One of Israel’s most notorious alleged Jewish extremists will be released from administrative detention on June 1. Meir Ettinger, who Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service believed to be a leading organizer of anti-Arab violence among West Bank settlers, had been held without charge for eight months. Ettinger’s arrest in July 2015 came the day after the deadly arson attack in the West Bank village of Douma that killed three members of a single family, including an infant. Two Jewish extremists have been formally charged for that crime.
An August 2015 New York Times report described Ettinger as “the most-wanted figure by the Jewish division of the Shin Bet,” citing Israeli news organizations. According to The Times of Israel report, however, the Shin Bet did not dispute Ettinger’s release, although it will be imposing undisclosed restrictions on him, suggesting that the agency still considers Ettinger a threat to public safety.
The exact nature of that threat, and the extent of Ettinger’s actual involvement in violent extremism, remains vague. Ettinger is clearly a leader of the “Hilltop Youth” movement, the effort to establish small Jewish communities deep in the West Bank without the permission of the Israeli government. And he’s the grandson of Meir Kahane, perhaps the most iconic Jewish extremist in Israeli history and someone whose career was spent almost entirely at odds with the Israeli state apparatus.
But Ettinger was never actually charged with anything, and held under a controversial administrative detention policy that had almost exclusively been used for Palestinian detainees in the West Bank. If the Israeli government has material proof that Ettinger is a terrorist mastermind, or even anything approaching it, it has not yet been made public. And as Liel Leibowitz wrote in March, the evidence against him doesn’t really seem to amount to much:
Having met with government officials as well as friends and family members, and having extensively reviewed Ettinger’s public and private writing alike, I’ve found plenty that might upset people who do not share his politics but nothing to suggest that the mystically-minded smiling young man had any concrete involvement whatsoever in planning or carrying out any concrete attacks against anyone. In fact, it is hard, reviewing the evidence, not to conclude that the charges against Ettinger amount to little else but accusations of thought-crimes. It’s feasible, of course, that hard evidence of real wrongdoing exists, but neither I nor Ettinger and his lawyers have seen it.
Is the 24-year-old Ettinger an arch-extremist, or a convenient scapegoat during a period when the Israeli government was coming under increasing fire for its alleged double-standard towards Jewish and Palestinian extremism? Certainly the Israeli authorities took a hard line with Ettinger: In March he was denied a requested furlough from detention to attend his son’s bris. But he’s also walking out of jail without ever facing a formal prosecution.
Previous: Let Meir Ettinger Attend His Son’s Bris
Israel Arrests Meir Ettinger, Suspected Leader of Jewish Extremists
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Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet Magazine.
