Right to Exist

For more than a half-century, Israel has been forced to defend its existence against international political disapproval, racist calumny, and violence visited upon its citizens by terrorists of many stripes. While nations have always been made to defend their moral, political, economic, or social actions, Israel has the unique plight of having to defend its very right to exist.

Covering Israel's struggle for existence from the British occupation and the UN’s partition of Palestine, to the dashed hopes of the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, Yaacov Lozowick trains an enlightening, forthright eye on Israel’s strengths and failures. A lifelong liberal and peace activist, he explores Israel’s national and regional political, social, and moral obligations as well as its right to secure its borders and repel attacks both philosophical and military. Combining rich historical perspective and  passionate conviction, Right to Exist sets forth the agenda of a people and a nation, and elegantly articulates Israel’s entitlement to a peaceful coexistence with its surrounding Arab neighbors and a future of security and pride.“An intelligent polemic. . . . Largely persuasive.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Essential. . . . Lozowick contends that the story of Israel is, crucially, the story of its wars–and that any attempt to evaluate Zionism must be anchored in the larger context of the morality of war.” --National Review

“Unusually illuminating. . . . Liberal American critics of Israel who wonder why Israeli intellectuals don’t share their views will find Right to Exist eye-opening.” –Philadelphia Inquirer

“Where has this book, or others like it, been all this time? . . . A powerful handbook for anyone interested in Israel.” –The New York Post

“[Lozowick] concedes basic justice in the Palestinian cause, and he deals respectfully with the arguments made by both sides. . . . He is also honest about such matters as the historic cohabitation of Muslims and Jews.” --Los Angeles Times Book Review
Yaacov Lozowick is the director of the archives at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, and the author of Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil.INTRODUCTION

Why I Voted for Sharon
The war against the Jews goes on. Jewish children are shot in their beds, and the shooters are celebrated as heroes. Jewish teenagers are blown up, and the mothers of their murderers exult. Elderly Jews are burned to death, and the killers gloat on their Web sites. And across the Arab world from Pakistan to Morocco, hundreds of millions have nothing better to do than to chant for the death of the Jews. If there was one thing to be learned from the twentieth century, it is that when people consistently say that they want the Jews dead, they may actually mean it. And when the rest of the world looks away or pretends not to hear, the killers take silence for acquiescence, acquiescence for concurrence, and concurrence for support.

Yet in our generation the Jews are quite capable of defending themselves, and that confuses the issue. The irrationality of wishing the Jews gone can hide—just barely—behind political considerations: the Jews must change before one can live with them. The immorality of passive support for the killers can hide—almost plausibly—behind censure of the way the Jews wield power: the Jews have brought their enemies’ ire upon themselves. Worst of all, the resolve of the Jews never to succumb can be whittled away by their own doubts about the wisdom of surviving by the sword and by their hopes of buying acceptance with political gambles: if only we were more benign and accommodating, our enemies would accept us.

The Jews cannot decide for the Arabs to accept Israel’s right to exist. They cannot decide for Israel’s Western detractors to accept the morality of the choices she makes. But Israel can and must do her utmost to ensure that her choices are moral and wise; when they’re not, they must be corrected. Jews care deeply about morality and always have; this has been a source of their strength in the face of enduring adversity. Since the adversity continues unabated, the strength that comes from being moral is as essential as ever.

My initial understanding of Zionism, while childish, was shared by most adults I knew. It had a good side, the Israelis, and a bad side, the Arabs, and they were so bad that their motives seemed almost inexplicable. The Arabs kept trying to destroy Israel, but Israel, partly by virtue of her moral methods of waging war, repeatedly rebuffed the heinous Arab attacks. The events of spring 1967—bombastic Arab speeches about destroying Israel, total international ineptitude in stopping them, if not even acquiescence, and then the seemingly miraculous Israeli deliverance and victory—these were the formative events of my childhood.

My arrogant complacency took its first blow on the gray afternoon of February 21, 1973, when our fighter pilots shot down a civilian Libyan airliner that had strayed into Israeli airspace over the Sinai. I was appalled by the deaths of everyone aboard and horrified by the total lack of remorse exhibited by the head of the army and the two civilians above him, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir. The plane had no reason to be there, they said. It had flown over a military installation. It could have been spying. There was no way to know—so they had ordered it shot down.

