MIDDLE EAST

A Jewish ISIS Rises in the West Bank

They reject modern political states and their institutions. They want to return
to an imagined earlier era of religious order. They are extreme, fundamentalist,
and violent. What separates so-called Hilltop Youth from young Jihadis?
By Hillel Gershuni

Middle East
A JEWISH ISIS RISES IN THE WEST BANK
They reject modern political states and their institutions. They want to return
to an imagined earlier era of religious order. They are extreme, fundamentalist,
and violent. What separates so-called Hilltop Youth from young Jihadis?
By Hillel Gershuni
January 11, 2016
To be a Hilltop Youth is to first disaffiliate with all establishments in Israel.
Especially the settlements. These young Hasidic-looking men and women make
their homes out of trucks, cars, trailers, cavesanything suitable for a

makeshift shelteratop the hills of Judea and Samaria. They see themselves as
connected to the Land of Israel, not to any of the institutions of the Israeli
state. The very violent group among them consists of no more than a few dozen
core members and a few hundred more who support them in public
demonstrations and on social media. Some in Israel refer to them in disgust and
horror as Jewish ISIS, and while theres a great distance between Al
Baghdadis practice of beheading, burning alive, and massacring thousands of
people and the violence of extreme members of Hilltop Youth, there is indeed a
deep connection between the two phenomena.
ISIS is not just a stateits an idea, and a powerful one: throwing away modern
norms and acting to revive the golden age of the Islamic Caliphate. And just like
the Caliphate, the methods to achieve it are pre-modern: Din Muhammad
Bissayf, the religion of Muhammad is [enforced, spread] by the sword. The
success of such cruel methods within the blurry borders of Iraq and Syria has
drawn young enthusiastic Muslims from around the world to Syria. Similarly,
ideas of reviving the thousands-of-years-old Kingdom of Judea draw young
enthusiastic men and women to the hilltops, where the leaders and idea-men of
the Hilltop Youth promise their followers a sense of authenticity in a postmodern world. As with ISIS, this authenticity is predicated on destroying all
institutions of the State of Israel, which is undeserving of recognition.
Hilltop Youth abandon the communities in which they were raised to live in
trucks in uninhabited regions of the Judean Hills. In their nativist ideology, they
are the real Jews upholding the true Jewish way, and they encourage each
other to strive with violence and terror against non-Jews in order to retaliate
against Arab terrorism and to establish a pure Jewish existence on the land of
Israel. The State of Israel is evil, and the religious communities and ideologies
that support it are misguided, they believe. Their nativism perceives the State
of Israel and its supporters as Erev Rav, a Kabbalistic term that refers to
people who look like Jews but have the souls of enemy gentiles.
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The first inclination of many observers is to label young people who seek out
nativist causes like ISIS or the Hilltop Youth as crazy, lunatics, or hormoneladen kids. But behind this perceived lunacy is a certain philosophy, or a general
tendency, that we can trace back to leaders who either taught fundamentalist
and nativist philosophies or whose teachings have been interpreted to support
violence and terror.
One such leader affiliates with the Chabad movement in Israel. His name is
Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, and many Hilltop Youth attended the yeshiva Od
Yosef Chai where he serves as president in the settlement of Yitzhar, a

community that is home to some of Israels most extremist settlers. In a famous

lecture during his protest of Israels disengagement from Gaza and removal of
the Gush Katif community on its banks, Rabbi Ginsburgh poetically interwove
Chabad and Kabbalistic writings to promote the delegitimizing of the State
institutions. Known as The shell and the fruit, Ginsburghs speech used mystical
metaphors to encourage the destruction of shells around the Jewish people.
The sages compared the people of Israel, said Rabbi Ginsburgh, to a nut, and the
nut has three shells. The shells, according to him, are Zionism, the Israeli
courts, and the government. Now, said Rabbi Ginsburgh, the time has come to
break the shells, overthrow Zionism, disobey the courts, and oppose the
governmentevery governmentuntil a true Jewish regime is reborn.
Although now shunned by Rabbi Ginsburgh himself, his pupils started and
continue to carry out Price Tag terrorism, or as they called it initially, Mutual
Responsibility, or Arvut Hadadit in Hebrew. They burn Palestinian fields or
mosques out of revenge for terror attacks, or just for spite. Outlaws attacked
IDF vehicles to disrupt state-mandated evacuations of illegally built
communities and to deter Israeli forces from policing Jewish terrorists on
hilltops.
A few of them took it one step further. A key figure here is Meir Ettinger, a
grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who has been in administrative detention by the
State of Israel for six months, and who is a disciple of Rabbi Ginsburgh. He was
even once a member of Rabbi Ginsburghs Derech Chayim movement, but
abandoned it for its non-violent approach and adopted the rebellion manifesto,
which called for violent acts in order to shake the foundations of the State of
Israel.
Another player in this scene is Rabbi Shmuel Tal, whose disciples are probably
not in the core of the violent group, but who share the same hatred toward the
State and its establishment. Rabbi Tal changed his view regarding the State of
Israel during the disengagement from Gaza Strip, saying that its no longer a
part of the Redemption process but it disrupts it. One of Rabbi Tals students
published a manifesto after the alleged torture of suspects in the Duma
murders, stating that the Shin Bet is doing this because it is afraid of these
young men, who intend to establish what they see as a real Jewish state in place
of the current corrupted one. Rabbi Tal himself, like Rabbi Ginsburgh, does not
encourage violent acts and in fact preaches against them, focusing on building
alternatives to the secular institutes of the state instead. Nevertheless,
understanding these rabbis philosophy is crucial to understanding the few who
do not follow their pragmatic non-violent line.

The main characteristics of these different perceptions of sovereignty are the

same: longing to go back to the roots and resenting the current State of
Israel. This view is also shared by many ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, people in
Israel, but with one crucial difference: Whereas the ultra-Orthodox do not
believe that the Jewish people is in the middle of a positive ongoing process
of geula (national redemption), the rabbis behind the Hilltop Youth doand also
believe, significantly, that it is a religious duty to act with God and help
advance geula by earthly acts, not just by committing good deeds and waiting for
the Messiah to come.
Combining the two ideasthat we should help the process of geula and that the
State of Israel is not a part of that process, but rather an enemycan be very
volatile. The good news here is that unlike ISIS, we are dealing here with a very
small groupnot tens of thousands of enthusiasts, but a few activists and a few
hundred supporters. But the main rabbinic authorities have no influence on them,
since their theological understanding of the role of the Israeli State is so
radically different. And as the history of ISIS shows, fevered doctrines that
preach a literal return to an ancient and glorious past do not seem to strike
their adherents as crazy.
***