Israel arrests second suspected Jewish extremist: Shin Bet

Pitella said the use by Israel of administrative detention orders – which allow for renewable six-month periods of detention without trial – not only against Palestinians but also against extremist Jews “doesn’t help”.

Officials did not say whether he was suspected of being linked to Friday’s deadly arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma killed an 18-month-old Palestinian boy and badly wounded his family.

A few members of each tribe are already so alienated that they turn to violence, like the settlers who attack Palestinian children, the Israeli Arabs who run amok and kill Jews, or the Haredi fanatic who attacked the Gay Pride march.

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“The security cabinet views the arson and murder in Duma as a terrorist attack in every respect”, said a statement released by the Government Press Office after the meeting. “We decry it as a terrorist crime”, Netanyahu said afterward.

Extreme rightwing Jewish activists have waged a so-called “price tag” campaign in Israel and the Palestinian territories, attacking and vandalising Muslim and Christian places of worship in particular. The assaults have ranged from vandalism of property to the burning of mosques and houses.

The attack has been firmly condemned by the global community, including by Israel where huge demonstrations were staged to denounce hatred. In graffiti left at a few of the websites, the perpetrators dubbed these “price-tag” assaults, a reputation that has caught within the public discourse.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged “zero tolerance” for Jewish terrorism and Israel authorized a series of steps, including administrative detention, to help stamp out the trend. “If all these young men were sitting in administrative detention then this attack [on the Palestinian home] might not have happened…” It is typically based on intelligence rather than evidence and is highly controversial. Rights organizations have labored to finish the follow.

Dawabsheh lived in Duma, a Palestinian village near Nablus and the Israeli terrorist settlements of Kida an Ahiya, illegal settlements built on stolen Palestinian lands for extremist Jewish fanatics.

Dawabsha’s parents and brother were badly burned in the attack on their home and remain in a “critical” condition, a hospital spokeswoman said.

His long beard, dangling sidelocks and wide smile give him the look of a hippie from another era, but Meir Ettinger has become the symbol of a crackdown on Jewish extremism.

On Monday, meanwhile, authorities detained Meir Ettinger, whose grandfather Meir Kahane founded the racist anti-Arab Kach group, and a court prolonged his detention until the weekend on suspicion of “nationalist crimes”.

The Arabs will not, of course, but neither will the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe the Zionist project to recreate Jewish rule in Israel is blasphemous. Although suspected in previous attacks, he has never been indicted.

On a parallel track, police have opened an investigation into online threats against President Reuven Rivlin following his condemnation of “Jewish terrorism” after the West Bank firebombing, a presidential spokesman has said.

According to the Shin Bet, the same “infrastructure” vandalized a monastery in 2014 and unsuccessfully sought to disrupt Pope Benedict’s visit the same year. Mordechai Meyer, an 18-year-old resident of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, was sentenced without charges or trial to serve six months in Rimonim Prison.