Amir Oren / Israel's new breed of terrorist
He is self-taught and able to operate personally imported weapons, with no co-conspirators.
By Amir Oren Tags: Israel news Jewish terrorist"Guns don't kill people," the notorious ad by the National Rifle Association proclaims. "People kill people."
And thus it was that one of those trigger-happy people - equipped with an arsenal easily purchased in his native United States - immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return, and began killing people he didn't like. A Palestinian from East Jerusalem here, a Palestinian from the West Bank there. Now and then, he would try to sabotage or detonate an explosive device, or spike someone's juice.
Yaakov (Jack) Teitel, serial terrorist, the son of an American dentist who decided to take an eye for a tooth, fit the general profile of a suspect drawn up by the Shin Bet security service and the police, but it took 12 years of terrorist acts before he was caught.
One of the aliases Teitel assumed was "Red Hand"; perhaps he was fantasizing about being in the Red Hand Gang, the one featured in a 1970s adventure show on NBC. Only that bunch of kids and their dog would leave red hand prints as their marks after solving crimes, not after committing them.
Had he stayed at home in Florida rather then loving Israel to (other people's) death, there's a decent chance Yaakov Teitel would have taken his arsenal to some university or to a gay club, and ended his life in a hail of bullets there; the police and the FBI would probably have shown him little mercy.
The Shin Bet and the police's anti-terrorism unit, by contrast, took Teitel in unharmed, although he was carrying a loaded pistol when arrested. One wonders whether the same operative guidelines are applied when detaining an Arab terrorist.
Teitel doesn't seem to have much in common with the Jewish Underground, which targeted Palestinian mayors and attempted to launch an explosion on the Temple Mount in the 1980s. Like Baruch Goldstein, and even much more than Yigal Amir, Teitel was a lone operator.
At the Shin Bet, the one person who ostensibly knows the most on such subjects, said cautiously yesterday that there is no positive evidence of a Jewish underground in the West Bank now, but there is also no evidence to negate that possibility completely.
But the apparent fading of the underground phenomenon is of little comfort. Groups are easy to apprehend. They meet, they talk, they scheme, they leak, they get infiltrated, and this applies both to criminal and terrorist organizations. However, it's nearly impossible to apprehend an individual bent on violence in advance - especially when he chooses unsecured targets. He might be caught after the fact, at the cost of an enormous technological and forensic investment, in putting together pieces of intelligence and evidence from the field.
Undergrounds are so 1980s. Teitel is the "new terrorist": self-taught and able to operate personally imported weapons, with no co-conspirators or chain of command between him and his God.
As long as this is the case, the Shin Bet experts will have trouble apprehending terrorists like Teitel ahead of their next attack. And before they or the police can say "Yaakov Teitel," a new terrorist will rise only to lay low, once again.
Why Facebook Connect?
Comment on Haaretz.com articles with your Facebook login, and share your thoughts on your own wall.
- Latest
- Most Viewed
- Most Rated
- Open all
crazies like Joe Sittizen, who are lost in their own religious delusions.
It's not an underground that is the problem. There are whole communities, and indeed units of the border police and the IDF whose behaviour is consistently problematic. They may not regularly kill Palestinians. But they block wells, poison sheep, shoot donkeys, harass children on their way to school. Anyone who follows daily reports on dozens of villages in the Hebron Hills knows this. Nothing is done to rein in the fanatics of Havat Maon, with their hooded patrols of the district, or the way the police harass people at Susya, or at-Tuwani etc. A coherent policy of making life impossible for hardscrabble Palestinian farmers on their own land, of fencing in, hemming in, people, and incremental land grabs, of illegal building, is reported, and yet nothing is done by Israel's authorities. Call it soft terrorism, creating an atmosphere of slow death by the slaps of hands wrapped in the velvet glove. It's the system itself in its normalcy you should focus on.
the occupation is not a legitimate reason to murder civilians in a cafe or bus
In contrast, the Palestinian fighting groups legitimately attack Israel as a response to the occupation and war crimes commited by Israel. If the people of Sderot want peace, get your government to withdraw from the territories.
Credit where credit is due: Palestinians murder hundreds of times more Israelis than Israelis murder Palestinians. For you bleeding heart terrorism lovers out there, sorry, but Cast Lead doesn't count since it was a legitimate military response to war crimes (Goldstone said the Palestinians are war criminals, not me). Jews don't blow up Palestinian buses or Palestinian restaurants full of families. If the world wants to see fewer Teitels, then they should stop praising Palestinian "resistance" and start demanding that the Palestinians respect the law. There may be a single "new kind of terrorist", but we still have thousands of old style Palestinian terrorists to deal with.
created people who decided to take justice into their hands. They saw murders,killed children,women,elders and a lot of Arab warmongering before they decided "to do something". Can we blame them after they witnessed so much suffering?
Haven't Arabs been doing that for many, many decades? In fact, they were doing it before Israel was a State. He should be punished, though, as should all Arab criminals and Jewish ones, too.