US terror report details 'price tag' violence by Israeli settlers
The State Department's annual report on terrorism includes acts of violence by Israeli settlers along with terrorism by Palestinians.
On April 30, the US State Department issued its annual Country Reports on Terrorism 2013. The report catalogues the multifaceted local, regional and global security threats to US interests characterized by Washington as terror. Included in this catalogue of dangers is what the Barack Obama administration, taking its cue from the Israelis, defines as “price tag” actions — that is, destructive and intimidating actions by Israelis directed against Palestinians and their property, including mostly land but also mosques and vehicles in the West Bank, and increasingly in Israel itself.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to legally characterize such actions as terror. The Israeli security cabinet has authorized the Ministry of Defense to classify groups that perpetrate “price tag” attacks as “illegal associations,” a less emotive and legally extreme kind of transgression.
Some political and security officials, however, do not shrink form calling a spade a spade. Already in September 2012, Minister of Internal Security Yitzhak Aharonovitch announced the establishment of a new police unit to counter settler violence and called for a “zero-tolerance policy against terror, the desecration of Islamic religious institutions, attacks on symbols of governance and attacks commonly known as ‘price tag.’”
"We know who are committing these acts and plan to make more arrests shortly. We intend on putting these criminals behind bars," Aharonovitch said while visiting the mosque in the Israeli Arab village Fureidis, the site of one recent such attack. "These are a bunch of criminals taking the law into their own hands. Most of them are in Judea and Samaria, are part of the extreme right and we know who most of them are.”
