The Fresh New Face of Israeli Defiance

The detainee was the very picture of defiance.

She scrawled slogans on the walls of her cell. She mocked her interrogators by chanting loudly whenever they tried to question her, or by reviling them as traitors and stooges. She even refused to reveal her name.

Her jailers reported, however, that she also sometimes got homesick and cried. Which wasn’t particularly surprising, given that she was only 12 years old.

In recent months, Israeli teenagers and preteens have become the shock troops of a nationwide campaign of protests against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip this summer, Israel’s first such ceding of settlements in war-seized territory the Palestinians want for their future state.

Hundreds of youngsters have been arrested for offenses such as blocking highways, daubing antigovernment graffiti on walls and scuffling with police and soldiers. They usually spend no more than a night or two behind bars, if that, but some have been incarcerated for weeks at a time.

The emergence of these young rebels with a right-wing cause has set off fierce debate among Israelis, encompassing questions of parental responsibility, freedom of expression, the proper use of judicial authority and the potential for what has so far been rowdy civil disobedience to boil over into real violence.

Opponents of the Gaza withdrawal tend to hold the teen lawbreakers up as heroes, likening them to the ranks of defiant young Jews who risked and, in some cases, lost their lives in Israel’s fight for statehood more than half a century ago.

Others, however, see impressionable youngsters being cynically used by adults in order to promote their own political agenda -- an uneasy reminder, for some, of Palestinian youngsters being exploited by militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the last four years of fighting.

Over the months, Israeli authorities have developed a profile of what they consider to be the hard core of the young protesters, some of whom are already veterans of a dozen or more arrests.

Many are the children of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, who fear the Gaza withdrawal would leave their communities vulnerable to uprooting as well.

Most are from religiously observant homes, with little or no contact with the secular world. And many strive to outdo even their settler parents in the zeal of their belief that the West Bank and Gaza are part of the Jewish people’s biblical birthright.

Significant numbers of these youngsters are followers of extremist right-wing figures like the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, assassinated in 1990, who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza. Many have engaged in brawls with Israeli troops trying to evacuate illegal hilltop settlement outposts scattered throughout the West Bank, an experience that has already helped inculcate in them an abiding disrespect for the Jewish state and its symbols of authority, including the army, the courts and the government.

‘Extremely Savvy’

“There’s no question that these kids are very motivated, very dedicated, and very focused,” said Gil Kleiman, a spokesman for the Israeli national police. “They’re young, but they’re extremely organized and extremely savvy about their rights.”

Theirs is a network at once loosely knit and tightly connected. The young activists use right-wing chat rooms, word of mouth and cellphone text messages to plan and coordinate protests, some of which have fizzled but some of which have been impossible to ignore.

On May 16, in what was described by organizers as a test run, anti-pullout protesters simultaneously blocked dozens of highways and roadways all over Israel, snarling evening rush-hour traffic for hours and tying up thousands of police in the process.

Organizers bragged that the mass action proved they could effectively paralyze the country two months from now if authorities move ahead with the plan to evacuate the 21 Jewish settlements of Gaza and four smaller ones in the northern West Bank.

Authorities acknowledged the blockages were disruptive, but insisted they amounted to little more than a nuisance. “I am telling you, the [withdrawal] will be carried out even if every single road is blocked, even if the entire country is shut down for two weeks,” the prime minister told reporters this month. “It won’t change a thing.”

But Sharon’s camp has been rattled by a recent slippage in public support for the pullout plan, which has emboldened the protesters. Polls last week for the first time showed respondents’ backing for the Gaza withdrawal dipping to 50%, down from previous highs of about two-thirds.

Girls Compare Bruises

Out on the streets, the youngsters boldly defy police and soldiers. Particularly nettlesome to the authorities are groups of teenage girls, clad in ground-skimming skirts, who deliberately tussle with burly officers in body armor at demonstrations on roadways or outside the homes of government officials.

The girls, most of them petite and long-haired, are well aware that television footage of them being roughly treated can stoke anger against the police, particularly from religious Jews who consider such physical contact improper.

After unruly demonstrations, female participants tend to gather, giggling like the schoolgirls they are, to triumphantly compare welts and bruises.

“If we get hurt, we show each other what they did to us,” said Matti Ernstoff, a seasoned 16-year-old road-blocker whose cherubic face, long ponytail and diminutive stature are well known to Israeli police and court officials.

At a recent demonstration, Matti and a dozen other teenage girls blocked a busy Jerusalem intersection, linking arms and planting themselves in the path of oncoming traffic. Together, they shrieked the main anti-pullout slogan -- “Jews don’t expel Jews!” -- at police officers who tried to herd them out of the roadway.

At one point in the melee, Matti fell or was wrestled to the ground; at another she broke and ran from officers who had already told her she was under arrest. Ilan Franco, the Jerusalem police chief, sighed resignedly and waved his men off from pursuit. “Let her go,” he said.

Like other young protesters, Matti has utter faith that the Gaza withdrawal, which is scheduled to begin in mid-August, can still be prevented.

“We’re just not going to let it happen. God gave us this land, and it’s ours, for always,” she said in an interview at her home in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, a sun-blasted enclave in the rocky hills south of Jerusalem. The family moved to Tekoa eight years ago, soon after immigrating to Israel from the United States.

