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"We got used to it - we're there every day; we feel more free there," says Nazigian. "In East Jerusalem everyone knows us, and people there aren't used to seeing an unmarried woman and a guy together."
As they approached IDF Square, next to Jerusalem's City Hall, where the eastern and western parts of the city meet, they noticed a group of some 30 youngsters, the boys walking separately from the girls. As it happened, they had just come back from the monthly ritual of encircling the Temple Mount - a mass of skullcaps, prayer shawls and long skirts - and were now screaming "Death to the Arabs!" and "Filthy Arabs, get out of our country!" at the top of their lungs.
Maabad and Nazigian didn't pay much attention. Having been born into the occupation, such scenes are familiar to them. The little girl skipped ahead of them and tried to get her mother and her friend to play. "We didn't think they would do anything to us," they recall now - but before they realized what was happening, the Jewish group assaulted them, the boys attacking Saad and the girls Dalida and her daughter, pummeling and kicking them.
Maabad, who teaches physical fitness and two years ago came in third in the "Mr. Palestine" contest because of his muscular physique, was able to fend off the boys and then tried to get the girls off his girlfriend and her daughter. A few of the boys backed off and one of them threw a large stone that struck him in the chest and hand. The girls continued to beat Dalida and her daughter, who clung tightly to her mother in desperation, wailing.
"They pushed her to the ground," Nazigian relates with pent-up emotion. "I shouted at them, `What are you doing? Can't you see she's just a little girl?' I picked her up - and afterward I saw that her whole back was covered with blue marks. I didn't know what to do. They kicked me in the stomach, in the leg. I didn't care about anything, I was only afraid for my daughter. I didn't know what to do." The nightmare lasted or six or seven minutes.
One of the girls grabbed Maabad's bag. Nazigian took advantage of a momentary break in the beating and called the police on her mobile phone, though she didn't believe they would respond. "Jews are jumping on us, beating us, we're in trouble, I have a little girl, help us," she begged the policewoman on the other end. To her surprise, police vans arrived within minutes. The boys scattered in a split second, making for the Mamilla neighborhood across the way. The girls walked on slowly toward Jaffa Street, around the corner. The police detained five of them, all of whom denied knowing anything about what had happened.
"We didn't do anything - we were just passing by," they said. One of them, "with short black hair and a retainer on her teeth," according to Maabad and Nazigian, was sitting on Maabad's bag. She said it was hers. When the police returned it to him, his mobile phone was missing. The two identified the girls as their assailants. Three Jewish passersby joined in the identification and said they would testify in court.
"We were coming back from walking around the gates [of the Temple Mount], hundreds of people, and suddenly a fight broke out between Jews and Arabs," said one of the suspects - a 16-year-old girl, from a family of Iranian origin who lives in a West Bank settlement - her manner aggressive, her eyes defiant.
"We didn't see anything, it was far away. In short, the police came, shoved us into the vans, handcuffed us, and before putting us in the detention cell a policeman came and started to pull me with his hand on my throat, almost choking me. I screamed, I didn't have any air, and then I was beaten and cursed. I just wanted to say that I always thought the police were something enlightened, but suddenly I saw the democracy we have."
Her 15-year-old girlfriend, giggling with self-satisfaction, added: "We saw the Arab on television. He seemed to be in one piece. Too bad he didn't die."
The Jerusalem cafe where the interview was held was not to her taste. "There are Arabs here," she whispered, her eyes gaping. Did she want to leave? "No, why should I leave? I want to kick them out of here."
This week the five girls, all minors, were charged with aggravated assault. Four of them are from settlements - Elon Moreh, Kokhav Hashahar and Kedumim - and the fifth is from Kiryat Moshe, one of Jerusalem's Orthodox neighborhoods. It was a rare case in which an indictment was filed against Kahane Youth, a movement which has become the raucous spearhead of the large-scale demonstrations against the disengagement plan in recent months.
The girls who were photographed being dragged off by the police during the evacuation of the illegal outpost at the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar were also from Kahana Youth, and so were the teenaged boys - bearded and dressed in biblical-style garb - who, outside Magistrate's Court in Jerusalem, danced and chanted slogans against the judges who, that day, had released one of the girls in their group. In a demonstration outside the Jerusalem home of Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, the chief chaplain of the Israel Defense Forces, Kahane Girls pounded their fists on the darkened windows of police vans after eight demonstrators were thrown into them.
