Like a growing number of Israel’s toughest combat troops, Friedman, 19, wears the trademark skullcap of Israel’s so-called national-religious Jews. Most of these Israelis cite religious reasons for their bitter opposition to abandoning any West Bank territory. Last week Friedman opened fired on a crowded Arab marketplace in the disputed city of Hebron–and became the first serving Israeli soldier to commit an act of terror designed to obstruct the peace process. Belatedly, Israelis were wondering how many lunatics may be among the soldiers who share his beliefs–and why Friedman was ever permitted to carry a gun.
Friedman may be crazy, but his violent ploy worked. It took him roughly 10 seconds to expose the inherent difficulty of achieving peace on the streets of Hebron. As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators struggled to finalize a deal on the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank city, he sat down awkwardly on a street near the busy casbah and began firing his M-16 rifle toward the crowd. An Israeli lieutenant pounced on Friedman in seconds; amazingly, nobody was killed, though bullet fragments hurt six people. Another casualty: any illusion that the pending withdrawal agreement would prevent a replay. Palestinians grimly noted an irony in the Israeli government’s obsession with the security of Hebron’s 450 Jewish residents from terrorist attack. “It’s the Palestinians who need protection,” declared Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.
In fact, Arabs and Jews alike seemed increasingly at risk in a climate of steadily rising tensions. The week began with the promise of a long-anticipated signing ceremony between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu–proof that after seven months of Likud government, cooperation toward peace is possible. It ended instead with Syria’s accusing the Israeli secret service of planting a bus bomb in Damascus that killed nine people. (Israel denied it.) The shooting spree in Hebron brought earnest pledges from negotiators to quickly conclude a deal for the Israeli pullback from 85 percent of the city–an arrangement that already has informally taken hold on the ground (page 42).
But the two sides were drifting apart again. Three more ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet threatened to withhold their support for the Hebron deal if, as Arafat insists, it contains a timetable for continued Israeli troop withdrawals. The fallout pushed an agreement back at least a week, and many people wondered when it would finally be sealed.
What once seemed unthinkable–terror attacks by Jews aimed at Israeli policy–now seems to fit a pattern. In 1994, a Brooklyn-born settler murdered 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs to sabotage the first accords between Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The next year, yeshiva student Yigal Amir assassinated Rabin in an effort to end ongoing negotiations with Arafat’s newly constituted Palestinian Authority government. It worked; Rabin’s Labor Party lost the subsequent election. Palestinians have long accused Israeli troops of winking at misdeeds by Jewish settlers. But Israelis were shocked that a soldier had been directly involved in terror–especially after Friedman rationalized his massacre attempt by citing religious ideology.
Friedman insisted he knew exactly what he was doing. “Our forefather Abraham bought Hebron for 400 shekels and the city belongs to us,” he told reporters at his arraignment last week. The eldest of four children, Friedman was raised in a modern Orthodox family household in Maale Adummim, a Jerusalem suburb that is the largest Jewish settlement on the West Bank. During his four years of study at a prestigious Jewish seminary in Jerusalem, Friedman met Nachshon Wachsman, an Israeli soldier who was later kidnapped by Palestinian militants in 1994 and died in an unsuccessful rescue operation. Friedman described himself as a “completely normal” individual who was avenging the deaths of Wachsman and Baruch Goldstein, who carried out the 1994 Hebron massacre.
Friedman may not have acted entirely alone. Authorities briefly detained Yuval Jibli, a 21-year-old soldier serving in Friedman’s unit at a logistics base outside Jerusalem. Like Friedman, Jibli nurses an abiding hatred for Arabs. On the same day that Friedman fired into Hebron’s casbah, Jibli walked into an Arab village and fired two bullets into the sky. Police say they suspect he knew of Friedman’s plans, but kept the knowledge to himself.
As the Hebron negotiations have warmed up, right-wing clerics are encouraging resistance. Some liberal Israeli analysts linked Friedman’s rampage in Hebron with a rabbinical injunction that challenges the authority of the state. First issued in July 1995, it advises religious soldiers to follow their consciences and resist any order to evacuate or surrender any portion of the West Bank, including Hebron. Rabin sharply criticized the 15 signers when it was first published; their decision to reissue it two weeks ago angered the left. One of the signers denied that the ruling might have incited Friedman. “Mr. Friedman is a crazy guy who says he has a direct connection with God,” said Eliezer Waldman, a rabbi living in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. “Since there was a danger that the Israeli government would pull out of large parts of Hebron, we wanted to reiterate our position that this is not permissible.”
Such leaders have a growing following in the armed forces. Ultra-Orthodox Jews reject the authority of the secular state and, for the most part, refuse to do their compulsory military service; the government honors those wishes, remarkably enough. But the modern Orthodox, or “national religious,” Jews take a different view. No more than 15 percent of Israel’s population, they make up 30 percent of the soldiers assigned to combat units, partly because many Jewish seminaries let draft-age men combine Torah studies with military service. Best described as religious Zionists, they figure among the army’s most gung-ho troops. They spring from a youth culture that is increasingly anti-Arab; one recent survey of Jewish youth found 37 percent admit hating Arabs and see no reason that any should be given full Israeli citizenship. “There are meshuganas [crazies] around and our religious Zionist community doesn’t do enough to excommunicate them,” says political-science professor Ephraim Inbar of Bar-Ilan University, the country’s leading modern Orthodox institution of higher learning. “People don’t realize these types are dangerous.” Or, rather, they didn’t.
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