53 American Teens are Fighting Back in Israel

(1) Brothels in Nazi concentration camps
(2) Toben calls judges "the Jewdiciary"
(3) IDF issues a pamphlet saying that Vatican teaches Hezbollah how to kill Jews
(4) Swedish newspaper alleges that IDF uses dead Palestinians as organ donors
(5) American Teens are Fighting Back in Israel

(1) Brothels in Nazi concentration camps

From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au> Date: 20.08.2009 04:59 AM

Deutsche Welle | 19.08.2009

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4581173,00.html

New book reveals horrors of brothels in Nazi concentration camps

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Author Robert Sommer says the brothels were meant to provide incentives to forced laborers
Though not widely known, it was never really a secret that the Nazis ran brothels in many concentration camps. But never has there been as comprehensive an account of the fact as in a new book by a German researcher.

"Das KZ Bordell" (The Concentration Camp Brothel) has been hailed as the first comprehensive account of a little-known chapter of Nazi oppression during World War Two.

Robert Sommer's 460-page book is the result of four years of painstaking research in all 10 former concentration camps where the Nazis ran brothels between 1942 and 1945.

It is based on numerous interviews with a small group of survivors.

According to Sommer, Hitler's Schutzstaffel, or SS bodyguard, was convinced that forced male laborers would work harder if they were promised sex.

"The women who were recruited for the brothels mostly came from the concentration camps of Ravensbrueck and Auschwitz," Sommer said.

The German social scientist says about 70 percent of these women were Germans. The rest came from Ukraine, Poland and Belarus.

Branded anti-social

Beginning with the Austrian camp at Mauthausen in 1942, the SS opened 10 brothels, the biggest of which was in Auschwitz in modern Poland, where as many as 21 women prisoners once worked.

The last brothel opened in early 1945, the year the war ended.

Sommer estimates around 200 women inmates in total were forced to work in the brothels, initially offered the prospect of escaping the brutality of the concentration camps.

He says the promise of freedom was never honored.

"A large majority of those forced into prostitution in the concentration camps were branded socially undesirable or anti-social by the Nazis. But there were no Jewish women among them, nor were any male Jewish inmates ever admitted to the brothels," Sommer said.

Also excluded from the brothels were Soviet prisoners of war.

Tens of thousands of captured soldiers, political prisoners and people branded socially undesirable by the Nazis, including Roma and homosexuals, were held in camps alongside the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Topic remained taboo

Insa Eschebach, director of the Ravensbrueck memorial site in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, says the topic of forced prostitution had been avoided for decades, as nobody seemed prepared to talk in the same breath about sex and concentration camps.

"There's of course a positive image of concentration camp inmates, and this is (viewed the same way) in both eastern and western Germany. The subject of forced prostitution within concentration camps tends to destroy this positive image," Eschebach said.

"Camp inmates were regarded as, and were in fact, victims. But in that special situation, male inmates could suddenly turn into perpetrators," she added.

Information hard to come by

Sommer says that getting first-hand information about this little-known chapter of Nazi history remains extremely difficult.

"On the one hand, most women who were recruited for the brothels never really overcame the stigma of being considered anti-social, and hence didn't want to talk in public about what they experienced," he said, adding: "It must be said that none of them ever received any compensation for their suffering after the war."

Moreover, Sommer, like Eschebach, points out that the issue of camp brothels was taboo for several decades.

"The topic of brothels and sexuality didn't quite fit into the picture of what Nazi concentration camps always symbolized to the public," Sommer said.

"It needs a lot of explaining to put it in the right context, and only a few responsible people at present-day memorial sites have ever attempted to do so."

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Sommer says few prisoners were physically fit enough to go to the brothels

Sommer says that while the idea behind the brothels was to raise productivity by providing incentives to prisoners, the strategy did not really work. He says few prisoners were physically fit enough to go to the brothels.

The publication of the book coincides with an exhibition which is currently traveling across Germany that highlights the plight of forced prostitutes in Nazi concentration camps.

Sommer's book is due to be presented at the Berlin state parliament on Wednesday.

(2) Toben calls judges "the Jewdiciary"

From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au>  Date: 18.08.2009 08:20 PM

Voice to be held in contempt

Freedom of speech should not be freedom to vilify, argue Steven Lewis and Peter Wertheim

August 18, 2009

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25942955-7583,00.html

IN a legal first, Australia's most notorious Holocaust denier, Fredrik Toben, has been jailed for three months following the failure of his appeal this week for contempt of court arising from breaches of Australia's anti-vilification laws.