I was a teenager at the time, and in the first political act of my life I faced my peers with the demand that they agree that while Zionism was still fine, these particular Zionists must go. Almost no one agreed.

From 1975 I spent three years in the armored corps. The army I was in was still reeling from the ferocity of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which people I knew had been killed; we spent most of our time in the Sinai desert, training to stop and rout another Egyptian attack, should it come. To listen to Israel’s critics today, we were already a decade into the brutal occupation of the Palestinians, but neither I nor anyone I knew had any military encounters with occupied Palestinians. We served on the borders and faced Arab armies or Palestinian forces in Lebanon; the Palestinians under our occupation went to work in Israel, and while undoubtedly disliking us intensely, they did very little that called for brutal oppression. On vacations we would roam freely wherever we wished, at times taking Palestinian buses between Palestinian towns. One image stands out: eight or nine of us standing in a Palestinian town and Avi Greenwald cracking jokes in Yiddish, to the tremendous amusement of the young Palestinians grouped around us. Avi was killed a few years later, fighting the Syrians; I have no doubt that some of those young Palestinians were later killed fighting us. That simple scene is hard to conceive of today.

A few years later, out of the army and at university, I took to reading history, particularly the history of the Jewish state. The good guys vs. bad guys version of the story on which I had been raised lost its appeal; the story of Zionism acquired darker hues, and Arab rejectionism became less inexplicable. They hadn’t asked us to come to their part of the world; the simplistic version of Zionism as a national movement that never did anything wrong, so I learned, was not the full story. As time went on, it seemed to me that saving the soul of the Zionist project required—indeed demanded—that Israel address the Arab predicament. That we reach a mutual accommodation that would address the basic needs not only of the Jews, but of their neighbors, especially the Palestinians. The Egyptian case was a shining example that this could happen.

In 1978, a trio of American, Egyptian, and Israeli leaders cloistered themselves at Camp David; the result was a treaty that has withstood some pretty severe tests. Those were heady days. Upon his return, Prime Minister Menachem Begin was greeted at the airport by thousands of cheering demonstrators; a representative of the Peace Now movement announced: “We didn’t vote for Begin, but as he has risen to the historic moment, we’ll marshal all our forces to support him.” The image was in black and white: color TV came to Israel only a few years later. The physical sensation was unforgettable. I was overcome by tears of emotion at the prospect of life in a country not at war—“a normal country.”

Though not actively interested in politics in those days, I was inclined to support whoever was willing to seek negotiating partners for peace, even if this meant handing over additional chunks of the territory we’d been holding since 1967. This put me to the left of the political center, since most people didn’t see any additional partners to discuss peace with, beyond the Egyptians.

Any final wavering about my political position was beaten out of me in 1982, when we went to war in Lebanon. The Lebanese war was Israel’s fifth since 1947, but it was the first war that many of us wondered about even before it had started. For one thing, it didn’t seem an unavoidable war of self-defense as the others had been. For another, it was brewing just as we were completing our evacuation of the Sinai as part of the agreement with Egypt, a peace that as yet showed no sign of spreading to the rest of the Arab world. The final stages of that agreement included the dismantling of settlements in Sinai set up after the Six-Day War and was presided over by an unlikely duo of hawks, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, his minister of defense. Sharon, already nicknamed “the Bulldozer” for his ability to get things done, quite literally bulldozed the settlements lest the settlers return, he said—or lest the Egyptians try to use them, some of us speculated. Then, within two months, these peacemakers took us to war.

The plan seemed straightforward enough. We were going to push the brigades and artillery of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) away from our northern border, whence they had been shelling and infiltrating northern Israel for several years; the war would be a limited affair, not very costly in blood and quickly over. We wouldn’t tangle with the Syrians unless they chose to tangle with us, and the whole thing had the fine title Operation Peace for Galilee.

Yet within a few days, doubts began to gnaw at us. Rumors coming from units facing the Syrians suggested that some of the provocations had been ours, not theirs. The government had assured us that the goal was to reach a line forty kilometers north of our border, but we were obviously not stopping at that line—nor was the operation over within a few days, or a week, or a month. About then, we had our first taste of a totally new phenomenon: A group of reserve officers, freshly demobilized from active duty at the front, announced to an incredulous nation that they thought this was a stupid war.

