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“Revenge junction,” reads the graffiti scrawled on a road sign marking the turnoff to this mountaintop Jewish settlement. It is perhaps a telling welcome to a town and local yeshiva considered by Israel’s government as a nest of young, radical right-wing vigilantes.
In the week since an Israeli military base was attacked and Palestinians were stoned by dozens of settlement sympathizers, Israelis have been up in arms amid allegations of growing lawlessness among hard-line Jewish settlements and the smaller outposts.
Allegations that the attackers — believed to be a hardened circle of “hilltop youth” from the settlement outposts near the West Bank city of Nablus — have been handled with kid gloves prompted a tidal wave of soul searching and a shift in outlook among Israelis. Those attacks, carried out by the fringe group of settlers, peaked last week in a sustained campaign of marauding through Palestinian villages, and mosque burnings.
As Israeli officials began using the words “Jewish terror” to describe the new round of violence, government ministers decided to allow the army to enforce legal measures against the extremist settlers akin to the ones used against Palestinians, such as “administrative detention”; the move allows the government to keep suspects locked up for eight days before appearing in front of a judge.
Government officials reason that such medicine is necessary to rein in future attacks on security forces and Palestinians, a two-year campaign of vigilantism called “price tag” — a reference to a quid pro quo for Palestinian terror strikes and violent actions against settlements."
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/israel/amid_settler_crackdown_hilltop_town_and_its_yeshiva_still_defiant
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