Private militias? Israelis form armed self-defence groups to protect neighbourhoods

BEN LYNFIELD: Last year’s riots and recent terror attacks have pushed Jewish citizens to take security into their own hands, raising concerns about private militias

AFTER A STRING of terrorist attacks inside Israel that sparked intensive Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank, tensions are running high again in Lod, one of several mixed Jewish-Arab cities where inter-communal violence shocked the country nearly a year ago.

But now an added element is being thrown into the mix that may make the situation in Lod even more combustible. Amid a sense that the police failed to protect them during Arab rioting last year, some Jews have organised a new security force which they say boosts police efforts but which in the view of left-wing Jews and Arabs is actually a private militia.

Its formation by right-wing religious nationalists, coincides with the emergence of a gun-toting extremist group in the southern city of Beersheba and a call by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in the wake of a March 30 terrorist attack to bear arms in the street if you have a license.

Applications for gun licenses have spiralled amid the wave of attacks, according to Israel's Channel 12 Television, the most recent of which came last Thursday when three Israelis were shot dead in a Tel Aviv pub. The sense of rampant gunfire is also being felt by Palestinians, with a woman who was reportedly not involved in hostilities, shot dead by IDF soldiers near Bethlehem last week.

In Lod, a Jewish self-defence force has begun emerging from the local population. "Until now I haven't personally seen the need to carry a weapon but there are friends who have weapons, certainly. There is weaponry, doctors and medics," Michael Lichtenstein, who terms himself the "security coordinator" of the unnamed group, told The Jewish Independent.

More than 50 volunteers serve in the group, based in the Ramat Elyashiv neighbourhood, a religious Zionist area with about 350 families, he said.

The volunteers have distinct vests and hats, he said, though the effort is so new it is not clear to what extent they have already taken to the streets or moved beyond their neighbourhood. Arab residents of Lod interviewed for this article said they hadn't noticed them.

But that could change dramatically if there is an escalation such as last year's violence in which an Arab resident was shot dead by a Jewish citizen during rioting and a Jewish resident died as a result of a stone-throwing attack. Several empty synagogues were attacked and vehicles belonging to both Arab and Jewish owners were torched.

"I know that if events break out all at once, the police won't reach me in the first hours, so my preparedness is for the first hours until the police come," Lichtenstein said. "The issue is: what do I do to safeguard my neighbourhood and the families that live there?"

Images of last May's violence are fresh in his mind. "I took scrolls out of the synagogue so they wouldn't burn. It takes me back to Kristallnacht (in Germany, 1938)," he said.

Lichtenstein's group appears to have the backing of the municipality, whose mayor, Yair Revivo, is a hard-right politician with close ties to opposition Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ramat Elyashiv resident Chen Mesika told Plus 61J:  "we are not militias. We aren't people looking to use weapons. We want to go to work in the morning and have our kids go to school. We're not looking for fights with someone."

Lichtenstein and Mesika come from the national-religious segment of Lod's population, which is about 70 percent Jewish and 30 percent Arab. In addition to its nationalist tensions, the city is notorious for crime and gang-related violence among part of its Arab population, fuelling insecurity among Jews and Arabs alike.

"I don't know when, but it's coming; there will be an explosion here," said grocery store worker Patrick Mounayer, 26, a Christian who said he is ‘neutral in the confrontation between Jews and Muslims’. The Arabs here are crazy, the settlers are crazy and together they will make an explosion."

The settlers he is referring to are national-religious elements who began settling the city in the 1990s in what their leaders said was a bid to strengthen Lod's Jewish character. Revivo himself was a pioneer of this effort. The national-religious inhabitants of Lod call their presence a "Torah seed" but Arabs view them as being intruders.

Last May's Arab fatality, Musa Hassouna, 26, was shot by a "settler", not by police. Although his father described Musa as a bystander, the police released the shooter from custody, accepting his account that he had felt his life was in danger. Arabs view Musa as a "martyr" who was murdered in cold blood.

Authorities are now exposing Arabs to greater danger, says Samah Salaime, an Arab feminist activist who works in Lod (and has spoken to The Jewish Independent previously). She said the formation of an armed group "gives settlers a green light to execute their targets. The danger in this case is not from Arabs but from Jewish extremists taking the law into their own hands."

"Everywhere there are armed militias taking over the public sphere it ends badly," she added. The mayor's office and Internal Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev's office did not respond to queries by The Jewish Independent about their view of the new grouping.

Meanwhile, in Beersheba in the south of Israel, an armed group known as “Barel's Rangers” headed by a far-right militant, Almog Cohen, a leader in the anti-Arab extremist Otzma Yehudit party, is coalescing and seeking to tap into heightened public insecurity amid the wave of terrorist attacks, the first of which was in Beersheba.

Although police at the last minute withdrew from its launch event, the group is still very intent upon becoming a force to be reckoned with. On April 8 it posted pictures on Facebook of training drills in which men in black T-shirts fired pistols from prone positions. "We keep fit and defend the home," the post said.

Eran Nissan, the head of the left-wing Israeli digital movement Mehazkim, which promotes democracy and progressive viewpoints, is warning that Israel is at a very dangerous juncture, with the formation of militias and the spike in applications for gun licenses. "When you arm a society, it's very hard to disarm."

He said that even if some of the people in Lod see themselves as an extension of the arms of the law and not vigilantes, "my fear is that underqualified, untrained people are arming themselves and will put themselves in situations where people will lose their lives".

"Our main fear is that recent attacks will create an atmosphere where an armed society can emerge. Pouring in guns and feeding this narrative of 'we are at war' is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Nissan said Australia provides a model Israel should follow in terms of gun reform. "Since Australia strengthened regulation, there's been a massive decline in gun violence. Israel is moving in the opposite direction."

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Photo:  Former policeman Almog Cohen, the driving force behind an armed self-defence group in Beersheba, pictured in 2013 (Eliyahu Hershkovitz)