As weeks turned into months, the pictures got worse. Every evening we would watch on television as our aircraft pounded Beirut: there were high-rise buildings there. How can you bomb them without hitting the wrong people? The wife of a lieutenant colonel whom I had known in high school published his letters of dissent in Haaretz, our left-leaning highbrow newspaper; he was abruptly thrown out of the army. Then the rebellious reservists were joined by a career officer, a full colonel who resigned rather than lead his troops into house-to-house combat in Beirut. Even cabinet ministers began to mutter that this was not the operation they had authorized and refused to countenance any further advances.

Begin, meanwhile, seemed increasingly out of touch. Visiting some crack troops who had just taken a very tough PLO position in an old crusader fortress called Beaufort, where they had lost their commanding officer, he inquired if the enemy had used “firing machines”—an archaic word for machine guns. Then he compared Yasser Arafat in his bunker to Hitler, prompting author Amos Oz to publish his famous article, “Hitler Is Dead, Mr. Prime Minister!” Soon he would visibly start to wither, eventually fading from the public eye and then out of office entirely. For better or worse, we were left with one major villain, Ariel Sharon, minister of defense and the architect of the entire campaign.

People like myself decidedly didn’t like Sharon even before 1982. Though he had fought heroically in the War of Independence and was an acknowledged tactical genius, there was something brutal about him. He set goals and reached them, no matter what the cost in human lives, whether in the Arab town of Kibiya in 1953, the Mitla Pass battle of 1956, or the subduing of the Gaza refugee camps in 1970. Even his brilliant turning of the tide in the Sinai in 1973 was rumored to have been the result of crass insubordination at a human cost that was not necessary. Perhaps most disturbing of all, he was completely free of any doubts, always certain that he was right and everyone else wrong, and since leaving the army and entering politics after the war of 1973, he had been a hard-line cabinet minister, the chief architect of the new settlements springing up throughout the West Bank. The political Right loved him, and the Left hated him, for the same reason: He represented Zionism’s transformation of weak but moral Jews into immoral power users.

At the end of September 1982, Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, perceived as pro-Israeli, was assassinated by Syrian proxies. For reasons still unclear, the Israelis allowed units of Gemayel’s paramilitaries into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut, where they massacred hundreds of defenseless Palestinian civilians. For a moment of panic we feared that our own men were implicated, but even when we understood that the murderers were Arabs, we were still horrified that we had somehow become allied to such thugs. The growing sense of unease and rejection that had been building all summer exploded in a nauseating attack of guilt and an acute sense of moral defilement. How could anyone have dared to drag us so incredibly low? With a sense of doom, we turned our fury on the man who epitomized the whole morass: Ariel Sharon.

There was a tidal wave of demonstrations, culminating in what is still referred to as the “Rally of the 400,000,” although the square where it took place couldn’t contain more than half that number. But even two hundred thousand people made up a full 5 percent of the population, equivalent to having fourteen million Americans at one rally. The government bowed to the pressure and appointed a commission of inquiry headed by Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan. Then began a very tense period of waiting.

The winter of 1983 was unusually bleak. The misadventure in Lebanon was proving a quagmire akin to the American experience in Vietnam. The populace was sharply divided: the enthusiastic supporters of Menachem Begin, until recently a charismatic leader and hypnotic orator, had no patience for what they saw as spinelessness in the face of a hostile Arab world; we in the opposition were deeply mortified by what seemed our encroaching moral integration into the surrounding Middle East. Then in February the Kahan Commission recommended that Sharon leave the Ministry of Defense for his failure to foresee the danger in allowing the Phalange forces into those camps. What remained was for the government to accept the recommendations.

