Perpetual Violence: Israel's Real 'Price Tag' for Terrorism

'Price tag campaign' - Israel is encountering serious internal issues over the actions of deadly settlers.

(SALEM) - The term 'Price Tag' is becoming synonymous with organized settler attacks against Palestinians; the violence carried out by these rogue Jewish militants even has Israel’s staunch, pro-settlement conservative community unnerved, as TruthDig reported last December.

The extremist settler gangs which Defense Minister Ehud Barak calls terrorists, have launched attacks against targets that include mosques, Palestinian civilians of all ages, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers, and Israeli peace activists.

U.S. Labels 'Price Tag' Settlers Terrorists

As mounting political pressure heats Israel from the inside out, the U.S. State Department has responded in a way that is unprecedented, adding elements of Israeli Jewish settler gangs to the 'terrorist' list.

While this maneuvering by the U.S. isn't an about face, it still could possibly be viewed as one of the most strident moves the U.S. government has taken toward Israel with regard to application of the 'terrorist' label.

UN Super Veto Immunity?

Israel's U.S.-backed military routinely attacks targets in Palestine with impunity. Sometimes Israel goes way over the line and finds itself facing war crime charges. However time and time again, the Israelis are shielded from war crime charges in the United Nations by the Unites States which predictably invokes something called 'super veto power'.

Due to incidents like those mentioned above, pressure from has been increasingly steadily for years. Awareness of Israel's alleged crimes against humanity have reached most of the world, but not here. The U.S. media in nearly every case fails to report the Israeli attacks waged in Palestinian territory; now they are failing to report the crimes of the rogue settlers who pose a threat to anyone who opposes them.

As reported over the weekend by Ha'aretz, the gangs are responsible for an expanding level of violence. Among more recent casualties in random attacks, the Israeli military reports that six Palestinians were wounded while riding in a taxi cab in a suspected firebomb attack in the West Bank.

They were traveling Thursday night when the firebomb was thrown into the car. The military suspects Jewish extremists to be behind the attack.

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Extremist Israeli settlers often attack Palestinians and their property as part of a campaign they call the "price tag," which is meant to retaliate for either army action against settlers or Palestinian attacks. Several more firebombs were hurled earlier Thursday toward settler vehicles in the West Bank^[2].

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With regard to the actual Zionist Israeli settlements; most of which are constructed on sites of former Palestinian villages dating back in some cases to Biblical times, the article cites the fact the a large percentage are illegal.

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All Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory are considered illegal by most countries, but the vast majority of them have at least been authorized by the Israeli government. About 4,000 settlers out of 300,000, according to the Times’ count, have built without permission.

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The Jewish organization Mishmeret Yesha operates a cell in Yizthar training adults & young children in paramilitary tactics for raiding Palestinian homes. They avoid men and Target women and kids. How they might differ from an Islamic terrorist, is hard to define. See: Israeli Settlers and the 'Price Tag' Campaign

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack, yet it is 'Bibi' Netanyahu- as he is known in Israel by his supporters, who has consistently backed these radical settlers, or land thieves as many in the pro-Palestine camp call them.

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Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative government has authorized expanded settlement construction despite pleas from Israel’s closest ally, the United States, and Palestinian negotiators. Despite this, he may be forced to tear down a few settlements, or, more likely, discover a way to legitimize them^[1].

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An article by ThinkProgress describes the recent attempt by an Israeli mob to literally lynch Palestinian children; an act sadly reminiscent of the deep south in the first hundred years following the American Civil War, and also the plight of the Jews and Roma and Poles in 1930's and 40's Europe.

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Two separate attacks on Palestinians civilians Friday morning raise serious questions about rising anti-Palestinian radicalism among Israeli youth. In the first incident, a mob of Israeli Jewish youth surrounded three Palestinians walking in Jerusalem’s Zion Square and assaulted them, yelling racist slogans including “Death to the Arabs.” According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, one of the victims remains in the intensive care unit in a nearby hospital. The second incident, a firebomb hurled at a West Bank taxi full of Palestinians, injured six of the passengers. Israeli authorities suspect extremist settlers were responsible for the attack^[3].

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From...

No one is paying the price for price-tagging but the settlers. Period.

Four female Jews, three of them minors, were arrested on suspicion of torching Palestinian vehicles in Hebron last month. Seems to the court this was related to the Price tag policy of some of the settlers.

The brother of one of the suspects was killed during Operation Cast Lead, this may have affected her judgment, admitted the authorities.

