Noam Federman (born October 25, 1969, in Jerusalem) is a religious-Orthodox right-wing [1] Israeli Jew in Hebron, and a former leader of the Kach Party, which he has been involved with since he was 14. He has been held in administrative detention several times. [2] [3] [4] Federman hosts a weekly Internet program called "Federman Without Censor". It can be heard on the Hebrew section of the Jewish Task Force's website. JTF funds his political activities in Israel. [5]
Noam Federman's father, David Federman (1909-1980), a Betar activist turned Lehi fighter, [6] was arrested by the British during the British Mandate for Palestine and interned in Africa for his Jewish nationalist activism, where he shared a cell with Yitzhak Shamir, a future prime minister. Federman was raised on stories of that period, and considers his own beliefs similar to those of Avraham Stern. [7] When he was asked if the similarity between the wartime group's activities and those of his own group was violence against Arabs, he replied, "Hitting the enemy is not a bad thing.” [7]
Federman is a radical settler activist associated with the outlawed Kach party, of which he was one time spokesman. [8] [9] A few hours after news of the assassination of Kach leader Meir Kahane reached Israel, two elderly Palestinians, Mohammed Ali (73) and Mariam Suleiman Hassan (71), were gunned down in an incident ascribed to Kach militants. Federman was quoted as saying that the slayings had been committed as revenge by Kahane supporters, and that more violence was in the pipeline. [10]
After his fellow Hebronite settler Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre, Federman paid tribute hailing him as a holy hero, [8] stating 'The act itself was one of greatness. It was a great act of sanctifying the Name (God).' [11] He openly expressed his satisfaction at the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and was investigated for incitement against Binjamin Netanyahu after the latter signed accords with the Palestinians, whom he advocates expelling from both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. [12]
On 1 September 1998, Federman was charged on suspicion of having kicked a Hebronite, Mamoun Ja'abri, in the stomach and then spitting on him, and also of assault of a United States Embassy worker. [13]
On 24 May 2002, his brother, Eli Federman, while on duty as a security guard outside the Studio49 Tel Aviv nightclub, shot and killed a suicide car bomber just seconds before he could drive his vehicle into the crowded club, preventing many deaths. [3] Anchorman David Witztum, reporting the incident, contrasted Eli's behavior to that of his radical brother. Eli described his actions thus:
I fired one bullet at him. He fell out of the car and blew up. After the blast, I shot him twice in the head, and then moved closer and emptied the rest of the clip into his head.' [14]
In May 2002, after two men from the Bat Ayin settlement were discovered outside a girls' school in a Palestinian neighborhood on the Mount of Olives with a bomb timed to explode in the morning when students would be arriving, police investigators took six people into custody, including Federman, whom the Shin Bet regarded as "the brain behind this organization". [15] He was subsequently accused of having provided the explosives to be used to blow up the girls school, and put under house arrest for over half a year. [12] All charges were later dropped, Federman was acquitted and he successfully sued the state for false arrest. [16] He was in the news recently after his home and farm, which he had built without a building permit, near Kiryat Arba and Hebron was torn down in the middle of the night. [17]
In November 2005, the Israeli Ministry of Justice expressed its intention to review Federman's application to be licensed as an attorney, claiming that a person with a past as rich with disturbing the peace as his may not be eligible for a license. [18] Federman, addressing the ministry's comment to the press, replied that it was in pattern with the courts' and prosecutor's offices past restrictive behavior towards him that they would now seek to bar him from acquiring the title he worked for as a law student.
In 2008, Federman was indicted for assaulting a policeman, but was acquitted in 2010 after prosecutors failed to show up for the trial, due to a prosecutors' strike. [19]
In 2011, he was arrested by police on suspicion, after he was found to have a goat kid in his possession, that he intended to sacrifice for Passover on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. [20]
Federman is married to Elisheva, [21] the daughter of David Ramati. [22] They have nine children. On the occasion of his son Oved's winning a prize for a film about Irgun militant Yehiel Dresner, who was executed by the British Mandate in 1947, Federman said that he is rearing his children on the ideals of the rightist underground movements of the past. [7]
On May 3, 2024, the UK sanctioned Federman as “a radical settler activist and former leader and spokesperson of the now-defunct Kach party, that espoused overtly racist and violent policies" and said Federman trained settlers to commit acts of violence against Palestinians while avoiding repercussions." [23] At the same time, three individuals (Neria Ben Pazi, Elisha Yered, and Eden Levi) and two groups (Hilltop Youth and Lehava) were likewise sanctioned. Federman's son Ely had already been sanctioned by the UK.
