Meet a man trying to bring Israel’s radical youth back from the brink

As a steady trickle of young kids in the US and Europe have embraced radical Islam, a similar phenomenon has been taking place in Israel — with young Israelis embracing a violent interpretation of Judaism.

The topic has been at the top of the news in Israel recently: Young Jewish extremist are suspected of carrying out a July 31 firebombing that killed three members of a Palestinian family.

So, who are Israel’s young Jewish extremists?

They are among the so-called Hilltop Youth — young Jewish settlers squatting on West Bank hilltops. It’s an elusive group that shuns journalists and most adult authority figures, but hilltop youth have agreed to meet with 35-year-old Avia Azulay, a Jewish settler in the West Bank and youth counselor for a local settler council.

On a recent afternoon, he paid a spontaneous visit to an organic farm near his home where hilltop youth help out as farmhands.

Azulay felt at home on the farm: He walked straight back to the farm’s kitchen and made himself a cup of black coffee, then wandered to the edge of the hilltop and warmly greeted two young men carrying wooden beams for a new office building.

Azulay looks a lot like Jerry Garcia, with a similar black beard, wavy long hair and large grin. That vibe helps him connect with the hilltop youth.

The hilltop youth are often misunderstood, Azulay said. They are mostly boys between the ages of 14 and 20 from all across Israel, numbering about a thousand altogether. They don’t fit into the mainstream, and feel misunderstood by authority figures.

The youth find themselves attracted to the defiant spirit of the West Bank settlers, Azulay said, so they drop out of high school — or even middle school — and run away to the hills of the West Bank, where they set up camps on hilltops in an effort to claim them as Jewish.

Occasionally, they will sneak down into Palestinian villages.

These youth, Azulay said, say to themselves, 'if Palestinians attack Israelis, why can’t we attack back?' With the same independent defiant spirit that brought them to the West Bank, some take the law into their own hands.

Azulay spends a few nights a week driving to hilltops, bringing snacks to the youth squatting there. He said he tells them to stay away from vigilante violence because they could get a criminal record, and then the Israeli army wouldn’t enlist them — offering them a path back to mainstream Israeli society.

Israeli authorities say there is a small, extremist fringe for whom violence against Palestinians serves a greater goal: to instigate chaos that would lead to the downfall of Israeli secular democracy and the rise of religious Jewish rule.

According to Israeli authorities, the leading figure in the movement is 24-year-old Meir Ettinger, a grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who is considered to be the father of militant Judaism.

A year and a half ago, Ettinger and other hilltop youth went to a Palestinian village to damage property in retaliation for damaged settler crops, and some were beaten up by Palestinian villagers.

“None of the youth were afraid at all,” Ettinger told an Israeli news channel at the time, because, he said as a smile crept onto his face, they felt they had God on their side.

Ettinger has now been jailed for six months without trial. Last week, at a court hearing to challenge his detention, he said he did not recognize the authority of the court. His dream, he said, is Jewish rule based on the law of the Torah.

There’s an Israeli government initiative, called the Hebrew Shepherd, that has been trying to reach out to hilltop youth, to offer vocational training, carpentry courses, even lessons in goat shepherding. The group had once approached Ettinger, according to a settler blog, but he refused to cooperate. 

Ettinger’s relative, a former hilltop youth activist, said in an email exchange that the government initiative hasn’t succeeded because it doesn’t offer a real response to the hilltop youth’s belief that Israel is too soft on the Palestinians.

"Every time Israel fails in its real mission — defending the people of Israel — it creates a few more frustrated youths. There is no organization that can come afterward and try to extinguish the burning flame in the hearts of these youths,” he wrote.