Their shouts of "police state" were only a faint echo of a call published that week in the bulletin of the Kahane movement - the outlawed group named after the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane - "The Way of the Torah," which is distributed in synagogues in the center of the country. The writer lashed out at the nation's leaders, "who are rising up against the Torah" (as well as at the official leadership of the settlements, which is calling for a passive struggle), against whom the only recourse is "to fight them and do the opposite of what they say in everything possible." Never have the Kahanists felt themselves to be more at the heart of the consensus of the religious right than in recent days.
Embarrassed giggling
They walk the streets of Jerusalem, five 15- and 16-year-old girls, with their curls flapping in the wind, giggling, whispering, occasionally bursting into laughter. No passersby would guess that they had just been released from detention, or that they are telling one another how they got away from the police while putting up defamatory posters, or what an especially juicy curse a policeman uttered.
That provocation was recounted by N., 15, in a whisper only, with embarrassed laughter, for her girlfriend's ears only. The latter was bolder, and quoted her aloud. Modesty, though, prevented her from repeating the other curses hurled at her, she says, in the many police detention facilities in which she has found herself in the past six months. Someone said she was referring to words like "whore," for example, and that whenever she arrived at the part about the policemen's curses in her story, she guffawed bashfully, "Nu, that word," and hid behind the table with stifled laughter.
She is the daughter of a "Dardaist" Yemenite rabbi who was born in Nes Tziona, near Rehovot. (The Darda'im - the name is from dor de'ah, meaning "generation of knowledge" - are a small sect within Yemenite Jewry, founded by "Mori" Yihye Kapah, who was born in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1850. The group follows the teachings of the 12th-century philosopher and physician Maimonides, tends to ignore rabbinical rulings of later periods and is especially antagonistic to the "messianic kabbala.") Ten years ago, N.'s parents lived in the large West Bank settlement of Beit El. Since then she has wandered with them from place to place. They joined a group of yeshiva graduates who were disseminating the word of God, drawing on selected quotations from Maimonides that serve their messages of expulsion and annihilation. She was in ninth grade in the religious village of Kfar Pines, but half a year ago dropped out of school. N. asked her parents to send her to a girls' school in the northern West Bank and took up residence at Givat Gal, in Hebron, hooking up with new friends from the "hilltop youth" in the settler outposts and enjoying the patronage of Itamar Ben Gvir, a leader of the Kahane-founded Kach movement and his young wife (she is 17 and a half).
N.'s credo is formulated in the terms one hears from every minor who has joined Kahane Youth: "Everyone arrives at the truth in the end. You see a lot of people whose opinions are changing all the time and you see another way, the way of the Torah, which does not change, which does not take account of anything, which does not zigzag, the true way, which you follow without compromises. I think my parents also think this way - it is pretty clear that they think like this - and in fact almost the whole people of Israel thinks like this."
She has a dark complexion, short soft curly hair, and her brown eyes occasionally light up with childish defiance. Usually she doesn't talk to strangers, not to mention the "leftist press." She is capable of surrounding herself with a wall of alienated silence. Her lips are tight. Her whole being says that whoever is not with us, is against us. She was arrested for the first time a few months ago while handing out pamphlets at a prayer assembly in memory of Rabbi Meir Kahane held in Zion Square, in the center of Jerusalem.
She was standing with girlfriends next to the police barriers. They always stand in groups: Activity in a group is a constant source of strength, the power of the herd.
"Suddenly two detectives show up," she snickers, "you know, in civilian clothes. They open the bag, see the pieces of yellow paper - which we didn't try to hide anyway, it's not something illegal - and right away they detained us for questioning."
`Self-sacrifice'
The next day N. and her girlfriends demonstrated across from the Disengagement Administration headquarters, carrying signs reading, "Sharon is a dictator, Sharon is a fascist, Sharon is a racist," she relates. "Police special forces jumped us from every direction, thugs, I don't know, and then they started pushing us. We weren't blocking any road, we wanted to keep going. The police tried to stop us. One came up behind me and almost choked me, another one handcuffed me, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't yell, they grabbed me and dragged me to the van. I fell on the floor, I went wild, a policeman tried to block me with his feet, but in the end I was all right. I managed to sit normally, I don't know," she laughs.