The tension in the air was palpable. Walking down Ben Yehuda Street in the center of Jerusalem, I saw an ugly crowd of gesticulating and cursing men. Edging my way in, I recognized the man at their epicenter: we were reservists together. Short, dark, and of Iraqi descent, Nathan did not at all resemble your stereotypical light-skinned academic peace activist. But he was proudly and furiously holding his own, damning Sharon and his failures and drawing the holy wrath of the surrounding ring of men. Hoping to reduce the pressure, I told some of the hecklers that Nathan, in one of the toughest battles of the war he was now lambasting, had proven himself a bona fide hero; but this was like water off the back of a duck. “Maybe he’s shell-shocked out of his senses,” they said, then shrugged and turned back to scream at him. That evening, Peace Now demonstrators, grimly bound together in a compact phalanx, marched through the streets of Jerusalem, surrounded by jeering crowds, all the way to the prime minister’s office, where the government was still deliberating. Yonah Avrushmi, who saw himself as a protector of Sharon, hurled a grenade at them, wounding many and killing Emil Grynzweig.

It was the first political murder I had experienced in Israel, and I can think of only one since then. Faced with the looming mayhem, the government removed Sharon from his post. We swore that he’d never be back.

Eighteen years later, in July 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak set off for a second set of trilateral Camp David peace talks with the American president, Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. Thousands of us converged in front of his residence to demonstrate our support. The first speaker, Tzali Reshef, had been prominent in Peace Now since its inception; now he was in his late forties. He reminded his audience of more than two decades of activism for peace—often in an atmosphere of severe public animosity, since the movement had demanded that the dream of retaining control of the West Bank be dropped. And now an elected prime minister with a mandate to withdraw from the territories was off to reach an agreement with Arafat. “This is the moment!” he thundered.

A few weeks later Barak was home, but there were no crowds to greet him at the airport. Israel had been dismantling her control over the Palestinians since the Oslo Accords in 1993. At Camp David, Barak had effectively offered an end to the occupation, with Israel to evacuate whatever territory she still held in Gaza and at least 90 percent of the West Bank, while dismantling many settlements; Israel would recognize an independent Palestinian state in all of the evacuated areas. In Jerusalem, Barak offered to divide the city, insisting only on Israel’s retaining some sort of connection, even symbolic, with the Old City and the Temple Mount. In return, he expected the Palestinians officially to declare that the conflict was over. Bill Clinton praised Barak for his far-reaching offers, while dejectedly noting that Arafat had simply turned them down without making any counteroffers.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, acting foreign minister, took off on a whirlwind tour of foreign capitals, to explain what had happened at Camp David. Wherever he went, he was congratulated on the positions Israel had taken while being encouraged not to give up. And indeed, the diplomatic activity between the sides was still going on. On September 24, Barak hosted Arafat at his home; after the meeting, negotiators from both sides flew to talks in Washington.

On September 27, an Israeli soldier, nineteen-year-old David Biri of Jerusalem, was killed by a bomb at Netzarim, an island of Israeli-controlled territory in the Gaza Strip. It was the first such attack since Barak had offered to dismantle and evacuate it, along with the other remaining settlements in Gaza. In other words, every single casualty there from August 2000 onward will be senseless, as the Palestinians are fighting for something they could have had without bloodshed. The second intifada had begun.

The next day, opposition leader Ariel Sharon and his entourage visited the Temple Mount. The visit had been cleared in advance with Palestinian authorities. Shlomo Ben-Ami, no friend of Sharon, had spoken personally about it to Jibril Rajoub, one of the top Palestinian security officials; Rajoub had told him that as long as Sharon stayed away from the mosques, there would be no problem. The visit itself was short and uneventful; Sharon told reporters how important the Temple Mount is to Jews, and left.

Friday, September 29: Muslim rioters on the Temple Mount dump rocks on Jews praying at the Western Wall below. A picture on my desk shows a four-year-old girl, crying with terror, being pulled away from the wall by her mother; other women are racing off; a policeman is screaming at them all to get away. Up on the mountain, five demonstrators were killed in the ensuing clash with police. Yossi Tabaja, an Israeli policeman on a joint patrol near the town of Kalkilya, was killed when one of his Palestinian colleagues simply walked over and shot him.

