Killing of Palestinian Youth Puts an Israeli Focus on Extremism --- JERUSALEM — Even as the Israeli public offers strong support for airstrikes on Hamas fighters and their weapons stocks in Gaza, there is a good deal of reflection over the coldblooded killing of a Palestinian teenager that helped lead to the latest increase in violence. -- Brutality against innocents is not new on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, despite a court order that bans the disclosure of information in the case, Israelis have been discussing links between the suspects arrested in the killing of the teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, and Israeli right-wing extremist groups that have at times operated with impunity. -- Very little about the six suspects has been confirmed, because of the court order. But several Israeli media outlets have linked them to extremist groups, describing them as “shababnikkim,” pejorative Hebrew slang for right-wing extremist youth from ultra-Orthodox homes on the fringes of Orthodox society. -- Lawyers for Honenu, a right-wing legal aid organization that often defends soldiers and civilians in cases involving attacks on Arabs, said they were representing the suspects. While none have yet been charged, the Israeli news media reported that three had confessed and three were scheduled to be released. -- The apparent link to the far right prompted some to bemoan the decay of society’s moral underpinning, with a small group of extremists becoming more brazen. The phenomenon has been traced to the yeshiva student who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, and even to the 1980s, when a “Jewish underground” put explosives in Palestinian buses. -- “The moral blindness has afflicted Israelis in general,” Anshel Pfeffer, a respected chronicler of Jewish extremism, wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. “We are all partners in this, accomplices in complacency, if not in deed.” -- Deborah Weissman, an educator and president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, said the Palestinian teenager’s killing showed that “we are not immune to extremism, that extremist, religious terror can occur in many, maybe in any, religion.” -- She said that though the killers appeared to represent “a very marginal phenomenon,” their very existence demanded that Jewish Israelis reflect on their identity and history. -- “We have to present a different view of Jewish history, one that is not about being the absolute victim, and then discuss what the implications are of becoming a state,” she said. “There were times in Jewish history when Jews were victims and powerless, but when you have power you have to exercise it wisely and morally.” - More, - NYTimes, STEVEN ERLANGER