Yisrael Medad, an American-Israeli who calls himself “an unofficial spokesman” for the Yesha Council of Jewish Settlements, asserts that settler violence hurts the entire community.
“It allows people to accuse Teitel’s neighbors and entire community of 300,000 Jews of being his comforters and cheerers on. That wasn’t the case.”
If Teitel did indeed commit the crimes, Medad says, “he had a wrong-headed view of what we’re doing here. I can’t deny that there are maybe dozens [of settlers] who think this is a repeat of the Wild Wild West and the Indians, and that they are Davey Crocket. But that’s Teitel’s fault, not ours.”
Medad, a resident of the settlement of Shilo, who moved from the U.S. to Israel in 1970, says he sometimes meets diaspora Jews “who think they know better than us. But they don’t live here and don’t have to adapt to the Israeli reality. You can’t live here and proclaim pure and unadulterated reality. It’s more complicated than that.”
The Yesha spokesman noted that Teitel allegedly murdered two Arab men in 1997, “when he didn’t live here. He could not have been imbued with a so-called ‘messianic radical settler mentality.’ If anything, he came with an unstable mentality.”
And Akiva Eldar:-
...urges caution, not a rush to conclusions, in the Teitel case.
“I don’t know about his family or where he grew up, exactly. Someone should do research on the young American Orthodox kids who move to the settlements, to try and figure out their motivations. It’s important not to generalize.
“I’m sure there are many Orthodox American Jews living in the settlements who are ashamed and embarrassed by this kind of violence,” Eldar says.
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