The sentence follows seven years of Toben repeatedly ignoring court orders requiring him to remove racist material from his Adelaide Institute website.

His journey to prison began in 2002 when the Federal Court found Toben's website breached the racial-hatred provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act.

According to the court, material on the site suggested the Holocaust did not occur, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, that Jewish people who believed in the Holocaust were of limited intelligence and that they have exaggerated the number of Jews killed during World War II to profit from what he described as "a Holocaust myth".

But it's not these claims, no matter how offensive they may be, that have landed Toben with a prison term. There are no criminal sanctions under the act.

Toben is going to jail for contempt of court. He was ordered to remove the offending material and he didn't. He promised to remove the material and then reneged. He apologised to the court but then recanted. True to form, he all but invited the court to lock him up.

Toben referred to judges as "the Jewdiciary" and, again true to form, accused them of bias without a shred of evidence. We all have to obey the law and court orders. There are no special rules and privileges for the Tobens of this world.

While the decision to jail Toben will be welcomed by most fair-minded people, questions will rightly be asked about free speech and turning Toben into a poster-boy for racist fringe groups.

The suggestion that Toben, and others like him, should be able to say whatever they like regardless of how hurtful, inaccurate and ugly it might be, goes to the heart of our dearly held belief in freedom of expression.

But does this sort of commentary, publicly attacking people because of their race, ethnicity or religion, really constitute community debate? Is it an exercise of free speech, or an abuse of it? When Jews in Australia are targeted, these questions take on a very sharp edge. Australia has the world's second highest percentage of Holocaust survivors after Israel.

Like all freedoms, the proper limits of free speech are exceeded when it is about causing harm. The basic question is whether vilification is sufficiently harmful to justify an intrusion by the law into this fundamental personal freedom.

Whether it's Jews, Muslims, homosexuals or women, the public vilification of entire groups of people can only undermine, and ultimately destroy, their sense of security, the birthright of every Australian.

Being constantly vilified as a member of a group, instead of being judged on one's individual merits, compromises one's social relationships. One is put on the defensive with workmates, friends, neighbours and anyone else with whom one interacts. Such is the power of modern communications. And vilification is the invariable precursor to violence against members of the targeted group.

The Racial Discrimination Act protects innocent people from this sort of harm.

But the harm has to be proved in court according to objective criteria. The act makes it clear that it is not unlawful to publish material in good faith as part of a genuine academic, artistic or scientific debate, whether anyone takes offence or not. What's clear in the Toben case, and what the court found, was that his material is not part of a genuine debate about history or politics, as he claimed. The real thrust of his material is to use the internet to stoke up hatred against Jews as a group.

Some argue that if Toben had been left alone to spruik from his Adelaide-based hate website he would have remained an obscure failed school teacher talking to like-minded nutters. Not so. Toben is a determined publicity hound. In 1999 he travelled to his native Germany and was convicted in Mannheim of incitement to racial hatred and Holocaust denial. In Germany, for obvious reasons, trying to whitewash the Nazis' crimes is a criminal offence. Toben spent seven months in jail.

In 2006, Toben went to Tehran for an anti-Semitic hatefest, hobnobbing in the media limelight with a cavalcade of some of the world's most notorious racists including Iranian President Ahmadinejad and US Ku Klux Klansman David Duke.

The publicity around the legal proceedings against Toben in Australia has been a mere zephyr in his international media whirl.

For reasons that defy conventional analysis, Toben has spent most of his adult life vainly working to rehabilitate the universally disgraced reputation of Nazi Germany. And for Toben, "the Jews" are the principal obstacle.

If Toben and his patsies confined their activities to ranting among themselves in private, few would care. But using our cherished freedoms and easy access to the mass media as a way of striking at the security of an entire group of people on racial grounds tears at the fabric of our community and ultimately threatens those very freedoms.

History has vividly demonstrated that the relentless infusion of racism into public discourse is like drip-feeding poison into the democratic body politic. And in the words of American philosopher George Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Steven Lewis and Peter Wertheim are lawyers with Slater and Gordon who ran the racial vilification and contempt cases against Fredrick Toben.

