Six decades after Israel was founded to ensure that Jews would never suffer another Holocaust, the Jewish state has smashed its first cell of neo-Nazis. The idea was so unthinkable that the country has no law against neo-Nazi activity.
Eight Russian immigrants, aged 16 to 21, were remanded in custody in the Ramleh magistrates' court, near Tel-Aviv, yesterday. They covered their faces with their shirts, baring arms tattooed with neo-Nazi insignia and slogans, and protested their innocence. A ninth suspect has fled the country. They are to be charged tomorrow with causing bodily harm, illegally possessing weapons and denying the Holocaust.
Superintendent Revital Almog, who headed the investigation, said: "The level of violence was outrageous."
One of the young men was Jewish. The rest were admitted under Israeli legislation, which grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent and entry permits to the families of gentiles married to Jews. About one million immigrants, many with tenuous ties to Judaism, moved to Israel in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The cell's alleged leader was named as Eli Buanitov. Detectives said they found an email message on his computer saying: "I won't have kids. My grandfather is half Yid, so that this piece of trash won't have ancestors with even the smallest percent of Jewish blood." In another file, he was quoted as writing: "I will never give up. I was a Nazi and will remain a Nazi. I won't rest until we kill them all."
Undercover police began tracking the cell after two synagogues in the Tel-Aviv satellite town of Petah Tikva were desecrated and yeshiva students were beaten. Internal and external walls were spray-painted with swastikas, as well as "Heil Hitler" and "Death to the Jews" graffiti.
The religious community in the town has complained of a reign of terror. "There are people here who simply hate Jews," said Nahum Taub, a synagogue sexton. Rabbi Yigal Rosen, who heads a yeshiva, reported that three of his students were ambushed as they walked through a local park. The assailants beat them, called them names and held a knife to the neck of one student before stealing their mobile phones.
Inspector Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said the suspects had filmed themselves beating 15 ultra-Orthodox Jews, foreign workers, homosexuals, homeless people, drunks and drug addicts. In one particularly brutal assault, the whole group set about a Thai worker in the old Tel-Aviv bus station. He had to be treated in hospital.
Detectives who raided their homes found the films and a photograph of one of the group brandishing an M-16 assault rifle. They also confiscated knives, an improvised pistol, TNT, wires and detonators.
Some of the footage was shown at yesterday's cabinet meeting. Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, said: "We saw the appalling documentation of violence for its own sake. We as a society have failed in educating these youths and distancing them from crazy and dangerous ideologies."
Inspector Rosenfeld said the eight had neo-Nazi tattoos on their arms. They would meet every few days and decide who and where to attack next. Searches of their computers and video cassettes revealed links to racist groups in Germany and the United States.
The case has shocked Israelis and prompted calls for the government to reconsider its immigration policy and to outlaw neo-Nazi and other hate crimes.
Efraim Zuroff, who is still hunting Nazi war criminals for the Simon Weisenthal Centre, said: "The writing was on the wall. This is what happens when you have laws that allow immediate citizenship to people with little connection to Jewish history, the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and Jewish culture."
Avner Shalev, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority, said: "Neo-Nazi activity, wherever it appears, must be treated with the utmost seriousness and the perpetrators prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
"While this is a marginal and extreme case, it is nevertheless intolerable. It must be combated and addressed in the legal and educational systems."
Colette Avital, a Labour MP, leads a group of about 20 legislators from all parties who have been pressing for a ban on neo-Nazi symbols and neo-Nazi activities. She was confident that their private members' bill would now pass.
Ms Avital, who was a child fugitive in German-occupied Romania, urged the government to examine revoking the citizenship of anyone convicted of such crimes. "Neo-Nazism is a terrible thing. Israel is the one country where this shouldn't happen," she insisted. "But it's not enough to ban it. You have to look at the root of things. What kind of education did these people receive? Kids like this don't come from nowhere."
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