ISRAEL CONDUCTS SECRET ARREST CAMPAIGN AGAINST RIGHTISTS

Israeljustice.com

  JERUSALEM – Israel Secret Service has launched an arrest campaign against the right-wing opposition, accusing young activists of everything from killing Arabs to gays.  
    Israel's military, police and domestic intelligence agency have conducted raids of suspected right-wing activists in the West Bank. Those arrested were warned not to report their detention and the media was banned from publishing details.  
    More than three weeks later, the Israel Security Agency lifted the ban and reported that Yaakov [Jack] Teital, a 37 year-old American citizen and resident of the Jewish community of Shvut Rachel in the West Bank, had confessed to the murders of two Palestinians, to placing bombs which injured two Jews and to countless other bombing attacks against gays, police, Christians and Arabs and arson.  
    "All we know at this stage is that he [Teital] connected himself to many of the suspicions against him," Defense Attorney Adi Kedar said. "I don't know how real these confessions are."  
    Teital, a father of four and a business studies graduate who designs internet websites, also confessed to the murder of two gay youths in a Tel Aviv bar in August but the ISA said he had not committed these crimes. Sources confirmed that Teital had driven a pregnant woman to the hospital to give birth at the time of the gay bar murders and shooting spree that injured 10.  
    Teitel, who is currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation, is scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 4 for the extension of his remand.  
    "All the signs show that my client [Teital] is mentally unstable," Kedar said. "He's convinced he's Gd's emissary."  
    Kedar criticized the ISA and police decision to keep Teital incommunicado and to refuse him a psychiatric evaluation since his arrest on Oct. 7.  
    "In the past, they used this [ban on meeting with legal counsel] mostly against [Arab] terrorists," Kedar told the weekly Mekor Rishon, but there were a few Jews who were not permitted to meet with an attorney about six or seven years ago in the case of the non-existent Jewish underground. They were about 10 people who were detained for a month and later released without any charges."  
    Kedar said ISA usually cites national security for denying to detainees access to their attorneys. He said the main reason was to isolate Jewish dissidents.  
    "In my opinion, the main reason is to break the person," Kedar said. "To the courts they say other things but in my eyes, the sole aim is to break the person. In the past, this has proven itself as unnecessary."  
    An official ISA document released on Nov. 1 detailed 13 confessions, including the murder of an Arab taxi driver in Jerusalem on June 8, 1997 and the murder of a Palestinian shepherd next to the Jewish community of Carmel in the southern Hebron Hills on Aug. 3, 1997.  
    Teital confessed to a series of bombings without injuries that included placing four explosives in the Israeli Arab neighborhood of Abu Ghosh outside Jerusalem in 2001, placing a pipe bomb next to the entrance of the home of a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Sinjal in March 2003 and placing three molotov cocktails near an Arab village between the Samarian Jewish communities of Ariel and Eli in 2004.  
    The ISA reported that Teital confessed to the arson of a forest next to Beit Jamal near Beit Shemesh in central Israel in an effort to set fire to the monastery in the summer of 2005 and he set an explosive next to the Ariel police station on Nov. 2, 2006. According to the report, Teital returned to Beit Jamal on April 20, 2007 to again target the monastery. A Palestinian was injured in the attack.  
    He also confessed to placing a bomb next to a police vehicle in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot on May 15, 2007 and one month later to placing a roadside bomb near the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in Jerusalem which he said he detonated next to a police vehicle. No one was injured.  
    Additionally, the ISA report said that Teital confessed to placing an explosive in a Purim gift package at the entrance to the home of a Jewish missionary family in Ariel on March 20, 2008. 15 year-old Ami Ortiz was seriously injured in the attack.  
    Teital also confessed to placing a pipe bomb outside the door of the home of a left-wing academic in Jerusalem on Sept. 25, 2008. Prof. Zeev Sternhell was lighly injured in the explosion.  
    The ISA has continued to interrogate Teital regarding other unsolved murders, the daily Ha'aretz reported. Ha'aretz said the ISA believes Teital, who speaks little Hebrew, had a Hebrew-speaking accomplice who wrote the text for the fliers supporting the gay murders in Tel Aviv. Teital was hanging the fliers in the Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem on Oct. 7 when he was arrested.  
    ISA agents originally investigated Teital in 1997 about the murder of the Arab in southern Hebron hills but released him citing lack of evidence. Additionally, Kedar said that Teital told him that he received a warning that he was under surveillance from ISA agents six months ago.  
    "He was a lone attacker," a senior ISA official said to explain why it took over 12 years to arrest Teital, the son of a dentist in the U.S. Marines, who grew up on military bases in Texas and Florida.  
    In a search of his house and yard, security officials uncovered a small hideout containing a weapons cache of nine automatic machine guns and pistols, plus another handgun at the nearby community of Adei Ad. None of them was identified as any of the murder weapons.  
    The ISA provided a photograph of the weapons and a copy of the anti-gay flier as appendixes to the official document on the investigation. No other evidence was provided in the appendix to the document citing the confessions.  
    "The cache pictured in various media reports is too large to have fit into the small hole in Teitel's yard in which the weapons were allegedly stashed," Shvut Rachel spokesman Shmaya Tiram, told IsraelNationalNews.com. "The weapons would not fit even if they were dismantled."  
    Israel's military, police and ISA agents have continued to raid homes and arrest suspected right-wing activists in the West Bank. The campaign is said to be linked with a military plan to dismantle dozens of Jewish communities.  
    Teital's wife, Rivkah, a British citizen, was arrested as she was driving to attend a court appearance by her husband on Oct. 21. The hearing in front of Judge Noga Arad in Petah Tikva was held in-camera, with a defense attorney in attendance.  
    "They told me if I want to see my husband, I should cooperate and not repeat what I am told," Ms. Teital said.  
    Two other Jewish residents of Shvut Rachel were arrested on Oct. 22. About 60 soldiers, police and ISA agents stormed a mobile home of a 23-year-old, blindfolded and interrogated him in a secret facility for 12 hours without food and water.  
    The 23-year-old suspect, who without a court order was forced to sign a 10,000 shekel bond, was accused of being involved in a series of unresolved murders of West Bank Arabs from the 1990s. One of the killings took place in 1997 when the suspect was 10.  
    The sources said authorities have repeatedly revised their charges against the detainees. They said Teital was first accused of killing the two gay youths in August 2009, then accused of the killing of Arabs in the 1990s.  
    The 23-year-old suspect was at first presented with a court order that accused him of murder, the sources said. Later that day, the order was revised and accused him of conspiracy.  
    Critics said the campaign was meant to discredit the growing Jewish opposition to the government policy of freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and dismantling communities deemed illegal. They said the arrests were timed to the annual memorial of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. An Orthodox Jew and former ISA staffer has been serving a life sentence for the killing.  
    "Every year this time, there are rumors of a Jewish underground in time for the Rabin festival," Arieh Yitzhaki, a military historian and regarded as a leading critic of the government, said. "They've accused him [Teital] of every unsolved murder that ever occurred."  
    Israeli attorneys involved in defending right-wing dissidents said the election of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has not changed policy toward the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank. They said Jewish communities are routinely raided and destroyed by army and police units without official authorization and gadflies are arrested on trumped-up charges.  
    Prosecutors have succeeded in reversing lower-court decisions to free right-wing dissidents, the attorneys said. In Israel, the prosecution as well as the defense, has the right to appeal court verdicts.  
    Major Israel human rights organizations have refused to represent or speak out against the campaign. Many of the major organizations, particularly the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, receive funding from both the government and Western sources.