(3) IDF issues a pamphlet saying that Vatican teaches Hezbollah how to kill Jews

From: Roy Tov <roytov@live.com> Date: 19.08.2009 11:25 PM

Vatican teaching Hezbollah how to kill Jews, says pamphlet for IDF troops

By Ofri Ilani

Last update - 11:02 19/07/2009 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101158.html

The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews, according to a booklet being distributed to Israel Defense Forces soldiers.

Officials encouraging the booklet's distribution include senior officers, such as Lt. Col. Tamir Shalom, the commander of the Nahshon Battalion of the Kfir Brigade.

The booklet was published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, in cooperation with the chief rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliahu, and has been distributed for the past few months.

The booklet, titled "On Either Side of the Border," purports to be the testimony of "a Hezbollah officer who spied for Israel."

"The book is distributed regularly and everyone reads it and believes it," said one soldier. "It's filled with made-up details but is presented as a true story. A whole company of soldiers, adults, told me: 'Read this and you'll understand who the Arabs are.'"

The copy obtained by Haaretz included a Pesach greeting from Shalom, "in the name of the Nahshon Brigade."

The story is narrated by a man named Avi, who says he changed his name from Ibrahim after he left Hezbollah and converted to Judaism. Avi says he was once close to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and describes Hezbollah's purported close relationships with the Vatican and European leaders.

The IDF Spokesman's Office said in a statement: "The book was received as a donation and distributed in good faith to the soldiers. After we were alerted to the sensitivity of its content, distribution was immediately halted."

According to the book, Nasrallah was invited to join a delegation to tour France, Poland and Italy, including the Vatican. Nasrallah could not refuse an invitation from the Vatican, Avi explained: "We knew [the Pope] identified with Hezbollah's struggle."

The book describes the alleged visit of Hezbollah officials to Auschwitz, led by the Vatican: "We came to the camps. We saw the trains, the platforms, the piles of eyeglasses and clothes ... We came to learn ... Our escort spoke as he was taught. We quickly explained to him: Every real Arab, deep inside, is kind of a fan of the Nazis."

The booklet also describes how European politicians and journalists ostensibly work against Israel.

"Our escort introduced us to important figures who identify with our causes. Rich people, people with authority ... They allocate big budgets to all sorts of Israeli organizations that erode the standing of the IDF ... We have a special budget for encouraging politicians and journalists who serve our purposes. Every opinion piece that conforms to our position is rewarded generously."

Rabbi Shmuel Eliahu, the son of former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu, is known for his extremist views, and was once charged with incitement to racism after calling for the expulsion of all Arab students from Safed College after a terror attack in the area.

The younger Eliahu was also behind an online video in which he described the "miracle of our matriarch Rachel," whom he claims appeared before Israeli soldiers in Gaza to warn them of booby-trapped buildings during Operation Cast Lead.

"In some of the places we went in Gaza there was a woman who warned them ... 'Did they tell you who I am,' she said, 'I am the matriarch Rachel," Eliahu says in the video. He claims his father confirmed the veracity of the story, and told him that he had prayed to Rachel: "I told her: Rachel, there's a war... Go to God, Blessed Be He, pray over the soldiers who sacrifice themselves for the People of Israel, so that they will strike and not be struck."

David Menahemov, an aide to Eliahu, claims the book is not fiction. "Avi is a real person and everything in the book is absolutely true," insists Menahemov. "It's a totally true story, I know the guy personaly. He's an Arab, who even though he converted still acts like an Arab. We helped him to write and to translate it. We changed a few details to protect him and his family." ==

Comment (Roy Tov):

The article include a mishmash of information: from quotations of a mysterious booklet to mystical apparitions of Rachel. Being designed for internal consumption of the IDF, probably it would never be made public. ...

Was this designed to be a piece of disinformation? If that's the case, then it is difficult to see the point. I can't see future Hezbollah soldiers asking to be recruited by the Vatican for training as a result of their reading this article. Moreover, as pointed out, the Israeli soldiers are already convinced that the Vatican, the Hezbollah and any foreigner are part of the enemy. "Everybody is against us," claims the Israeli mantra-turned-into-mythos.

Thus? No disinformation. To me, it looks as a sophisticated extortion attempt by the State of Israel toward the Vatican. "Behave; otherwise we will publish more embarrassing lies on serious international newspapers we control."