"It's not important what I felt, what's important is what they did," she continues, now with demonstrative apathy. Like all Kahanist activists, she has received systematic training in how to behave with the police. She refused to be fingerprinted and fought the policemen who tried to coerce her into having her fingerprints taken. "I didn't agree, they don't have the right, I know. There's a court ruling that you're not allowed to fingerprint a minor unless it's directly connected with his case, and the police commit themselves not to put the fingerprints in the police album," she says. "I didn't cooperate, I whistled in their faces to rile them, so one of the policemen dragged me to the floor and almost broke my finger. Another one was irritated by my whistling, I don't know, he started to whop me, he pushed me like so, I don't know. I was handcuffed and all the police are laughing away, humiliating you. Fine, no problem, let them laugh, okay."
In the terms of the movement this is "self-sacrifice." According to the movement's guidelines, minors remain silent when questioned and do not cooperate with the police. At most they snap, "This is a political interrogation." Sometimes they also recite Psalms or whistle the time away. The police detain them in the lockup in the Russian Compound in central Jerusalem. ("I actually slept, I enjoyed it," N. laughs. "In the morning I got up and thought, `How boring.'") The next day the minors are brought to court where the police ask the judge to remand them in custody or issue an order barring them from approaching the site of the demonstration. In nearly every case the court releases them without any restrictions, citing freedom of expression.
The struggle against the police and judiciary establishments continues to oil the wheels of the movement. The confrontation with the police, who do not balk at using intimidation and force, seems to fire the youngsters with a sense of mission and lends their struggle an aura of heroism. Nor do they hesitate to invoke what they perceive as the wrongheaded democratic system to excoriate the police and the courts, if they, heaven forbid, ignore the youths' democratic right to struggle in favor of expelling the Arabs and establishing a Jewish theocracy in Israel.
"I don't think the police beat the Arabs the way they do us, no way," N. says in reply to a question, rocking back and forth in her chair unthinkingly, "but even if they are abused, I am not in favor of abusing Arabs - no way. I am in favor of killing them and being done with it."
Cat and mouse
M. a 16-year-old girl from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, and N., a 17-year-old boy from the religious Bayit Vegan neighborhood of Jerusalem, were waiting at a Jerusalem juvenile detention center to be released on bail, as ordered that morning by the Magistrate's Court. M. was sitting in an inside room, her feet on the table in front of her. N. was slouched in a chair in the corridor. They had been arrested the day before for putting up posters bearing slogans slamming Judge Haim Liran, "the leftist judge who persecutes right-wing people."
At 5 A.M. a municipal inspector had spotted youths pasting posters on walls calling for the judge's ouster, alongside a photograph of Stalin. Within minutes, King George Street, in the heart of Jerusalem, was filled with police vans and four minors were arrested on suspicion of defacing public property. N., fair-skinned, with no sign of a beard, from a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) family, was still wearing a blue cap into which he stuffed his sideburns so they wouldn't get dirty from the poster glue. All four denied involvement. They just happened to be passing by, they insisted. Another ironclad rule of the movement: Never admit to anything for which there is no evidence of your involvement.
It was raining cats and dogs in Jerusalem. Itamar Ben Gvir, who is in law school and personally handles arrests of Kahane Youth, rushed to the juvenile unit with a gaggle of giggling Kahane Girls in tow. Ben Gvir gives every street beggar he encounters a handout, but only after first asking whether he is a Jew or an Arab. Arabs get nothing. He is still on a high from his victory earlier in the day, when the court rejected all the restrictions the police asked to be imposed on the detainees. Afterward, he transmitted announcements about the judge's decision to all the "court reporters" of the police, who get information about arrests, "but are not on the scene when the police are revealed in their shame by repeated judgments of the court against their anti-democratic demands."
In the meantime, the juvenile unit is also pleased. M. and N. have not yet been released, because their parents refused to sign for their release on bail. "I don't want my father to come," N. bursts out. "The police kidnapped me, they will release me. When they kidnapped me, they didn't have me sign anything. They are denying me my freedom. Why should my father have to undertake to pay NIS 2,000 if I don't show up for questioning? It's an infringement of my basic right - they are fighting a battle against us over nonsense. The whole city is filled with wall slogans like `Danny loves Ruthie,' `Nahman from Uman,' and what not."
His father, who was imprisoned for "transporting someone who killed an Arab and refusing to turn him in," N. notes proudly, informed the police that he had no intention of showing up, "and they can do whatever they want with the kid." "The kid" has not been in school for some time now. "What do I have to learn for?" N. snaps. Like many of the hard-core members of Kahane Youth, he gets his training at the Jerusalem-based Kahanist Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, a spiritual home for about 60 youngsters who have dropped out of official educational frameworks. There they study Torah for six hours a day and the rest of the time are free to carry out "political activity," in shifts of eight hours, around the clock.