This does not excuse price-tagging.

In an even more disturbing tale, according to Ynet, an IDF major was indicted Sunday on charges of ordering a soldier to run over a 20-year old Palestinian with an army jeep in 2008.

And again: a lieutenant and infantry commander were indicted on charges of vandalism with malicious intent for torching Palestinian vehicles with his soldiers in 2009.

There is no hope for Zionism when we fan the flames of Jihad. We become guilty^[4].

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... referred to as such because the terrorists were intending to exact a price for any moves by the Israeli government towards dismantling illegal settlements or withdrawing from the West Bank.

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Other events in late 2011 that were attributed to the 'price tag' involved desecration of religious sites:

* On November 10, at the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem, vandals sprayed “price tag” graffiti in Hebrew on four Muslim graves.

* On December 14, unknown vandals burned a mosque in Jerusalem and sprayed anti-Arab graffiti (e.g., “A Good Arab is a Dead Arab,” “Mohammed is Dead”).

* On December 15, Israeli settlers attacked a mosque in the village of Burqa in the Ramallah governorate, setting it afire and defacing it with “price tag” graffiti.

In fact according to a new report by Israeli counterterrorism experts at the Brookings Institute, the problem may be more serious than some had previously thought. Pointing to numbers provided by the United Nations, Daniel Byman and Natan Sachs, found that there were roughly twice the number of 'price tag' attacks in 2011, than there were in 2009.

They say more than 90 percent of settler violence investigations over the past ten years ended without indictments. Byman says the attacks have escalated recently due to the rise of an extremist subculture among young, religious settlers.

The young extremists are trying to pressure the government to leave intact their communities, which Israeli courts have found illegal, as the L.A. Times reports:

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The strategic goal is to try to frighten Israeli society to such a degree that it will withdraw from any possibility of a major removal of settlements in the future,” said Yehuda Ben-Meir, a security analyst at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies. “They’re saying, ‘For every two bricks the government tries to remove somewhere, we’ll go wild.’

The militants think “the only way to prevent it from becoming a slippery slope toward wholesale evacuation is to put up a fight for every house or even a chicken coop,” Ben-Meir said. “Their tactic is to react to even the smallest of such moves with such violence so that eventually the army tells the government they can’t do it.

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Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Tim is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine who follows stories of Marines and Marine Veterans; he's covered British Royal Marines and in Iraq, Tim embedded with the same unit he served with in the 1980's.

He holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing from traditional mainstream news agencies like The Associated Press and Electronic Media Association; he also holds awards from the National Coalition of Motorcyclists, the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs; and was presented with a 'Good Neighbor Award' for his reporting, by the The Red Cross.

Tim's years as a Human Rights reporter have taken on many dimensions; he has rallied for a long list of cultures and populations and continues to every day, with a strong and direct concentration on the 2009 Genocide of Tamil Hindus and Christians in Sri Lanka. As a result of his long list of reports exposing war crimes against Tamil people, Tim was invited to be the keynote speaker at the FeTNA (Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America) Conference in Baltimore, in July 2012. This is the largest annual gathering of North American Tamils; Tim addressed more than 3000 people and was presented with a traditional Sri Lanka ‘blessed garland’ and a shawl as per the tradition and custom of Tamil Nadu, India.

The notorious list comprising Tim's ancestors includes Pedro de Alvarado, the lieutenant of Hernando Cortez of Spain; King Phillip IV, Eleanor of Aquitaine and William the Conqueror. Perhaps most interestingly, King John; the dark force in the story Robin Hood, and also the last Spanish governor of California, a real person fictionalized as the arch rival of the character in Zorro, are in reality both Tim's multiple-great grandfathers.

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In a personal capacity, Tim has written 2,026 articles as of March 2012 for Salem-News.com since the new format designed by Matt Lintz was launched in December, 2005. Serving readers with news from all over the globe, Tim's life is literally encircled by the endless news flow published by Salem-News.com, where more than 100 writers contribute stories from 23+ countries and regions.

Tim specializes in writing about political and military developments worldwide; and maintains that the label 'terrorist' is ill placed in many cases; specifically with the LTTE Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, where it was used as an excuse to slaughter people by the tens of thousands; and in Gaza, where a trapped population lives at the mercy of Israel's destructive military war crime grinder. At the center of all of this, Tim pays extremely close attention to the safety and welfare of journalists worldwide. You can write to Tim at this address: tim@salem-news.com. Visit Tim's Facebook page (facebook.com/TimKing.Reporter)