For the next two days I heard no news. It was Rosh Hashanah, one of the most solemn dates of the year, and we spent long hours in the synagogue. The climax of the day, I have always felt, is the segment written in the eleventh century by Amnon of Magenza, as he lay dying from torture inflicted for his refusal to convert to Christianity. Magenza was the Jewish name of the German town of Mainz, although I have yet to meet a single German who recognizes it. A few years later, the whole community was destroyed by Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The survivors fervently adopted Rabbi Amnon’s powerful passage about the awesomeness of the day each year on which God decides who will live and who will die. Fittingly enough, the possibility of living for another year is noted briefly, while the possibilities of death are multiple: “who by water, who by fire, who by the sword, by the beast, by hunger, by thirst. . . . Man is as a broken shard, as hay on the wind, as a wilted flower, as a passing shadow, as a fleeting dream.” A tradition that calls forth such poetry from the bloody rubble is surely worth living—and fighting—for. Some cultures would call forth only hatred.

Sunday night, with the two days of prayer and reflection behind me, I got on the Internet and visited The New York Times. The horrifying picture of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy named Muhammad al-Durrah huddling in terror next to his father, moments before he was shot, struck me like a fist in my face. As a liberal humanist, a lover of peace, and a seeker of justice, and as the father of a twelve-year-old son, I recoiled from the image. My first response was an internal cry of pain; externally, a compressing of the lips and a grim condemnation of our inability to keep the children out of our wars. That picture is on my desk as I write, and I have spent many hours studying it, etching it on my mind and soul. It is an incredibly powerful image—so powerful, indeed, that it took me weeks to understand the truth of it: that it happened at Netzarim, a place that had already been surrendered. That Muhammad’s father had been screaming to his own compatriots for a brief pause in the firing; that a French cameraman—mysteriously alerted to the attack ahead of time—had been standing a few yards away but rather than join in the pleas of the anguished father had merely kept his camera trained on the picture of his career; that the Palestinian fighters themselves were so intent on redeeming by bloodshed what they had refused to accept by negotiation that it never crossed their minds to stop shooting; and that given the terrain and the range, it was highly unlikely that the Israeli soldiers had any idea a child was there. Hunkered in their trenches, being shot at from three sides just a few days after David Biri’s death at the same place, they could not be accused of having calmly and maliciously shot down a child; only a fool would say otherwise.

But that is precisely what my good friend Arthur turned out to be. Arthur is an English academic who takes his non-Jewish students each year to visit the Nazi death camps in Poland. In a heated exchange, he placed the entire blame for the violence on Sharon and, implicitly, on Israel’s insistence on occupying Palestinian territory; he further declared that Sharon was a war criminal and that in a normal country he would have been tried for his crimes. Going over the top, he likened Sharon to Slobodan Miloˇsevi´c, the Serbian leader who has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his conscience, the dynamo of an entire decade of calculated murder of civilians, concentration camps, and systematic ethnic cleansing. This was too much, and for the first time in decades I found myself defending Sharon by replying that these events were a bit too grave to be glibly assigned to him and that if one were looking for a leader with the blood of innocents on his hands, Arafat would easily qualify. In response, Arthur severed his relations with me—a decade of friendship, gone in the puff of an e-mail.

Also gone forever was my second, laboriously constructed, revised understanding of the Zionist project. In this version, so typical of my own post-1967 generation, powerful Israel had to reach out her hand to the aggrieved Palestinians and offer them generous terms of peace and reconciliation, and if she did so, the Palestinians would inevitably return the gesture in kind, because after all, everybody prefers peace with dignity to war with suffering. Nothing to come in the months and years ahead would allow me to get back to where I had been.

On October 12, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche, two reservists who mistakenly entered Ramallah, where Arafat has his headquarters, were lynched by a mob in the center of town. The purportedly wild and uncontrollable mob had the presence of mind to confiscate the film from all of the cameramen present, except for an Italian who smuggled out video images of the killers exultantly bathing their hands in Jewish blood. It was a deeply shocking illustration of the savage hatred of the enemy we had thought we were making peace with: say what you like about Israeli policies, we could not think of a single case where Jews washed their hands in the blood of their enemies. The army warned the Palestinians to clear the police building where it happened and rocketed it from the air. No one was hurt, but the pictures told their own story: here the impotent mob, there the arrogant helicopters; there the almighty occupiers firing from the safety of the air, below the despairing occupied people, venting their frustration with their bare hands.