"Revenge is an important value. The Talmud says that it is one of the greatest things. Revenge is great." [24]
Meir David HaKohen Kahane was an American-born Israeli ordained Orthodox rabbi, writer, and ultra-nationalist politician who served one term in Israel's Knesset before being convicted of acts of terrorism. He founded the Israeli political party Kach. A cofounder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), he espoused strong views against antisemitism.
Hilltop, outpost or lot 26, was an illegal outpost, consisting of a mobile home, founded by Netanel Ozeri outside Hebron in the West Bank. It lay approximately 100 metres (330 ft) from the Kiryat Arba settlement, in the Beqa'a valley. At the time of its destruction. Despite court orders, he kept expanding his outpost, refused to bullet-proof the caravan, fence the area he claimed in, or accept protection from the IDF.
Kiryat Arba or Qiryat Arba is an urban Israeli settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, in the southern West Bank. Founded in 1968, in 2022 it had a population of 7,490.
Baruch Meir Marzel is an Israeli politician and activist. He is an Orthodox Jew originally from Boston who now lives in the Jewish community of Hebron in Tel Rumeida with his wife and nine children. He was the leader of the far-right-oriented Jewish National Front party. He is now a member of Otzma Yehudit. He was the "right-hand man" of assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, acting as spokesman for the American-born rabbi's Kach organization for ten years. The mainstream Israeli press has described him as an "extreme right-wing activist".
Jewish extremist terrorism is terrorism, including religious terrorism, committed by extremists within Judaism.
Tel Rumeida, also known as Jabla al-Rahama and referred to by Israeli settlers as Tel Hebron is an archaeological, agricultural and residential area in the West Bank city of Hebron. Within it, lies a tell whose remains go back to the Chalcolithic period, and is thought to constitute the Canaanite, Israelite and Edomite settlements of Hebron mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple period literature.
"Israel's Next War" is an episode of the PBS series Frontline that aired on 5 April 2005. The episode, by Israeli director Dan Setton, investigated the rise of the religious right in Israel and the role it could play as a "spoiler" in peace negotiations with the Palestinians. It was Setton's second documentary film for PBS: his previous film for them, "Shattered Dreams of Peace," won him a Peabody Award.
Lehava is a far-right and Jewish supremacist organization based in Israel that strictly opposes Jewish assimilation, objecting to most personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews. It is opposed to the Christian presence in Israel. It has an anti-miscegenation focus, denouncing marriages between Jews and non-Jews forbidden by Orthodox Jewish law. The group has over 10,000 members.
The price tag attack policy, also sometimes referred to as "mutual responsibility", is the name originally given to the attacks and acts of vandalism committed primarily in the occupied West Bank by extremist Israeli settler youths against Palestinian Arabs, and to a lesser extent, against left-wing Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Christians, and Israeli security forces. The youths officially claim that the acts are committed to "exact a price from local Palestinians or from the Israeli security forces for any action taken against their settlement enterprise".
The Zion Square assault, also described by Israeli police, the judge who passed sentence, Israeli and foreign media as a "lynch" or "attempted lynch(ing)", was an attack by Israeli youths against four Palestinian teenagers that took place on the night of 16–17 August 2012 at Zion Square in Jerusalem. The four were chased by 10–15 teenagers and a 17-year-old Palestinian boy Jamal Julani was beaten unconscious and subsequently found to be in a critical condition.
Kach was a radical Orthodox Jewish, religious Zionist political party in Israel, existing from 1971 to 1994. Founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1971, based on his Jewish-Orthodox-nationalist ideology, the party earned a single seat in the Knesset in the 1984 election, after several electoral failures. However, it was barred from participating in the next election in 1988 under the revised Knesset Elections Law banning parties that incited racism. After Kahane's assassination in 1990, the party split, with Kahane Chai breaking away from the main Kach faction.
Ezra Yitzhak Nawi was an Israeli Mizrahi Jew, left-wing, human rights activist and pacifist. He was particularly active among the Bedouin herders and farmers of the South Hebron Hills and against the establishment of Israeli settlements there, in what Uri Avnery described as a protracted effort by settlers to cleanse the area of Arab villagers, in the prevention of which he played a key role. He was described as a "Ta'ayush nudnik (nuisance)", and "a working-class, liberal gay version of Joe the Plumber".
Yehudah Joshua Glick, alternatively spelled "Yehuda Glick", is an American-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi and politician, described as a "right-wing" or "far-right" activist. As the President of Shalom Jerusalem Foundation, he campaigns for expanding Jewish access to the Temple Mount. He was a member of the Knesset for Likud, having taken the place of former Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon in May 2016 until April 2019.
This is a list of individual incidents and statistical breakdowns of incidents of violence between Israel and Palestinian dissident factions in 2014 as part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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