997, and a Palestinian shepherd in the South Hebron Hills two months later.

He is also alleged to have bombed the Jerusalem home of Professor Zeev Sternhell in September 2008, wounding the prominent academic and Peace Now activist who had spoken out against the West bank settlements.

Israel's 1967 conquest of the West Bank spawned the suicide bombers that have terrorized the Jewish state. But it also gave birth to a right-wing Jewish underground, an explosive mix of messianism and ultra-nationalism, that periodically rises up to attack Palestinians.

These extremists, deeply rooted among the ultraorthodox movement and the religious Jews who spearheaded the colonization of the West Bank, carried out numerous attacks on Arabs in the early 1980s.

Twenty-eight extremists, most of them from the settler establishment and with close ties to some right-wing Israeli leaders, were convicted before the group was broken up in 1984. They were given lenient sentences and in the end did not stay behind bars for long.

But times change. A new generation of extremists who became active in 2006-08 were given sentences of 12-15 years. One cell was suspected of killing at least eight Palestinians over two years.

The judges who sentenced them at Jerusalem District Court wrote in their summation that "the bar should be raised in punishments for Israeli citizens convicted or murder or attempted murder."

Teitel was considered a lone wolf who did not belong to any group, but security authorities worry about a wider resurgence of Jewish extremism that is reflected in a hardening of attitudes toward Arabs.

This is partly in response to the bloodletting of the Al-Aqsa intifada that erupted in September 2000 and the fears of militant settlers that they may be sold out by the country's leaders.

Shin Bet is once again grappling with a phenomenon that some dismiss as a lunatic fringe and others fear could mushroom into a Jewish version of Hamas.

Indeed, some extremist rabbis endorse the concept of suicide missions. They praise the actions of another Jewish American fanatic, Baruch Goldstein from Brooklyn who slaughtered 30 Muslims praying in Hebron's Ibrahim mosque, known to Jews as the Cave of Machpela, on Feb. 25, 1994.

He was a member of the banned Jewish extremist group Kach founded by Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane, himself assassinated by an Arab in New York in 1990.

Goldstein was beaten to death by those who survived the massacre. He became an icon of the far-right and a martyr-hero for Revisionist Zionists.