Two of the most significant insights that Roy Sharon lays out in his book on Jewish terrorism ("Venkama") concern the massacre and murder of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs by Kiryat Arba physician-terrorist Dr. Baruch Goldstein on Purim some 30 years ago.
The review of "Venkama" should be opened, both because they relate to the worst terrorist attack to date in the history of Jewish terrorism, and also because they refute a common fiction and plot. Sharon refutes from "all security officials" the false knowledge that a serious terrorist attack against Jews was prevented only because of the massacre. "Scrambled nonsense never existed and never was created," in the words of then-Central Command Chief Danny Yatom. Sharon also does justice to the much-maligned Kiryat Arba after the massacre, stating that "a silent majority of Kiryat Arba residents disliked the murder."
At the same time, the saddening, even more significant "news" of "Venkma" is that Jewish terrorism in our places is no longer exceptional. It is true that its scope is tiny and negligible compared to the Palestinian one – hundreds of incidents against tens of thousands; It is also true that Jewish society condemns Jewish terrorism that harms innocent people, while Palestinian society raises generations of terrorists, glorifies them, educates them in their light and gives them an aura of saints and martyrs. Yet the very existence of Jewish terrorism – how difficult it is to utter this phrase – is no longer surprising or precedent-setting. This is a phenomenon, and Sharon calls the child by name and describes his behavior, motives and characteristics.
"Venkama" by Roy Sharon,
Something personal: Many of the Jewish terrorists – from the previous generation of Jewish terror, in the '70s and '80s, to whom Sharon rarely refers – are familiar to me. I dealt with them for decades, I spoke with many of them, whether they were members of the Gal underground and their leader, Yoel Lerner, or members of the Jewish underground. For more than a year, almost daily, I published in Haaretz the "trial diary of the Jewish underground," which planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock, murdered students at the Islamic College in Hebron, attacked mayors in the West Bank and almost managed to blow up buses with their Arab passengers. I also had the opportunity to deal with Jack Teitel and members of the Bat Ayin underground and other Jewish terrorists of the "new generation."
It is precisely from this perspective that I appreciate the excellent work done in Venkama. There is not a wealth of analysis or new insights in the book. Roy Sharon preferred to concentrate on the facts, and let them tell the story. He separates between the trivial and the essential, and manages to bring quite a bit of new information and exposures in affairs that have already been ground to the ground in the Israeli media. Parts of his book read almost like an action movie that includes crimes, shootings, violence, chases and interrogations in the cellars of the Shin Bet. The problem for all of us is that this film, which Roi Sharon turned into a book, is not fiction. It's a real movie, from our lives.
Roin Sharon in "Cultural Agent" with Kobi Meidan, photo: courtesy of Kan 11
Sharon reveals new details about the Kahalani brothers' investigation and interrogation exercises by the Shin Bet that led to their conviction, and expands on the Bat Ayin underground, a "black hole" for the Shin Bet. Members of this underground were discovered by chance by patrol officers who noticed the explosive cart tied to a pole near a girls' school in East Jerusalem. "Venkama" also tells the sad story of Gur Hamel - a lost soul and a battered child, who got into almost every possible trouble, until he murdered an Arab whom he met by chance, was extradited by his friends to the Shin Bet, sentenced to prison and died in prison.
The hardest parts to read, almost like watching a horror movie, are the descriptions of terrorists like Vizgen, the bus driver from Shvut Rachel who murdered three Arab workers, just like that. Wiesgen thought that his act would stop the disengagement, and later, in prison, he hanged himself with his tefillin strips.
Another chapter of the same genre deals with the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir with indescribable cruelty. Abu Khdeir was set on fire and burned alive, after he was abducted near his home in the Shuafat neighborhood and severely beaten all over his body until he lost consciousness. The abduction and murder were carried out by Yosef Haim Ben David, owner of an optics store in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, and two minors, in revenge for the abduction and murder of the three youths from Gush Etzion. The only comforting news, so to speak, in this chapter of horror is the shock that befell many at the murder of the Arab boy, and the condemnation and condemnation, almost wall-to-wall, of this horrific terrorist incident, both by the rabbis and by Racheli Frankel, the mother of one of the Jewish boys who was kidnapped and murdered. Frankl made it clear that shedding clean blood is against morality and Torah, and that she is proud of "the country that stopped the criminals and the atrocities."
The Duma Affair: Confessions Granted Under Torture Disqualified, Reconstruction Remains Admissible // Archive photo
"Venkama" does deal with a very limited phenomenon, but since it is often fanaticism that shapes reality - sometimes even more than the norm - this is a required and significant book. Sharon was careful not to generalize or stain the stain of Jewish terror, neither the Jewish side nor the religious Zionism, which many Jewish terrorists grew up in one way or another in its beds. The fact that the silent and very large majority of religious Zionism strongly opposes Jewish terrorism is encouraging but also problematic – encouraging because of the very objection and problematic because it is often silent (not always).
Roy Sharon's book is also important because it breaks this silence and silence. Sharon himself grew up in Karnei Shomron. He and his immediate surroundings, like 99.9% of the settlers, were never part of Jewish terror. He classified the arson attack in the village of Duma as a terrorist incident, and assumed that the arsonists planned to burn down a house in order to terrorize the villagers and to convey a message through a Molotov cocktail and graffiti.
"I believed," Sharon writes, "that when they returned from the operation and discovered that three members of a family had been burned to death, they must have been shocked by the outcome, for who wanted the death of an innocent toddler?" But when he watched a video from the wedding of a boy and a girl in the hills, which documented how many of the guests held up a picture of Ali Dawabsheh, the toddler who was burned in his sleep in the village of Duma, stabbing her with knives, he was sickened. These images shattered much of what he thought, or wanted to think, after the deadly arson, about the most extreme faction of the hilltop youth. "Venkama," which breaks the silence, is largely the result of this shock.
Yitzhak Ginzburg. The book deciphers his character well,
And two more comments that do not detract from the quality and richness of this fascinating book: the book deserves a respectful index and an orderly list of sources and references. Book publishers often tend to forego this in order to save on printing and production costs. In this particular book, this drawback is particularly noticeable.
"Venkma" clearly deciphers the character of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg as one of the sources of inspiration for Jewish terror, but it devotes relatively little space to discussing the various motives of this terror, chief among them revenge. Even the two most dangerous threats currently plagued by the Jewish division of the Shin Bet – an attempt by Jews to attack the prime minister and the Temple Mount mosques – are mentioned in only a few sentences. If they are so dangerous, they should have gone a little deeper.
"Venkama", Roy Sharon, Kinneret Zamora Publishing House, Bitan Dvir, 250 pages
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us