One of the things that struck me about Israel was that it was very much more integrated than some places. Israeli Muslims, Druze, Samaritans and Christians have equal rights and almost equal duties. Muslims and others have been prominent in business and administration as have Christians with about the only exception to full equality is that Muslims and Christians not compelled to join the military, which is a burden that falls mostly on Israel’s Jewish population.

I remember hanging around in Beersheba waiting around for a bus that would take me to the Airforce Museum and doing some people watching. I saw Muslim women in hijabs, Orthodox Jewish women and men, Ethiopians along with what presumed to be secular Israelis and I picked up no vibe of hostility between the members of one group to another. That’s not been my experience waiting for buses in places like London where in some places there is a permanent pall of mutual hostility or at least indifference and occasional waves of menace.

But despite Israel’s admirable achievement of mutual toleration and respect between different faiths it is not a nation immune from potentially dangerous wayward nutcases and has to guard itself against such people.

One of those people is a Bedouin named Abdullah Gergawi aged 20, who has been arrested and indicted by the Israeli authorities and accused of involvement in an Islamic extremist group and a bomb plot. Gergawi is alleged to be from a good Bedouin family but started to imbibe Islamic extremist propaganda and who became more and more extreme in his views. He joined an online Islamic extremist group that admired the actions and beliefs of ISIS and before the group was shut down allegedly urged others to undertake terrorist action.

Gergawi was ultimately arrested for a bomb plot where the target was a night club in Beersheba and he is awaiting trial for that crime. Reading between the lines of the two Jerusalem Post articles on this subject (linked to below) it appears that this guy wasn’t representative of his whole community but was the sort of random nutcase black sheep that many families can produce, sometimes through no real fault of their own. Any family, no matter what faith they espouse can produce the occasional wrong’un, just look at the history of some of Britain’s great families to see evidence of that. Estates and businesses that were carefully husbanded sometimes over centuries could be destroyed in a generation by a feckless, dissolute heir.

If convicted Gergawi is probably looking at a long prison sentence and the Israelis are lucky that this particular wrong’un was both garrulous and incompetent. He talked far too much and far too strongly about his new interest in the works of ISIS and when I read about his attempt at bomb making I was struck by just how idiotic it was. He talked about carrying out terror attacks and his attempts to buy and source materials for his bomb was so amateurish that suppliers of one component refused to sell it to him and he was reduced to scraping sulphur from match heads.

I think the Israelis did well to catch this guy and I suspect that the Israelis were monitoring him for a while, before he could do any damage or inspire others to do so but this case is a warning. It’s a warning that horrific acts can no only be the work of an organised group but can also be the work of unhinged randoms with extreme internal obsessions.

Links

Religion of Peace website which publicised this story

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

Jerusalem Post stories about this incident

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/crime-in-israel/article-905869

and

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-905951