As Israelis -- and American Jews -- continue to search their souls in the aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, many wonder how the extreme rightwing Jewish groups could have been ignored for so long. In fact, a handful of writers have been monitoring them for years.
Jonathan Broder, Washington correspondent for The Jerusalem Report and an editor with National Public Radio, recommends the following for people who want to learn more about these groups.
"Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel's West Bank Settler Movement." by Robert I. Friedman. Rutgers University Press, paperback, 1994.
In this fast-paced account, Friedman, now a writer for New York Magazine, penetrates the xenophobic and violent world of Israel's rightwing Jewish settlers with detailed first-hand reporting from their West Bank communities. Written before the 1993 Israel-PLO agreement, Friedman's book explains how previous Israeli governments, both Likud and Labor-led, used the settlers' militant messianism as a front line against Palestinian national aspirations in the West Bank. Friedman's account of being attacked and beaten by a group of settlers provided a chilling early warning about their willingness to use violence against other Jews.
"The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right." by Ehud Sprinzak. Oxford University Press, 1991.
This scholarly volume is an exhaustive study of the political, intellectual and religious origins of Israel's extreme right. Sprinzak, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, traces the movement's history after the 1967 war and includes detailed portraits of the leading terrorist organizations -- including followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane -- and of the so- called Jewish Underground that tried to blow up the Al-Aqsa mosque in the early 1980s. Sprinzak shows how previous Likud governments did little to limit the extremists' influence in such hotbeds of Palestinian- Jewish conflict as Hebron.
"Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist." by Yossi Klein Halevi. Little, Brown, 1995.
"I wanted to be a Jewish outlaw at war with history." Thus Halevi, the Brooklyn- born son of a Holocaust survivor, begins this just- published memoir of a youth spent as an active member of the Jewish Defense League and disciple of Kahane. Halevi recounts his exploits in the 1970s against Soviet representatives in the United States and abroad as he and his fellow Jewish militants sought to dramatize the plight of Russian Jews. Halevi, now a senior writer for The Jerusalem Report, also recreates the feel of Brooklyn's mean streets where Jews hold their own against other ethnic toughs. His journey of self-discovery eventually takes him to Israel, where he settles, softens and matures into an advocate of reconciliation.