confessed killer dubbed “The Jewish Terrorist” has shown how far settlers may go to stop Israel trading land for peace with Palestinians and the risks even lone attackers can pose to stability in a tinderbox region. So concluded many Israelis as media devoted much of their newsprint and airtime this week to the arrest of Yaakov “Jack” Tytell, an American immigrant to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. Police said he had admitted killing two Arabs a decade ago and more recent attacks on Israeli leftists. Analysts were quick to compare him to the right-wing Jew, angry at peace deals with the Palestinians, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 14 years ago. The jailed killer Yigal Amir remains a hero to thousands on the Israeli right. Newspapers, most of which devoted numerous pages to Tytell, also recalled Baruch Goldstein, the settler physician from New York who shot nearly 200 Arab worshippers at a Hebron mosque in 1995, killing 29 of them – an act swiftly followed by Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks in Israel. Former Israeli secret service agents warned of a “Jewish Underground”, out in the wilder edges of the West Bank hilltops, that has the weaponry to make good on hardliners' threats to resist with violence any move by Israel's government to end its 41 years of military occupation, or even to evict settlers from some of their fringe “outposts”. And Menachem Landow, a former head of the Shin Bet security service's Jewish Division, said even loners threatened national security, either by posing a risk to leaders like Rabin or by provoking Arab attacks.
