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‘Messianic Marlboro Man’: Are American-Born Settlers More Likely to Go Postal?
Yaakov “Jack” Teitel in court in Petah Tikva last week. His American upbringing has caught the attention of Israelis. Getty Images by Michele Chabin Evidently, many other Israelis had the same thought. The newspaper Haaretz, for example, ran its front-page story on Teitel under a large headline proclaiming, “U.S.-Born Terrorist Suspected of Series of Attacks over Past 12 Years.” This reaction stung many of the country’s approximately 200,000 American immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding citizens. Since last week, when Israeli police lifted a three-week gag order on Teitel’s arrest, people here have been weighing in on whether 
Many have pointed to the ease with which most Americans can obtain a gun (the “gun culture”) and the many shootings by people who have “gone postal” in schools, malls and on college campuses. They have theorized that perhaps Teitel, who reportedly kept an arsenal of weapons in his yard and barely spoke a word of Hebrew, was attracted to his West Bank settlement the way American survivalists are drawn to the hill country. In an essay in the Israeli magazine Faster Times, Kraft, herself an American-Israeli, notes that there is no reason to believe that American immigrants are disproportionately represented in the radical right wing. Yet in the next breath Kraft points out that ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, “who helped plant the ideological seeds of the extremism we see today,” and Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh, “considered one of the more extreme ideologues in today’s ultra-nationalist,” were both raised in the U.S. Baruch Goldstein, who enraged the world after he murdered Arab worshippers at a mosque, was also American, Kraft notes, as well as one of the many followers of Rabbi Kahane. “Granted, it’s only a hunch,” Kraft continues, “that some of the more hard-line American-born settlers ... have possibly transferred some of their American-nurtured prejudices to the Israeli-Palestinian landscape ... that American born and raised Jews find especially appealing the image of the Messianic Marlboro Man, tsit-tsit [religious fringes] flapping under a flannel shirt, a gun slung over their backs.” While acknowledging that Teitel “no doubt brought some baggage with him” to Israel, Gershom Gorenberg, author of “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements,” insists that viewing Teitel solely as an American wacko, rather than as someone who spent the past several years in a settlement that had already produced another murderer, absolves the Israeli settler movement of any responsibility. “A well-known settler once wrote that Meir Kahane ‘wasn’t really one of us. He was an outsider.’ It’s very convenient,” Gorenberg says, “to say this is someone from outside rather than looking at the homegrown Israeli conditions in which Teitel functioned.” These conditions seem to appeal to “a certain type of American-style extremist who is really into guns,” Gorenberg says. “Guns are a part of American culture in a way they aren’t here. He chose to come to a place where conflict and violence are part of the [settler] movement historically. Teitel could have felt that his actions would make him a hero in his community of reference, but I can only hypothesize.” Yisrael Medad, an American-Israeli who calls himself “an unofficial spokesman” for the Yesha Council of Jewish Settlements, asserts that settler violence hurts the entire community. “It allows people to accuse Teitel’s neighbors and entire community of 300,000 Jews of being his comforters and cheerers on. That wasn’t the case.” If Teitel did indeed commit the crimes, Medad says, “he had a wrong-headed view of what we’re doing here. I can’t deny that there are maybe dozens [of settlers] who think this is a repeat of the Wild Wild West and the Indians, and that they are Davey Crocket. But that’s Teitel’s fault, not ours.” Medad, a resident of the settlement of Shilo, who moved from the U.S. to Israel in 1970, says he sometimes meets diaspora Jews “who think they know better than us. But they don’t live here and don’t have to adapt to the Israeli reality. You can’t live here and proclaim pure and unadulterated reality. It’s more complicated than that.” The Yesha spokesman noted that Teitel allegedly murdered two Arab men in 1997, “when he didn’t live here. He could not have been imbued with a so-called ‘messianic radical settler mentality.’ If anything, he came with an unstable mentality.” Richard Silverstein, who writes the left-wing blog Tikun Ha’olam, also lays much of the blame on America’s doorstep, but from an entirely different perspective. “Israel didn’t mold Teitel in his youth. The far-right ultra-Orthodox community in the U.S. did. If they were honest, the American Jewish pro-settler movement would be looking itself in the mirror and say, we have met the enemy and he is us,” Silverstein says. Silverstein says the American Orthodox community “funnels millions” to settlements, including ones like Shvut Rachel, Teitel’s yishuv. “After he made aliyah to Shvut Rachel, did some of those donations, directly or indirectly, support his terror ‘lifestyle?’ Did he or his family receive any financial support whatsoever from these charities [which often fund needs of specific settler families]? Have any of these funds supported that other settler terrorist living at Shvut Rachel, Asher Weissgan [who was convicted of murdering four Palestinians and later committed suicide in jail]? Have they supported Yigal Amir or efforts to free him from prison?” Silverstein wants the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and federal law enforcement agencies to monitor the settler movement more closely, so that tax-deductible dollars are not used “to buy guns and other equipment.” Although journalist Akiva Eldar, author of the book “Lords of the Land: the War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories,” is well known for his left-of-center views, he urges caution, not a rush to conclusions, in the Teitel case. “I don’t know about his family or where he grew up, exactly. Someone should do research on the young American Orthodox kids who move to the settlements, to try and figure out their motivations. It’s important not to generalize. “I’m sure there are many Orthodox American Jews living in the settlements who are ashamed and embarrassed by this kind of violence,” Eldar says.
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