[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Sure, can you provide me with a list of violent acts taht they've comitted over the last couple of deades though?

I'm not being a smart a%% I couldn't finds them

It's becoming a serious, serious issue for the IDF.

Radical Jewish activists have staged politically motivated attacks against Palestinians and pro-peace Israelis before. In the early 1980s, for example, one group, known as the Jewish Underground, carried out a series of bombings against Arab mayors and shot three Arab students in the West Bank. And in 1995, an Israeli law student, Yigal Amir, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, dealing a devastating blow to the peace process. Israeli authorities have investigated and prosecuted those involved in these operations, and they have disrupted other attacks before they could occur. Yet they have failed to stem less dramatic violence, such as arson and assault. According to UN investigations, in 2011, extremist settlers launched almost 300 attacks on Palestinian property, causing over 100 Palestinian casualties and destroying or damaging about 10,000 trees of Palestinian farmers. The UN has also reported that violent incidents against Palestinians have proliferated, rising from 200 attacks in 2009 to over 400 in 2011. The spike in assaults on Palestinians by settlers has come despite the fact that over the same period, Palestinian terrorism fell dramatically.

To be clear, arson and the destruction of trees do not belong in the same category as suicide bombings, and using the word "terrorism" to describe such vandalism risks moral equivalency. Yet "terrorism" is defined not only by the act itself but also by its purpose: to produce a psychological effect, terror, as a means of advancing a political agenda. This definition fits the aim of extremist settlers, who often scrawl the Hebrew words for "price tag" at the scene of the crime -- a message to their targets that they will exact a price for any act that they oppose. Such attacks target innocent Palestinians in response to and as a deterrent against Palestinian terrorism and target Palestinians, pro-peace Israelis, and Israeli soldiers alike for supposedly anti-settlement measures taken by the Israeli government. By seeking to frighten a rival population and intimidate a government, the extremists mimic the typical methods of terrorist groups across the globe.

The Israeli government does not support or condone settler violence, but it has failed to adequately combat it. Soldiers have been known to look on as violence occurs, and they sometimes do not aggressively seek the perpetrators after the fact. According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, of 781 incidents of settler abuse monitored since 2005, Israeli authorities closed the cases on over 90 percent of them without indictment. And the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that the IDF is currently probing 15 cases, all of which took place between September 2000 and December 2011, of Israeli soldiers witnessing clashes between settlers and Palestinians and failing to intervene.

Israel's halfhearted response to settler violence is partly a result of the fundamental anomalies of military rule. Unlike East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, other territories that Israel conquered in the 1967 war, the West Bank was never annexed by Israel, and Israel applies civil law there only to Israeli citizens. Although the Israeli police have authority over criminal matters among settlers, the military governs most aspects of public life, from security to construction permits. The Palestinian Authority assumed sovereignty over parts of the West Bank following the Oslo accords, but Israel still controls "Area C," which includes all the settlements, four percent of the Palestinian population, and 60 percent of the total land. Within that territory, the IDF faces the extremely difficult task of safeguarding both Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli security forces may have helped drastically reduce Palestinian terrorism, but the military unsurprisingly remains wary of Hamas and other militant organizations and views the defense of Israeli citizens as its main task.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...rism?page=show

Haaretz has learned that intelligence officials have warned repeatedly over the past few months that right-wing activists would try to sabotage military vehicles inside bases to thwart attempts to evacuate outposts.

The information was reportedly on the desks of Central Command's top brass, which raises questions about the army's functioning during Monday night's settler violence against the Israel Defense Forces.

"In my 30 years in the IDF I never saw such hatred by Jews toward soldiers," GOC Central Command Avi Mizrahi said Tuesday.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition...lence-1.401247

Primarily, the "price tag" policy launched by extremist settlers has become a major factor in developments in the West Bank.

The policy's roots lie in the August 2005 disengagement from Gaza and the subsequent destruction of nine houses in the West Bank outpost of Amona about six months later.

Ever since then, the extreme right has sought to establish a "balance of terror," in which every state action aimed at them - from demolishing a caravan in an outpost to restricting the movements of those suspected of harassing Palestinian olive harvesters - generates an immediate, violent reaction.

Even if this reaction cannot stop an evacuation, the theory goes, the damage it causes - whether the victims are Palestinians or Israel Defense Forces soldiers - will cause the government to think twice before ordering additional evacuations.

Diskin said that hundreds of people are regularly involved in extremist violence, and if necessary, they could recruit another few thousand people for a violent confrontation.

In recent months, the Shin Bet has discerned a gradual rise in right-wing violence. Even though settlers still see no great likelihood of settlements being evacuated in the near future, the fact that senior government officials such as outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Labor leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak all speak constantly of the need for such an evacuation increases the sense of being under pressure.

And the distance from hitting and kicking soldiers and policemen to a political assassination is shorter than it seems.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition...error-1.256501

This is from 2008, but extremely relevant.

The September 25 pipe bomb attack on Israeli professor and prominent peace activist Zeev Sternhell outside his Jerusalem home suggests that some extremists may already be engaging in price-tag attacks in Israel proper. Although Rabin's assassin was a lone gunman acting on the extremist ideology of unorganized fellow travelers, the Sternhell attack appears to have been the result of an organized group of right-wing extremists seeking to incite like-minded individuals to action.

According to Israeli public security minister Avi Dichter, the bombing was believed to be an ideologically motivated terrorist act perpetrated by radical Jewish extremists intent on killing Sternhell. In Sternhell's neighborhood, investigators found pamphlets, signed the "Army of Liberators," offering 1.1 million shekels (roughly $320,000) to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli group. The pamphlet stated, "The State of Israel, our 2000-year-old dream, has become a nightmare. This country is ruled by a mob of wicked people, haters of the Torah who want to erase the laws of God. . . The state of Israel has become our enemy. . . The time has come to set up a state of Jewish law in Judea and Samaria. The time has come for the Kingdom of Judea."

The pamphlet echoes long-stated fringe propaganda, but Israeli security officials fear it represents an extremist threat that has evolved since the days of the Temple Mount Underground (a Jewish terrorist group that plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in the early 1980s). Although the perpetrators of this attack have not been identified, security forces state that a new, organized Jewish underground may be responsible for the bombing and could be planning additional strikes.

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/p...sing-challenge