During a campaign they usually make use of 20 vehicles a day, with a driver and two people to do the pasting riding in each one. Some 4,700 youngsters are registered as identifying with Kahane Youth in every part of the country, Ben Gvir says, with half of them involved in activities on a daily basis. Many of them join the army and can be counted on to refuse to evacuate settlements when the time comes.
Ben Gvir has become quite skilled at knowing where to draw the line in the tortuous but careful game the police play with Kahane Youth. He is adept at calming down the girls who want to enter the juvenile unit to support their comrades, implores them not to pound on the doors, not to make noise, not to whistle, but at the same time affably scolds the head of the unit for shutting the door in the face of the girls.
"Do me a favor, talk to the girl's father so he'll come and take her from here already," the unit head jokes with him, out of a lack of patience or weariness - or both. According to the court's ruling, the father has to sign for the release. Ben Gvir insists on following every last detail to completion. He persuades the father to come to the police station, despite his vehement objections, but when the police also insist on the daughter's signature, he gives his tongue free rein: "What is this, adding new conditions, what nerve, this is a democratic country, they should never have been arrested in the first place, and now you're adding conditions? Aren't you ashamed?!" Ben Gvir protested, to the cheers of N. and the girls.
"As far as I'm concerned, they can leave her in jail," the father - a computer man, a new immigrant from the United States - retorted and stalked out. The experienced unit head did not respond. Very soon M. was released without having to sign, to the wild whistles of her girlfriends. N. was also eventually released, without his father's signature. Total victory.
Truth, not slogans
In its early phase, in the 1970s, the Kach movement, founded by the American-born Rabbi Kahane, attracted alienated, often-violent distressed youth, secular no less than religious. In recent years, though, it has been increasingly striking roots in impoverished Haredi neighborhoods, where traditional ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism has been transformed into religious nationalism - which also lambastes the state and its institutions, based on the word of God, "Then shall you drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you" (Numbers 33:52). In the light of this success, Kahane activists have now launched what they call a "Haredi campaign," aimed at recruiting young people from Haredi neighborhoods in Jerusalem, such as Bayit Vegan, Romema, Mattersdorf, Har Nof and others.
The demonstration outside the home of Rabbi Weiss, the chief chaplain, in the Givat Shaul neighborhood of Jerusalem, also aroused the sympathy of children and other curious neighbors who came out of their houses when the police arrived to disperse it. "Vai, vai, this is what they do in our country, to do this to Jews, a shame and a disgrace," the residents called out in support of the demonstrators.
The religious nationalists on the margins of society, some of which are far more extreme than the Kahanists - indeed, none of the Jewish underground cells have to date emerged from the Kahane activists - view themselves as the true representatives of "the people" and are increasingly appropriating the iconic elements of secular Zionism, even the heritage of the Holocaust. Kahanist pamphlets are replete with inflammatory pornography against "cannibalism in Gaza" and against "the desecrators of the bodies of our holy soldiers," in an appeal to the lowest common denominator. They also brandish ancient Jewish heroes such as the Maccabees and Bar Kochba - as well as the pre-state underground movements of Lehi and Etzel - as the movement's precursors.
Young people are easily swept up in this nationalist tide and are only too eager to adopt talk of the supremacy of Jewish blood, about killing Arabs, about a war of Gog and Magog against the Americans, or about "that skinhead cop, like the Nazis, God help us." An example is M., 16, her light hair arranged in a bun, blue smiling eyes, who moved to Israel with her parents eight years ago. She joined Kahane Youth at the age of 11, though she can't remember why. Her mother bought her a yellow T-shirt of the outlawed movement and sent her to a demonstration. "I was little, I didn't know it was illegal, I didn't have any ideology, I didn't know what was happening," she chortles.
At her first demonstration the police told her to remove the T-shirt and detained her for questioning. "In time I saw what was happening, people see their friends being murdered, my mother was almost killed in a terrorist attack in Mahaneh Yehuda," the Jerusalem produce market. Gradually M. imbibed the entire doctrine and became convinced that "it's the government that is giving the Arabs the rifles, the powers, is making it possible for them to enter here, to bring in bombs, all kinds, I don't know."
