Israel's Ehud Olmert warns of 'evil wind of extremism' in Israel

[TriWooOx]

Quote:An "evil wind of extremism" is threatening Israel's democracy, the outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Sunday after a pipe bomb attack last week wounded an outspoken critic of Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

"The security agencies have been ordered to deal with this case, investigate it and act with the utmost speed to bring to justice what appears to be another underground," Mr Olmert told his cabinet in broadcast remarks.

Mr Olmert's forceful comments came amid growing concerns in Israel over violence by hard-line radicals, including extremist West Bank settlers.

Israeli defence officials and human rights groups have noted a rise in settler violence against Palestinian soldiers and Israeli soldiers in recent months.

On Sunday, police were investigating the shooting death of a 19-year-old Palestinian shepherd whose body was discovered in a ravine in a remote area of the West Bank. The shepherd's relatives blamed Jewish settlers, but police said they were still investigating.

Professor Zeev Sternhell, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and a leading opponent of settlement building in the Palestinian territories, was wounded on Thursday when a pipe bomb exploded outside his home.

Police found posters in his Jerusalem neighbourhood offering a one million shekel (£160,000) reward to anyone killing a member of Israel's Peace Now movement that opposes Jewish settlement on land occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

He said there was a "direct link" between the attack on Sternhell and the assassination of former premier Yitzhak Rabin, who was gunned down by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995 for his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.

"A bad wind of extremism, hate, evil, violence and contempt for state authorities is blowing through certain sectors of the Israeli public and threatening Israeli democracy," said Mr Olmert, who is engaged in land-for-peace talks with the Palestinians.

In the 1980s a Jewish underground group, acting after six Jewish seminary students were killed in a Palestinian attack, carried out bombings that maimed several West Bank mayors and a shooting in an Islamic college that killed three students.

Members of the group were jailed but the sentences were later commuted by then-President Chaim Herzog.

Mr Olmert, who resigned a week ago in a corruption scandal, is serving in a caretaker capacity until a new Israeli government is formed. His deputy, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, is trying to put together a governing coalition.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...-in-Israel.html