Letters from Tel Mond Prison: An Israeli Settler Defends His Act of Terror

Winner of a National Jewish Book Award, these impassioned, self-righteous letters offer an unsettling look into the mind of a terrorist. Raised as an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, Rapaport was a civil rights worker, graduated from Yeshiva University, became a social worker, studied in Israel in 1966 and worked as a medic in the Six-Day War. In 1971 he married a native-born Zionist and they moved to the West Bank with the aim of establishing the first permanent Jewish settlement in Samaria in nearly 2000 years. In 1980 Rapaport helped plant car bombs targeting Arab mayors; one of them blew off the legs of Bassam Shaka, mayor of Nablus, described here as a PLO terrorist who openly encouraged massacres of Jews and secretly organized the stoning and firebombing of Jews' cars. After five years as a fugitive in the U.S., Rapaport was arrested, and in these letters, mostly written from prison, he writes lovingly to his wife and six children, and spars with his critics, staunchly defending his violent deeds even as he wrestles with his conscience and God--which makes this document all the more disturbing. Now mayor of the settlement town of Shilo, Rapaport also includes letters from early 1996 expressing his deep skepticism about the Israeli-Arab peace agreement. Helmreich, professor of sociology and Judaic studies at City College of New York, sympathetically views Rapaport's act as part of a cycle of escalating terrorism fueled by a combustible mix of protest, religion and nationalistic ideology. (Nov.)