Matti’s mother, Sara-Rivka Ernstoff, said whenever her daughter failed to return home after a demonstration, she assumed the girl had been arrested, and also knew that Matti had probably refused to identify herself or asked to make a call home. She has never tried to dissuade her from such actions.

“Of course I worry like any mother would, but I really don’t lose sleep when she’s in jail,” she said. “She’s old enough to make her own choices.”

Many Israelis were disquieted when the same argument was put forth this month by the mother of the jailed 12-year-old girl, whose case garnered nationwide attention. The girl, whose name was not publicly disclosed, spent more than three weeks in jail after refusing to sign a declaration promising to stay away from anti-pullout demonstrations. Her parents said they acceded to their child’s wishes that they not come forward to identify and claim her.

“She might be in the body of a 12-year-old girl, but her perception and understanding is more mature than ours,” the mother told Israel Radio. “Her spirit won’t be crushed.... I am confident she won’t suffer any emotional problems in the future.” Social workers and even prison officials were aghast.

“This mother scares me,” said Etti Peretz, who heads the Israeli social workers organization. The mother, she said, needed to “take a close and candid look at whether the end justifies all means.”

Prosecutors have threatened, on grounds of parental neglect, to seek state custody of minors whose families knowingly leave them in jail. That has triggered heated arguments about whether such a step would ultimately be even more harmful to the child involved.

‘They Cry at Night’

Jailed minors are usually held in special facilities and are kept away from adult prisoners, but Yaakov Ganot, the head of Israel’s Prison Authority, said no amount of special treatment could counter the fact that the youngsters were incarcerated.

“They are visited by social workers as well as doctors, but they are children and should not be here,” he said. “They cry at night when no one is looking.... They should not be pushed to the forefront of events by adults.”

Police and prosecutors say that the youngsters are carefully coached in how to behave at demonstrations and once in custody. “They’re being instructed, that we know,” said Kleiman, the police spokesman.

The teens often gravitate to charismatic figures who are somewhat older but still young enough for them to relate to. One such mentor is 28-year-old Itamar Ben Gvir, a prominent right-wing activist whose 18-year-old wife, Ayala, is something of a den mother to the group of girls Matti runs with.

The protesters’ tactics continually evolve. They routinely carry a change of shirts or yarmulkes to road-blockings and other demonstrations, so they can flee and reappear without being readily identified by police.

In court, many of the arrested youngsters refuse to answer judges’ questions, using the stock reply of “We are Jews from the Land of Israel!” -- an echo of what Jewish arrestees told captors during the British Mandate.

Girls sometimes give their name as “Sarah Aharonson,” a heroine of the Jewish resistance in Palestine during Ottoman times.

‘They’re Alienated’

Some analysts see the young activists as increasingly cut off from the mainstream of Israeli society.

“They’re alienated, and I’m just not sure how they can be reintegrated,” said Giora Rahav, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University with a specialty in juvenile crime. “There is a real messianism at play here, and it’s very powerful as a uniting force for them, but also very isolating.”

In a country in which military service is a key rite of passage, most of the young protesters do not intend to go into the army after high school, because they regard the Israel Defense Forces as the tool of a tyrannical government policy. They speak with disdain and even hatred of institutions such as the Supreme Court, the prime minister and the Knesset, blaming them for having cleared the way for the pullout.

“In many ways, they’re disengaging from the state of Israel,” said Mordechai Nisan, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “They have this sense of themselves as being like the original Zionist pioneers, with a pristine connection to the land, and a total belief in the purity of their cause.”

Often, anti-pullout activism is a family affair. Matti’s brother, Koby, 18, is under house arrest and facing an array of charges, including spray-painting slogans that were considered to constitute incitement, and planting a fake bomb with a note protesting the withdrawal.

Authorities are divided over whether anti-pullout protests such as road blockings constitute legitimate free speech or are a threat to public safety, and whether they are likely to escalate into wide-scale sabotage, or worse.

Vandalism is already on the rise. Activists recently glued shut the locks of hundreds of government offices, and protesters have previously slashed the tires of army vehicles and poured sand into their gas tanks.

Israel’s domestic security service, Shin Bet, has for many years focused its attention on infiltrating and monitoring Palestinian militant groups. In recent months, though, it has devoted growing resources to keeping a close eye on right-wing Jewish groups opposed to the pullout, including the teen activists.

Israel’s security establishment is still haunted by its failure to prevent the November 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by law student Yigal Amir, an ultranationalist Jew who believed that territorial concessions to the Palestinians were an affront to God.

Some of the anti-pullout rhetoric employed by young activists is chillingly reminiscent of statements by Amir, then 25, and his supporters. Koby Ernstoff, who refers to Kahane as “my rabbi,” speaks of the struggle against the Gaza withdrawal as a vital form of self-defense by the Jewish nation.

“Of course there will be violence,” he said matter-of-factly.

Rahav, the sociologist, said a slide into disorder could be self-reinforcing.

“These young people are creating situations in which the state is going to have to consider using physical force against them, and they are likely to use physical force to counteract it,” he said.

“It’s a very fragile situation that could simply explode.”