As one that his last book is continuously sabotaged by Israel and that had survived several violent attacks by the State of Israel (including a sniper attack a few years ago and a strangulation event last month), I can only hope the Holy See would stand firm on Christian Values and would not surrender to this extortion attempt. ...

Comment (Peter M.):

The IDF pamphlet probably derives from the writings of Barry Chamish; he has been saying for years, that it's the Vatican, not Jews, which runs the world.

(4) Swedish newspaper alleges that IDF uses dead Palestinians as organ donors

From: mary <humdrum2@libero.it>  Date: 20.08.2009 04:42 PM

http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/19/gilad-atzmon-the-idf-israels-organ-grinder/

Gilad Atzmon writes on the Swedish report regarding testimonies of parents of men killed by the IDF who evidently had their bodies plundered for organs. Those who have no illusions regarding a very immoral army will be disgusted and horrified, although they may not be surprised, since these reports have been circulating for some time, and IDF top brass seem to have made a post-career boom out of it. It is sufficient to remember the retired Israeli officer arrested in Brazil for illegal organs trafficking, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmafp/is_200401/ai_kepm352375/ , the ongoing international investigations since 2000 have reported over the years again and again that organ trafficking was an Israeli problem that could not be kept under wraps forever. As is printed in BioEdge, a Bio Ethics site, in 2004:

Organ donation rates in Israel are amongst the lowest in the developed world, partly because of a belief that Jewish religious law forbids it. To relieve the resulting organ shortage, brokers search for donors overseas for prices which can soar as high as US$150,000. Some advertise openly on radio stations for donors and recipients. There is no law in Israel against organ trafficking and government policy effectively encourages it by allowing Israelis who go abroad for transplants to be reimbursed as much as $80,000. http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/7726/

So, why would any of this really seem to be from beyond the beyond, that the IDF would have been part of this dirty business, especially in the light of the recent discovery of an organ trafficking ring involving Israel and with its ringleader a New Jersey Rabbi, reported to the Federal Agencies as long ago as 2001?

Are the accusations true? Are the testimonies and the photographs not enough? Should it all end with the Israeli papers that are jumping to defame the journalist as anti-semitic? Should we accept the reply of the Israeli Foreign Minister, "We call on every Swedish citizen who holds democracy dear to reject these inflammatory (accusations)."

Far better would be to further investigate. If there were accusations of this sort circulating, one would think that rather than the knee-jerk defensive reaction, a humane person would take responsibility for  knowing the facts and punishing the criminals of such heinous and outrageous exploitation of human beings. ==

The IDF: Israel's Organ Grinder

By Gilad Atzmon

Aug 19th, 2009 http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/19/gilad-atzmon-the-idf-israels-organ-grinder/

... For years we have been hearing about Palestinians claiming that Israel is "deep into organ trafficking." We also learned that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, "was forced to bring suit for his return with missing body parts."

In 2002 the Tehran Times reported: "The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament 'Knesset', Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn't deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research." ...

(5) American Teens are Fighting Back in Israel
   
U.S. kids aren't going to Israel just to live on a kibbutz these days - some of these are willing to take on the Israeli military in the West Bank

By Matt McAllester

Details Magazine
September 2009

http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_10397

Later this year, 21-year-old Ephraim Khantsis will pack a couple of suitcases, say good-bye to his mother, leave his home in Brooklyn, and move to Israel. On arrival in Jerusalem he will enroll in a  yeshiva, or religious school, that is popular with Americans. After a few months he will make his way north, to a place this young American feels is his true home: the Jewish settlement of Kfar Tapuach.

Perched on a hill just off Route 60, the main north-south road in the occupied West Bank, Kfar Tapuach is known as a particularly hard-line community. Home to about 600 people, the settlement has a history of welcoming American immigrants whose beliefs and acts raise alarms among Israeli intelligence agencies, leading them to monitor it as a haven for suspected terrorists.

Khantsis, who is in the process of applying for Israeli citizenship, will fit right in. Like the assassinated Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane, the man some in Kfar Tapuach consider their spiritual leader, Khantsis believes that all Arabs and Palestinians should be forcibly removed from territory controlled by Israel, including the West Bank.

"It's the most humane way to solve the situation," Khantsis - who has just graduated from Stony Brook University, on Long Island, with a degree in computer science - says, sipping a soda in an Israeli-run kosher pizzeria in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, this past June. He acknowledges that he is advocating ethnic cleansing.