In seventh and eighth grades she attended a school in the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin and dropped out. Now she is studying in a special program to do an external matriculation certificate. She didn't want "to waste three years on matrics," she says. "That's a bit of a waste of time, and I wanted to do other things - yes, politics, too, why not." M. is not cultivating any exaggerated dreams for the future: It will be enough for her to be a mother. Her brother is coordinator of the Kahane Youth cells in Gush Etzion - the settlement bloc south of Bethlehem - and in southern Jerusalem and is, M. says, responsible for 200 activists. In the past few months he has been arrested three times for putting up posters. She has a whole collection of accusations, which she insists is the only subject she will talk about: about police breaking into her parents' house without a search warrant, about curses by the police, intimidation, handcuffs and, she says, the time her hands were tied to a chair and she was locked in the bathroom after whistling in the faces of interrogators.
"Any Arab who doesn't leave her voluntarily should be killed," she says in reply to a question with a pleasant smile, without batting an eyelash.
N., 17, from an indigent family in Jerusalem's Musrara neighborhood, which borders on the Old City, left home a year ago and has since been wandering around the country. "I have nothing to do. I don't work and I'm sick of school," he says, shrugging his shoulders. His family are Bratslav Hasidim. He became involved with Kahane Youth four months ago, because of a friend. "He wasn't exactly a friend of mine," he says, "but I knew him. People said he was in the underground, what's called the underground, and me and a friend of mine used to bring him food to the detention room in the Russian Compound. That's how it all began."
In demonstrations N. keeps his distance from the police. "I don't like to shout," he says, casting his eyes delightedly over events around him. "Wow, here come the police commandos, we've got action!"
His pal from the settlement of Elkana, 14 and a half, thin, bespectacled, who attends the high-school yeshiva of Rabbi Haim Sabato in Mitzpe Jericho, was in Jerusalem without his mother's knowledge and scurries from one demonstration to another against the disengagement plan, quivering with excitement. He calls home every once in a while to reassure his mother. "My parents are regular right-wingers who are afraid to speak their truth out loud," he says, with a child's know-it-all attitude. "Mom knows I am a Kahanist and she doesn't want it, she's afraid I'll be arrested, but she's happy that I am saying what I think out loud. Everyone has the same opinions. In their hearts every Jew knows that one Jew is worth more than five million Arabs and Jewish blood is sacred, it says so in the Torah."
"A lot of kids are drawn to us, because they are looking for the truth and not for slogans," asserts Y., M.'s brother, who wears a knitted skullcap and has curly earlocks. His dream is to get into an elite commando unit in the army; he says he devotes many hours to staying fit so he will be ready for his induction.
Y.: "Our youth is fed up with Yesha [West Bank and Gaza settlement] slogans like `The eternal people is not afraid of a long path,' or `I have love and it will triumph.' That's all nonsense. The eternal people is afraid of a long path and if we don't shorten the path, if we don't deal with the Arabs now, they will liquidate us and take over our country democratically. They will change our flag and our national anthem." He adds that he is not in favor of killing; he espouses expulsion of the enemy. They have to be given a 48-hour ultimatum to leave the country, "and whoever refuses, we will shoot him."
N. interjects that "King Solomon, the wisest of all men, said, `There is a time to love and a time to hate, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.' What is that - a joke? That is what is happening across the generations: one time it's the Inquisition, one time the Arabs, and when the Arabs are finished the Americans will come. It's obvious that the Americans will attack us in the end and we will fight back, what else? In Afghanistan they look for Bin Laden's cousin and wipe out a wedding of 150 people - they're allowed to do anything - but when we shoot at a girl who is running at an IDF outpost and who knows what's in her bag, the whole world shouts. We have nothing against them, they are right, but then they shouldn't come with complaints against us. In war as in war, Rabbi Kahane always said," N. continues fervently.
"When Jews are killed, that is desecration of the name of God. Anyone who throws a stone at a Jew is not throwing it at the Jew, but at him.
"We are the representatives of the Holy One in this world, a chosen people, that is a fact. If a Jew is killed and there is no reaction, that is proof to the goyim that the Holy One does not exist. Of course I will not condemn someone who did not succeed in expelling Arabs by some other way and therefore chose terrorism. And as for the injury done by Kahane Youth to the Arab family in Jerusalem [the couple with the little girl], I wasn't there, but I'm sure those Arabs did some provocation, they probably spit at them or something like that. It's enough to see them walking proudly in the streets of Jerusalem - that's a provocation, too."
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