Meir Ettinger is an Israeli Kahanist activist and extremist known for leading the Hilltop Youth, a group that pursues the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, conducts punitive price tag attacks on Palestinian villages, and targets Muslim and Christian sites.
22 Facts About Meir Ettinger
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Meir Ettinger is one of 12 children of Mordechai and Tova Ettinger.
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Meir Ettinger's father serves as a rabbi at the Har Hamor and Ateret Cohanim yeshivot.
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Meir Ettinger was raised in the Jerusalem suburb of Kiryat Moshe.
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Meir Ettinger is said to have become a disciple of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, after meeting settlers from the Israeli settlement of Yitzhar.
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Meir Ettinger is said to have disagreed with Ginsburgh's pacifistic approach in this regard, as Ettinger advocated the adoption of violence in order to undermine the foundations of Israel.
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Meir Ettinger Kahane, according to Ehud Sprinzak, espoused a view of the world, based on his reading of Kiddush Hashem, called catastrophic messianism, requiring the exaltation of Jews and the humiliation of their enemies.
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Meir Ettinger became a charismatic leader among the militant settler movement known as Hilltop Youth.
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Meir Ettinger has played a leading role in setting up illegal Israeli outposts on Palestinian land, and attracted police attention for his militancy in two outposts - one, Ramat Migron, just outside the settlement of Migron, and another, Givat Ronen, near Har Brakha.
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Meir Ettinger was part of a group that infiltrated Joseph's Tomb in 2011, against explicit IDF orders to keep away from the site.
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Migron was dismantled by force, and Meir Ettinger served a spell in jail for his disruptive attempts to hinder the military's evacuation of such outposts.
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In 2012, Meir Ettinger was arrested for complicity in what Israeli media termed the "spy affair".
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Meir Ettinger was sentenced to a 6-month term for "conspiracy to collect information of military value".
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Meir Ettinger was known to undertake price tag assaults on nearby Palestinian villages.
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Meir Ettinger laid the blame for the incident on the army for refusing to allow them to carry weapons, commenting:.
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One day before the attack, Meir Ettinger wrote on his blog a disavowal he was in any way connected to price tag assaults, while stating that many Jews are not bound by the laws of the state, but only God's law.
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Meir Ettinger was imprisoned under administrative detention laws, which are mainly applied to Palestinians, and rarely to Jews, for six months leading to widespread assumptions that he was the ringleader of several violent terrorist actions.
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Meir Ettinger's lawyer complained that Ettinger had been subjected to tiltul methods, rough shaking and punching, during his interrogation.
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Meir Ettinger was not directly linked to the attacks, and was released in June 2016.
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Meir Ettinger was placed under several restrictions, which included bans from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and he was barred from making contact with 93 people.
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Meir Ettinger attacked the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin for pandering to Palestinians, and thereby betraying the state.
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Meir Ettinger has called there for the "dispossession of gentiles", whose religions are deemed a form of idolatry, and wrote, when the Church of the Multiplication was torched near the Sea of Galilee:.