Jewish Terrorists Blamed For Sternhell Attack

Israeli Historian Says Authorities Failing To Crack Down On Homegrown Jewish Terrorism.

First Published 2008-09-26
Courtesy Of Middle-East-Online

TEL AVIV - Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell on Friday blamed extreme right-wing Jews for a pipe bomb attack that wounded him and accused the authorities of failing to crack down on homegrown terrorism.

"Clearly I am not the victim of the mob settling scores. Only the extreme right could have perpetrated this crime, either an individual or a cell," the 73-year-old writer told Israeli public radio from his hospital bed.

Sternhell warned that "democracy cannot exist in these conditions."

Sternhell, a staunch critic of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, was wounded on Thursday when a pipe bomb went off outside his house in Jerusalem.

"If we do nothing when Palestinians are attacked, when their fields are destroyed and their cars are vandalised by settlers, then it should come as no surprise when the violence reaches into Israel itself," he said.

After the attack police found fliers offering a 1.1 million shekel reward (320,000 dollars) for the killing of members of Peace Now, an Israeli group dedicated to ending the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.

Israel's Public Security Minister Avi Dichter said the bombing was a "nationalist terror attack apparently perpetrated by Jews" and was aimed at killing Sternhell, not merely intimidating him.

Dichter added that the bombing "takes us back to the days of (Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin's assassination," according to Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist at a Tel Aviv rally in 1995 two years after launching the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians.

An extremist movement - ‘The Jewish Front’ - though denied any connection to the attack, said in a statement that it would not condemn the incident.

Left-wing protesters gathered in front of the house of professor Sternhell to show solidarity with him, hold banners saying “Fascism won’t pass”, in reference to the ideologies of the Jewish extremists.

Peace Now head Yariv Oppenheimer said his group receives Jewish terror threats on a weekly basis.

Sternhall, who was born in Poland in 1935 and fled the Nazi Holocaust, teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in the emergence of fascism, and is an expert on extreme right-wing ideologies in France. He was reported to have demonstrated that nearly all the ideas found in fascism first appeared in France.

In February he was awarded the 2008 Israel Prize in political science.

Sternhell is the author of the controversial book The Founding Myths of Israel.