CurrenT aFFairs The ugly face of Israel’s neo-Nazis A disturbing number of attacks by a gang of selfstyled neo-Nazis has caused shockwaves in Israel and the Occupied Territories. What is particularly disconcerting for the Jewish state is that all of the arrested gang members had immigrated to Israel from Russia under the country’s “right of return” law that grants automatic citizenship to anybody with at least one Jewish grandparent. mel frykberg reports from the West Bank

The film on the mobile phone was extremely disturbing. Eight neoNazis filmed themselves as they indulged in an orgy of violence against an immigrant Thai worker who was brutally beaten to a bloody pulp as he cowered on a street corner. He was but the first of several victims. The others filmed on the cellphone included an orthodox Jew with a long beard, several gay men, an Ethiopian Jew, several drug addicts and an elderly holocaust survivor. Seventy-five-yearold Rivka Zavaron was walking along a beach in northern Israel when two

young men attacked her after shouting “Heil Hitler”. Shortly after kicking the elderly woman, the thugs moved on to the Thai streetsweeper. But the blatancy and bravado of their behaviour in capturing their cowardice on film proved to be their undoing as police arrested the young men following a year’s surveillance. This surveillance began after the home of one of the suspects in the West Bank settlement of Ariel was searched by police following a tip off. The search uncovered neoNazi related material, including swastika posters, neo-Nazi movies, explosives and an improvised pistol. The teens’ cellphones contained pictures of them performing the Nazi salute and holding up a torn Israeli flag. Two of the suspects also had Nazi symbols tattooed on their bodies. Just before the suspects were brought to court, covering their heads as the gathered crowd booed and spat at them, the police informed the media that they had intercepted the emails of the offenders. Messages

included celebrating the Fuhrer’s birthday, swearing allegiance to Hitler and to all white people. One of the neo-Nazis expressed concern that a “kike” might spot the celebration of the German dictator’s birthday, but was reassured by one of his comrades that anybody who grassed on them would be killed. Eli Buanitov, the leader of the gang, who had boasted of “protecting the white race to the last drop of our blood”, was recorded in a separate conversation saying: “I will never give up, I was a Nazi and will remain a Nazi. I won’t rest until we kill them all.” In another chat he stated, “I won’t have kids. My grandfather is half Yid, so that this piece of trash doesn’t have ancestors with even the smallest percent of Jewish blood.” The Ukrainian grandmother of one of the 17-year-old gang members denied her grandson was a Nazi sympathiser and explained that she was only six when the Nazis herded her and other Jewish families into open pits. “The Nazis stood all the Jews they had

Neo-Nazism has become an unsavoury fact of life... such behaviour in the country built on the ashes of the Holocaust is deeply shocking for many Israelis rounded up and began to shoot them. I was saved by a miracle because someone fell on me and hid me. I know who the Nazis are, I went through it, and my grandson knows that very well.” Several weeks later, in a separate and unrelated incident, Israeli police arrested two 13-year-old boys on suspicion of daubing swastikas and naked women on the door of a Haifa synagogue. A 19-year-old man was also charged with setting fire to a booth where Haifa’s religious Jews celebrated the Sukkot festival. In Bnei Brak, a predominantly Orthodox town near Tel Aviv, someone painted “Heil Hitler” on a synagogue wall. However, there is growing evidence that this anti-Semitism has moved well beyond nasty emails, gang bashings and mobile film footage. One group actually established its own neo-Nazi website “The White Israeli Union”. The website included pictures of some neo-Nazis in Israeli Defence Forces uniform giving the Nazi salute. The managers of the website introduced themselves as Ilya from Haifa and Andrei from Arad and as people who have pride in themselves and who are sick of living among “dirty bastards”. Their site proclaimed their enemies as Jews, Arabs, immigrants from all Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union and foreign workers,

a synagogue near Tel aviv defaced by some of israel’s neo-nazis. most charged for these racist offences have been immigrants – with Jewish ancestry – from russia

referred to as “black-asses”. The site was well organised. It had text and pictures showing the activists of the organisation. In the material about the Arabs there is even a practical suggestion to enlist in the IDF in a combat unit, in order to get weapons and begin to shoot at them in every possible circumstance. Recently, skinheads have been seen in Hatzor and Kiryat Shmona. In Russian bookstores in Israel, books that promote Holocaust-denial are sold openly (which is against the law), as are cassettes of neo-Nazi songs like The Nazis are Coming. While neo-Nazism has become an unsavoury fact of life in the seedier and more economically deprived areas of eastern European capitals of the former Soviet Union Bloc, the occurrence of such behaviour taking place in the country built on the ashes of the Holocaust is deeply shocking for many Israelis. What was particularly disconcerting for the Jewish state was that all of the arrested gang members had immigrated to Israel from Russia under the country’s “right of

return” law which grants automatic citizenship to anybody with at least one Jewish grandparent. Ironically Hitler’s definition of a Jew also included anybody with at least one Jewish grandparent. Throughout the 1990s, Israel absorbed over a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, keen to swell the Jewish population out of fears that at some point in the future, the country’s Arabs might outnumber its Jewish population. It didn’t matter if the immigrants were not Jewish or even anti-Semitic, as long as they weren’t Arab or Muslim. Incidents which would have been swiftly dealt with by the police in other countries merely raised eyebrows amongst Israeli of ficialdom. Israeli of ficials now concede that more than one in four of those Soviet immigrants were not practising Jews, and that they included thousands of non-Jews who felt no sympathy for Zionism but saw their claim on Israeli citizenship as a means of escaping the economic ravages of a collapsing Soviet empire. It is also not coincidental that Russia itself has a thriving radical right. Vladimir Putin’s Interior Ministry estimated that there are 70,000 white-supremacist skinheads in the country while a recent poll found that 35% of Russians claim to “dislike” Jews. Although Israel’s law of return allows anybody with a Jewish grandparent to immigrate to Israel, according to Halacha or Jewish law, a person is only considered “a real Jew” if their mother is Jewish. And while many Russians have adjusted comfortably to the Israeli way of life and become productive members of society, excelling in sport, literature and the sciences, a disturbing and significant minority of “partJews” have felt alienated from the culture of their adopted homeland and rejected by their new compatriots. The most obvious sign of this has been the rising numbers of anti-Semitic incidents in Israel involving Russian immigrants. Some social commentators say it is important to differentiate between verbal outbursts from disenfranchised youths and hardcore anti-Semites who could present a serious threat to the Jewish state. In a society filled with discrimination and layers and degrees of discrimination within the official discrimination which constitutes Israeli law, these nuances can make a big difference However, Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit has ordered his staff to examine the citizenship papers of the families of the neo-Nazi gang members. “I will not hesitate to revoke their citizenship,” Sheetrit said. “It is certain that this phenomenon is the embodiment of anti-Semitism at its nadir.” n

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