THE FACE OF ISLAM:

The hilltop youth have always had power, which they wielded through violent acts, often under the cover of night. But for most Israelis, these were distant events perpetrated by extremists in the West Bank, a kind of Wild West they rarely think about or visit. Now, ironically, the efforts of Israel's security services to suppress the hilltop youth have brought this cohort into the daylight -- and given them a voice.

Their breakthrough into mainstream discourse may seem sudden to many Israelis. But the hilltop youth is a phenomenon long in the making. Their roots go back to Israel's 2005 disengagement from Gaza, the Palestinian territory that Israel occupied and today blockades on the Mediterranean coast. Israeli troops forcefully evacuated some 8,600 Jewish settlers, most of whom resisted nonviolently. In taking this action, the state provoked a generational rupture in the settler movement with implications few understood at the time. Settler elders had promised that God himself would ensure that the Jewish state's army would never force them to forsake their settlement, known as Gush Katif, in what they saw as the biblical Land of Israel. But God failed to intervene, and a generation of young people lost trust in their parents.

Their mentality was: "Why should I listen to you? You didn't succeed in your big project. So if you didn't succeed, it means I can try as well as you can try," said Shimi Friedman, an anthropologist at Ariel University, in the settlement of the same name.

Now, 10 years on, the hilltop youth are an established entity. Several hundred adolescents from both sides of the Green Line -- including some girls -- roam the West Bank hills. Some are yeshiva dropouts. Others are students of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh of Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, in Yitzhar. Ginsburgh, a prominent scholar of Kabbalah and a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, has concocted a potent ideological brew for this new generation of Jewish radicals, spouting mystical admonitions to live in nature and Kabbalah-based rationales for Jewish racial superiority and violence against Arabs.

Meanwhile, two other prominent rabbis at Od Yosef Chai have given the hilltop youths' penchant for attacking Arabs even stronger religious legitimacy. In their 2010 book, "The King's Torah (Torat Hamelech), Part One: Laws of Life and Death Between Israel and the Nations," Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur declared, "The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder'" applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew." Non-Jews, they wrote, are "uncompassionate by nature" and assaults on them "curb their evil inclination," while infants and children of Israel's enemies may be killed, since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."

Up until 2013, Od Yosef Chai yeshiva received government funding and support. It has also received money from American donors. While "The King's Torah" sparked a scandal in the mainstream press, the book's wide dissemination in Israeli bookstores, and its enthusiastic endorsement by several prominent rabbis gave the authors' ideas currency.

Still, some scholars say that the hilltop youth are acting not on any religious authority but on their own violent convictions. For years, its members have been committing vigilante acts against Palestinians, torching olive groves and defacing mosques. But until recently, Israeli leaders in the mainstream have been reluctant to label them terrorists -- a term usually reserved for Arabs. Israeli courts have also done little to punish this kind of behavior. In 2013, Israel's defense minister, Moshe Ya'alon, defined price tag activity as "illegal organizing." And according to a report by the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, just 7.4% of complaints filed by Palestinians from 2005 to 2014 have ended in indictments against Israeli civilians.

Now, the arson attack in the Palestinian village of Duma last July, which killed an 18-month-old infant and his parents, appears to show that the hilltop youth are capable of not only destruction, but murder, too.

"Christians to Hell," and "Death to the heathen Christians, the enemies of Israel," were among the slogans painted on the walls of the Benedictine monastery, which lies just outside the walls of the capital's Old City. "The revenge of the people of Israel is yet to come," read another epithet written next to a depiction of a bloody sword. [...]

Dormition Abbey, which is located right next to the Cenacle -- which Jews revere as the site of King David's Tomb and Christians as the room of the Last Supper -- outside Zion Gate, was the site of graffiti attacks in 2012 and 2013. In 2014, hours after Pope Francis celebrated mass at the abbey, arsonists set fire to the compound, causing minor damage to its structure.

Joint (Arab) List MK Ahmad Tibi condemned the graffiti as a religious hate crime, and slammed the "inadequate" response by Israeli authorities. In a statement Sunday morning, he warned against underestimating the impact of such attacks and called on police to put an end to them.

In recent years, Israeli nationalist vandals have targeted mosques and churches, in addition to Palestinian private property, on dozens of occasions -- including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, in northern Israel, which was badly damaged in a fire when arsonists set it ablaze in 2015.

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