The Palestinians seemed to feel that they were winning. Superficially, they were. That one image of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was more powerful than seven years of Israel transferring real power to the Palestinians; Barak’s proposals at Camp David were as nothing when compared with the deaths of children confronting Israeli soldiers. In the first intifada, the working assumption had been that since it was an unarmed population facing the Israelis, the tremendous power of their army had been neutralized; should the Palestinians use firearms, however, the Israelis would be free to react with force and crush the uprising. This time, in the second intifada, the Palestinians were using automatic weapons from the first, the Israelis were responding with the tiniest fraction of the firepower at their disposal, and still the world reacted with abhorrence. In other words, the Palestinians had nothing to lose except lives and much to gain. They realistically assumed that no Israeli government would offer them dramatically more than Barak had, so they were trying the double track of violent pressure at home and massive pressure abroad, on the reasonable assumption that this would lead to even better terms: when you hold a winning hand, why stop playing?

But they had badly miscalculated. After all the speeches and declarations and resolutions, the Palestinians must make peace with Israel, not with the UN or the European Union. The opinion of the American president is reasonably important, but at the end of the day, the Israeli electorate is the only body that can agree or disagree with the terms the Palestinians seek. Now, however, the Israeli electorate was furious at the Palestinians—and nowhere near breaking.

The first group to tire in this cruel war of attrition was that of the large numbers of Palestinian men who daily went out of their way to seek Israeli military outposts beyond the perimeters of the enclaves ruled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), there to taunt the soldiers and to act as live shields for the armed men firing from their midst. After a month or two, however, they dropped out of the confrontation. From then on, it was armed men against Israelis—though preferably not Israelis of the lethal kind. The settlers in their civilian vehicles were a much easier target, and much of the international community regarded them as legitimate prey, since the Palestinians were purportedly resisting occupation and displacement.

No one gets worse press than the settlers. They are portrayed as the evil and violent edge of Israeli society, their greed for Palestinian land the engine of the entire conflict. My own relationship with them has long been ambivalent: I objected to their goals but liked many of them personally. Almost all the people I went to school with grew up to be settlers. Two weeks into the violence I had lunch with three or four of them, and they were complimenting themselves on their prescience: they had known the Palestinians were not going to make peace and had managed to provoke them into showing their hand. “Stop kidding yourselves,” I responded. “This has nothing to do with you. If the Palestinians had been willing to make peace with me and my kind, you wouldn’t have impeded us. The truth is that the peace efforts blew up over Jerusalem, over the right of return, perhaps over our very existence here—anything but the settlements, which Barak was willing to dismantle.”
By November, settlers were being shot down on the roads to their homes. Colleagues who live in Efrat or Ofra took to leaving work early in order to be home before nightfall; one of my staff didn’t come to work one day at all, going instead to the funeral of her neighbor, murdered in his car the evening before. Yet contrary to their image as Zionist fanatics no less militant than their Palestinian counterparts, they restrained themselves. Practically every household in the settlements owns a firearm or three, and many are armed with automatic weapons loaned on a permanent basis by their reserve units. There are forty-five thousand armed Palestinians, we were told. The number of armed settlers was at least as high, many with military training and experience far exceeding anything the Palestinians can offer. Yet surrounded by violence that threatens the lives of their wives and children, these supposed warmongering extremists refrained from using their firepower, even when faced with the most outrageous provocations.

Dr. Shmuel Gillis, forty-two years old and father of five, was a hematologist at Haddassah Hospital. His colleagues told of his outstanding professionalism and his contribution to the international research team he belonged to; his patients told of his warm bedside manner. After he was shot down as a settler, even his Palestinian patients mourned with the others, sharing their grief openly with the media. His funeral set out from Haddassah with thousands of participants; additional thousands lined the road south of Jerusalem on which he had been shot, standing in silence.

A few days later, Zachi Sasson was killed, again just south of Jerusalem. Also a settler, he had formerly been a congregant at my synagogue, so someone put up an announcement of the funeral details, including the promise of bulletproof buses. Yet ironically, the attacks on the settlers may have achieved the opposite of what their perpetrators intended. The murderous campaign had spread to Jerusalem and the Israeli towns of Hadera, Holon, and Netanya, blurring the line between the settlers and the general population. The