WASHINGTON (JTA) — Repeated attacks by Jewish extremists on mosques are "unacceptable," the Anti-Defamation League said in an unusual censure by a Jewish group on a pattern of behavior by Israelis.
The ADL and other U.S. Jewish groups routinely condemn individual Israeli attacks on Arabs, but statements condemning patterns of such behavior are rarer.
"Mosques are repeatedly being subjected to attack by Jewish extremists and this activity is completely unacceptable," Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national director, said in a statement Tuesday after vandals burned and defaced a mosque in Jabaa, a village near Ramallah, apparently in response to the planned government-ordered evacuation of a West Bank neighborhood deemed illegal by Israel’s Supreme Court.
"The attack on the Jabaa mosque and other recent, similar incidents against mosques are fundamentally an affront to the values of Israel," Foxman said, referring to a series of recent apparent "price tag" attacks by hard-line settlers on Palestinian and Israeli-Arab property.
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