While such a view is unlikely to become mainstream in Israel, there's a pledge Khantsis makes, one that it's also possible to hear from Americans already living in settlements, that might be more troubling to Israeli authorities: If the Israeli military comes to remove him from his new home - and many in Israel believe such an event is likely - he will not leave peacefully.

"I would fight against it with all my strength, and I would leave nothing back to try to stop it," says the slim young man wearing a black yarmulke. He speaks so softly that at times it's hard to hear him. "If they use violence, then we're justified doing the same."

Would that include using a gun?

"Yes," he says.

Is he absolutely sure that he would use a weapon against Israeli soldiers?

"That's right. I strongly hope it would never come to that," he says. But "if they're already shooting us, I'd have no option. I don't think the right thing to do is turn the other cheek. It's not a Jewish thing to do."

After Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967 and took control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank - Palestinian areas that had been held by Egypt and Jordan, respectively - religious and right-wing Jews quickly began pushing for the establishment of communities on what they considered land promised them by God. At first the Israeli government refused to let them build on occupied territory, but as the years went by, homes and businesses started popping up.

In May of this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear that the Obama administration would have little tolerance for the growth of existing settlements. After Obama's position was made public, extremist settlers rapidly erected new buildings and repaired outposts. In one location they built a wooden structure they named an "Obama hut." Around the same time, an Israeli newspaper reported that the senior Israeli army officer in the West Bank had received threatening letters, apparently from radicals trying to dissuade the military from evicting settlers from their homes.

There are now more than a quarter of a million Jewish settlers living among almost 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank - and many of the radicals resisting Obama's wishes are American. The approximately 100,000 U.S. immigrants in the West Bank and Israel have been influential from the beginning of the movement, and many of them have been among the most extreme of the pioneers: Kahane founded a political party that was deemed racist and banned from the Knesset before he was assassinated in Manhattan in 1990; Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein shot dead 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994; and a group of settlers in Hebron, whose spokesman is New Jersey–born David Wilder, was involved in a violent confrontation with the Israeli military last year.

While Kahane's original followers and other American extremists continue to face arrest and monitoring by Israeli security services, it is the young people - many of them, like Ephraim Khantsis, American - in the settler movement who are now the Israeli government's primary concern. This new generation of hard-liners differs from the previous one in a crucial way - its members are profoundly alienated from the secular Israeli state.

This increasing radicalization is a response to the forced removal of Jews from West Bank settlements that the Israeli government considers obstacles to peace. In August 2005, the government of Ariel Sharon, once the great champion of the settlement movement, evacuated thousands of people from the Gaza Strip. The settlers generally did not use violence against the soldiers and police officers who came to evict them, tearfully pleading with - and even hugging - them instead. But that strategy failed. Some extremist settlers said they would never leave so easily again. True to their word, they put up a fight when the army tried to evacuate a settlement at Amona, in the West Bank, in February 2006 - more than 300 people were injured.

Nowadays the talk is that the next evacuation will lead to even more violence. "I can tell you one thing," says Yedidya Slonim, a 16-year-old Australian immigrant who lives in a sizable cave on a hill in the West Bank that functions as an illegal outpost called Shvut Ami. "What happened over there when the people hugged the policemen - that ain't going to happen."

"A lot of kids have got no authority, just them and God out there on the hills," says Yekutiel Ben Yaakov, 50, formerly of Queens, New York, who now lives in Kfar Tapuach and has provided guard dogs for some of the young extremists who set up illegal hilltop camps.

How far the youth of the West Bank are prepared to go to stay on what much of the world considers occupied land is a question that is increasingly haunting a country surrounded by enemies. In November 2008, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's internal intelligence service, told the Israeli cabinet that future evacuations would involve "a very high willingness among this public to use violence - not just stones but live weapons - in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process."

Making peace with Israel's traditional enemies may have to wait until the country has dealt with the enemy within.

Aaron Gottlieb is 15 years old, speaks in a rapid-fire American accent, and has yet to have his first shave. He does not look like much of a threat, but he is part of a group that has many in Israel deeply worried: the Hilltop Youth.

Gottlieb grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and immigrated to Israel with his family when he was 9. Whenever he can get away from his yeshiva in the town of Petah Tikva, he spends the night, along with Yedidya Slonim and other teenage boys, at Shvut Ami. Their mission is simple: to establish Jewish homes on as many strategic hilltops as possible throughout the West Bank. According to Peace Now, an Israeli pacifist organization, there are about 100 such outposts. The mainstream settler movement has largely disowned this radical wing and its frequently violent acts.

