We must take a stand against settler violence

Such acts of reconciliation have become a sad necessity for Dr Gvaryahu, a leading Orthodox campaigner against Jewish extremism. A year and a half ago he helped to set up an organisation to counter the “price taggers”, militant young settlers who carry out revenge raids for Palestinian attacks or government attempts to uproot West Bank outposts.

Sometimes the price taggers may be content with spraying graffiti. But they have also engaged in physical asssaults and arson. And whenever they strike, members of Dr Gvaryahu’s organisation will go to the place to talk to the victims and offer help, sympathy and sometimes compensation. “In a [Palestinian] village called Jabba, where extremists tried to burn down the mosque, we met many children,” he said. “One father said he was happy that we’d come because his child had started saying that all Jews are evil.”

His group is called Tag Meir,“tag of light”, a punning riposte to “price tag” in Hebrew, tag mechir. “They want to create damage, we want to create light,” he said.

Although most religious Zionists and most settlers oppose price tag attacks, he notes, enough extremists exist to cause trouble. “One person can create an enormous amount of damage,” he said. “You just need one Yigal Amir to kill a prime minister, and one Baruch Goldstein to kill 29 innocent Muslims at prayer.”

An eighth-generation Jerusalemite on his mother’s side — who has a doctorate in animal behaviour — he was inspired by the religious values of his father, a Holocaust survivor. “For him, anything that sounded like racism or hate crime was a sin,” he said.

Tag Meir is not his first venture into activism. He is also a founder of the Yud Bet Cheshvan Foundation, named after the yahrzeit of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. “Yigal Amir was unfortunately a religious Zionist. And we feel a kind of responsibility for what he did. He received our education,” he said.
Amir was thought a model student at Bar Ilan University and also studied at the respected Keren B’Yavneh Yeshivah. “You cannot say he was not part of us, that he was crazy,” Dr Gvaryahu said.

The foundation has established a number of schools and also a youth movement. “We decided we need to bring more values of tolerance and open-minded pluralism. As we say in Hebrew, derech eretz kadma l’Torah, you need to be a human being before you practise your religious obligations.”

Whereas Orthodox Zionism was once a liberal, even left-leaning movement politically, he noted, it swung right after the 1967 War, gripped by messianic idealism which viewed settlement in Judea and Samaria as holy work. But that sense of divine mission has also spawned among a small, but dangerous, minority, a disregard for democratic norms.

The struggle against extremism is not just for Israelis. “Our religion is under attack and not only in Israel. If you let extremists burn mosques and churches all over Israel, tomorrow someone will do it with a synagogue,” he said.

Which is why his just he paid his first visit to London, as a guest of the New Israel Fund, which supports his work in Israel. He addressed a Yom Ha’atzmaut lunch at Golders Green Synagogue and spoke to groups from two other United Synagogue communities, Muswell Hill and South Hampstead.

If the religious Zionist sector were slide to the extreme right, it could spell disaster for Israel. “Because they serve in the army, they know how to use guns. They can destroy the country,” he said.

Instead, if it regained a more moderate voice, it could play a major bridge-building role in Israeli society, he believes. “I think at the end of the tunnel, we’ll win the battle. But there is a long way.”