Citizen Patrols Accused of Vigilantism : Jews on West Bank Respond to Attacks

KIRYAT ARBA, Occupied West Bank —  After three Jewish deaths in less than four months, Shmuel Ben-Ishai is more vigilant with his gun and adheres more closely to a passage in the Talmud.

“The one who comes to kill you, make haste and kill him first,” he quoted the passage of rabbinic commentary as saying.

He spoke to a visitor as he sat at the wheel of his station wagon, gun ready, as a group of fellow Jewish settlers got off a bus near a Palestinian refugee camp. He was on the lookout for Arab rock throwers, a task he views as good citizenship but one that others call a new and dangerous form of vigilantism.

No rocks, no gunshots, no trouble between Jews and Arabs on this summer day on the stretch of road near the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, 20 miles south of Jerusalem.

But after the recent Jewish deaths in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Ben-Ishai vowed that the civilian Committee for Safe Roads he founded to patrol the West Bank would keep at its work.

Firebomb Attack

In April, a pregnant Jewish settler was killed when a firebomb was thrown at her family’s car near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya. Her 5-year-old son died of burns in a hospital in July.

In May, near the West Bank’s largest city, Nablus, an 8-year-old Jewish boy was beaten to death, his head crushed with a rock.

No arrests have been reported in either case.

“The country is betraying us,” Ben-Ishai said. “The army isn’t doing its job, and we decided that’s it. We bought some walkie-talkies, we took our guns, and we got our cars out on the road.”

Ben-Ishai, who wears a prayer shawl and yarmulke, or head covering favored by Orthodox Jews, is a 29-year-old native of Tel Aviv who says he grew up with an awe for the Israeli army.

Because of his religious convictions, he moved to the West Bank, which he refers to by its biblical names. But he said he became convinced that the Israeli army on the West Bank “is not a Jewish army. It is more concerned with protecting Arabs than Jews.”

Patrol Roads

Ben-Ishai said the main purpose of his newly formed committee is to patrol the roads frequented by Jewish settlers.

But he acknowledged that in theory, his 50-member band could be turned into a Jewish terrorist underground like the one that shot and killed three Arab students and maimed two Palestinian mayors in the early 1980s before 25 members were arrested and jailed.

“I won’t talk to you about all my activities,” said Ben-Ishai, adding that he had been arrested about a dozen times since the age of 16 for harassing Palestinians.

Military commanders have said Israel’s army, trained to defend the country’s borders, is not well suited to the job of policing of the West Bank.

“The Israeli Defense Forces was not built for this type of activity,” the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, told high school students in Tel Aviv recently.

Hannah Siniora, a moderate Palestinian who is editor of the Al Fajr newspaper in Jerusalem, said vigilantism “fuels the spiral of violence in the West Bank.”

“The main cause of the blood and deaths is friction between the settlers and the Palestinians, and the settler patrols only aggravate this,” Siniora said in an interview.

The Safe Roads committee is not officially sanctioned, but the army largely turns a blind eye to its activities.

“Technically, they aren’t breaking any laws. They are just driving along the roads,” said a military official speaking anonymously in keeping with army regulations.

However, the army clamped down in June after about 100 settlers and committee members rampaged at the Dheishe refugee camp, breaking windshields and firing shots through the windows of houses. The disturbance was in reprisal for stone throwing by Arabs in which one Jewish woman was injured.