"I very much believe I'm a threat to my own government," Gottlieb says. "There will be no giving up."

Shvut Ami sits close to Route 60, near the hard-line settlement of Qedumim, one of the first to be established in the West Bank. Israeli police have tried numerous times to remove the teenagers - arresting some of them and destroying their temporary structures - but the kids keep coming back. In four months over the winter, they used picks and shovels to dig the cave into the hillside. To get rid of it, police will need to use dynamite. The boys live there among dusty blankets and pillows, a gas heater keeping them warm at night while they study the Torah.

Many saw the strong resistance put up by the Hilltop Youth and others at Amona as a harbinger of battles to come. "When bricks are thrown at the heads of soldiers and police officers, a line has clearly been crossed," said then acting prime minister Ehud Olmert.

Like most other settlers, Gottlieb doesn't call the people in the nearby town "Palestinians." That would imply that there was a country called Palestine. Sometimes they're "Arabs," but mostly he calls them "terrorists." Gottlieb says he's not afraid. "God's with me," he says. "This land has been ours forever."

Gottlieb's belief in his right to live in the West Bank despite international condemnation and the laws of his own government is total. There is very little of America left in him. He goes back sometimes to visit his grandmother, who lives on Park Avenue in New York City, but he dislikes what he sees as the sinfulness of the United States.

"How much are you prepared to sacrifice?" I ask.

"For the land of Israel?" He taps his chest where his heart is.

"Your life?"

"Mm-hm," he says.

The Palestinian town of Jenin lies about 15 miles north on Route 60 from the cave at Shvut Ami. It was at the refugee camp here, in April 2002, that militant leader Zakaria Zubeidi helped direct a brutal nine-day fight against the Israeli army, during which 23 Israeli soldiers and up to 56 Palestinians, including some civilians, died. Zubeidi survived, escaped capture, and spent the next five years on the lam, avoiding Israeli attempts to assassinate him - he was shot 11 times. In 2007, he and 178 members of the Palestinian political party Fatah, including members of his militia, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, were granted amnesty by the Israeli government as part of a deal intended to strengthen Fatah. Zubeidi committed himself to working for peace.

But given the recent rise in settler violence, Zubeidi, 33, has begun to lose faith in the possibility of avoiding more bloodshed.

"The next war is with the settlers," he says, sitting in a room at Jenin's Freedom Theatre complex this past January. He works at the theater, which was founded in memory of an Israeli woman in order to provide a creative outlet for young Palestinians. "I feel it will be very soon. I would not give it more than a year."

Zubeidi's body bears the marks of his experiences during the second Intifada. His face and eyes are scarred from a bomb that blew up as he was handling it. It gives him the look of a crudely tattooed Maori warrior.

I ask him if he and Jenin's other militants are making specific preparations for war with the settlers.

"Of course we are preparing," he says. "It will be dependent on individuals - to bomb themselves [as suicide bombers]. And some small guns. If the guns are not available and explosives are not available, we have experience using stones."

During the six years of the first Intifada, Palestinian protesters, many of them young boys, would line up against Israeli soldiers and tanks, raining stones on the well-armed troops.

"I don't fight in the shadows," Zubeidi says. "I am in the right. They are taking my freedom. They are oppressing me. They are taking our land. We, the Palestinian people, are fighting for our freedom."

Since I met Zubeidi, that fight has quietly but brutally intensified, and there have been several violent attacks on settlers in the West Bank. On April 2, a Palestinian was accused of using an ax to kill a 13-year-old boy in the settlement of Bat Ayin. A 7-year-old boy, whose father has been in prison for seven years for planning to bomb a Palestinian girls' school, was also injured.

Security sources told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that they feared Jewish extremists would seek revenge for the attacks. In a vicious cycle of violence that appears to be quickening, radicals on one side are breeding radicals on the other.

Yehuda Goldberg was 16 years old when Israeli intelligence agents came for him. "They surrounded the house and knocked on the door - because they don't want you to jump out of the window," says Goldberg, 20, who has a pensive stare and wears the large yarmulke of the youth movement. "It was four or five in the morning. They came also four or five into the house."

