Jack Teitel was among the settlers living in the West Bank (AP)
The New York Times is reporting that the Israeli police said
on Sunday that they had arrested a
37-year-old American immigrant, a West Bank settler,
and charged him in an array of killings and terrorist attacks over the last 12
years. According to the daily, among the settler's crimes were the murders of
two Palestinians, the bombing of a
leftist Israeli professor's home and the maiming of a 15-year-old boy who
belongs to a community of Jews who believe in Jesus.
Excerpt:
The suspect, Jack Teitel, a father of four and a computer
technician and Web site designer, was born in Florida, the son of a military dentist. He went
back and forth between Israel and the United States
starting in the 1990s, immigrating here in 2000. His parents followed a year
later and live in a different West Bank
settlement.
The murders with which he has been charged, of a taxi driver in Jerusalem and a shepherd south of the West Bank city of Hebron, took place in
1997. The attacks on the teenager and on the professor occurred last year.
Mr. Teitel is also charged with having attacked police officers on several
occasions.
"This investigation has exposed a dark and dangerous world where human life was
lost and people were injured against a background of ideological extremism,"
said Dudi Cohen, Israel's police commissioner. He
said it had involved extensive cooperation between the police and the Shin Bet
internal security force. The arrest occurred several weeks ago but was subject
to a court blackout until Sunday.
Click here to read the full article on the New York Times.
Plaestine Note blogger Noam
Sheizaf has written a commentary on the arrest. Sheizaf says:
This is the second Jewish terrorist to come out of Rahel Shvut settlements.
In 2005 Asher Weisgen, a bus driver, shot and killed four Palestinians near
Shiloh in the West Bank. Even so, when you
listen to the settlers in the Israeli media this evening, all of what they talk
about is "the incitement against the Right". None of them seems ready
to ask some tough question on racist anti-Arab discourse they were promoting,
or about the de-legitimization
of the left.
What's funny is that the settlers were pushing their message even before the
Taitel's arrest was made public. As Ido Keinan revealed in his blog, a Right wing PR
group named "Mateh Arim" (מטה ערים) distributed a
talking points e-mail, in which speakers for the Right were instructed to
counterattack by the Left immediately. One of the points reads:
Click here to read Sheizaf's full post.
Posted
at
3 Nov 2009 4:33 AM
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