Investigations by the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) have led to the arrest of 24-year-old Meir Ettinger, grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, on suspicion of nationalist crimes.
Sources said he was not specifically accused of involvement in last Friday morning’s firebombing of two homes in the Samarian village of Duma, where an 18-month-old baby died in the ensuing fire. The baby’s mother and a brother suffered serious burns.
Ettinger has been described as “the unofficial leader of the hilltop youth and has been barred from Judea and Samaria since January. Police arrested him in Safed (Tzfat).
His grandfather Rabbi Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990 in New York City, founded the nationalist Kach movement that the Israeli government eventually outlawed after Kahane was elected to the Knesset.
Ettinger allegedly was the mastermind who organized the arson of a church on the shores of the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret) in June and for which the Shin Bet has arrested five suspects.
It can easily be speculated that interrogations of the suspects exposed enough evidence for the Shin Bet to arrest Ettinger.
He is scheduled to appear in court this morning (Tuesday), where police will almost certainly ask that he remain in custody until the end of judicial procedures.
The government this week approved “administrative detention” for so-called Jewish terrorists, a move that makes it easier for the court to put Ettinger in jail for several months pending a trial.
Ettinger has denied that there is an underground movement in Israel but has written on his website that mosques and churches are places of “pagan worship” and that
He also wrote:
There is no terrorist organization, but there are lots and lots of Jews, much more than what they think, whose ladder of values is completely different from that of the High Court of Justice or the Shin Bet.
Ettinger wrote on Arutz Sheva in May:
The Nationalist Crimes Unit [of the Shin Bet] was created three years ago by Tzipi…to eradicate nationalist crimes, i.e. actions of what are known as Jewish ‘rebels’ who, for their part, feel that they are acting to prevent the further deterioration of the state of Israel.
The officials in this unit harass those they suspect and try to put as many as possible behind bars….
When a Jew’s blood is spilled in a terror attack, they go from yeshiva to yeshiva, town to town, to insure that there will be no response, other than an op-ed column by a family member…..
The fact is that the security services have been acting for a long time now as if the main enemy of the State of Israel is Jewish children who move to the hills of Judea and Samaria (‘Hilltop Youth’) and that helping these youngsters is akin to treason….
The Unit has declared us the enemy.