The Israeli officers, from the Shin Bet - Israel's FBI - searched Goldberg's bedroom at his family's house in Kfar Tapuach. They found ammunition, explosives, and knives. He was given a suspended sentence and community service. Goldberg's father, Lenny - who emigrated from New York City in 1985 - is proud of his son. "He was going hand-to-hand combat with soldiers," he says. "Our generation used to give cups of coffee to soldiers. The police found weapons in his room."

Goldberg doesn't want to reveal what he intended to do with the ammunition and weapons. "It's not weird to have such things in our area," he says. "Legally, it's not allowed. But every kid can get ammunition."

Soon after that arrest, the Shin Bet came to get Goldberg again, accusing him of involvement with a 19-year-old friend who, while awol from the Israeli army, had killed four Israeli Arabs and wounded nearly two dozen with his army-issue M-16 rifle.

The Shin Bet "had information that he was my friend," Goldberg explains, sitting on a plastic garden chair outside his home while his mother prepares Shabbat dinner. "They arrested me and two other kids. They held me in a chamber for four days, with the light always on. I don't have bathroom. They close my eyes with black glasses, put me in a chair with my hands behind my back."

Eventually the Shin Bet released Goldberg and he received a letter saying the case was closed.

Lenny and his wife and their eight children seem to be a welcoming, loving family. Lenny rents out inflatable castles and swimming pools in the summer months. It's quite a change from his life in New York, where he worked at J. Walter Thompson, a major advertising agency. His children don't bear much resemblance to the American kid Lenny once was. "They have more chutzpah. They're more brazen," he says.

When I meet the Goldberg family in January, Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza is reaching its end, and Lenny - who is not legally permitted to carry a weapon after a mid-nineties crackdown on Kahane supporters - is frustrated with the military's strategy, which involves sending soldiers into Gaza. Like many other hard-line settlers, Lenny is not hesitant to express views that most Israelis would consider abhorrent.

"I want them to bomb all of Gaza, even if they kill all the civilians," Lenny says. "You have to firebomb all of Gaza and not let one Jew get hurt."

"We can erase them in no time," Yehuda says of the Palestinians. "But the government won't let us do it."

"How does it feel to meet a Jewish terrorist?" asks Yekutiel Ben Yaakov, the guard-dog trainer, laughing, when we meet at a café in the large settlement of Ariel.

"We're heading toward a situation where in all likelihood there will be bloodshed between Jews," he says. "I say this with a heavy heart."

Would this mean settlers shooting at Israeli soldiers?

"I think we'll see more innovative forms of Jewish resistance," says Ben Yaakov, who is friends with Ephraim Khantsis and encouraged the young Brooklyn student to move to Kfar Tapuach. "We may see guys that themselves were colonels in the Israeli army or engineers helping the kids create rockets to shoot into Arab villages."

The point of attacking Palestinians at a time when Israeli soldiers are coming to expel Jews from settlements would be, Ben Yaakov says, to distract and divert the Israeli army and to "change the balance" - to alter the dynamic of the conflict. That would also reduce the chances, he says, of Jews' killing Jews.

In recent months, this strategy has been adopted by radical settlers around the West Bank. They call it the "Price Tag" campaign: The price for the Israeli government will be high. So far, settlers have blocked roads, attacked Palestinians with guns - during my visit a settler shot dead a Palestinian who was allegedly throwing stones at his car - and other weapons, daubed graffiti on at least one mosque, and battled soldiers by hand and with stones.

What Ben Yaakov sees happening is a step up from that kind of resistance.

It would include planting bombs in Palestinian villages. The Dome of the Rock, one of Islam's holiest sites, might also be a target for Jewish terrorists, as it was in the early 1980s for a group named the Jewish Underground.

There could, perhaps, be no more provocative action for extremist settlers to take than an attack on the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, which sit in the old city of Jerusalem, on top of the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount.

Back in the Brooklyn pizzeria, when talk turns to the Temple Mount, Khantsis' conviction is resolute. "I think it's one of the greatest insults to put their place on our holy site," he says. "I think the mosques should be removed. At best they should be peacefully removed and built elsewhere."

The other option, he says, is that they should be "violently disassembled."

That is a nightmare scenario for the Israeli government - an act of destruction that would make all-out war almost inevitable.

And it's a nightmare that has roots that stretch all the way from the hilltops of the West Bank to the quiet streets of the United States.