The recent youtube clip of radical rightwing Jewish settler youth celebrating the slaughter of the Dawabsha family in the West Bank of Duma has shocked much if not most of the entire political and religious establishment, especially the rightwing who have to come out to disown and condemn these terrorists. Indeed, the rightwing should be the most shocked. They own it. The scene looks like something out of Islamic State, only hasidic.

But shock and condemnation go only so far. This phenomenon represents not simply a terrible aberration but one logical outcome to an entire political, educational, and social constellation. This support for terrorism represents one side of the current status quo today in Israel which the mainstream rightwing establishment insists they can “manage.” After almost 50 years of Occupation, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, what was anyone expecting? Not this, to be sure, but definitely this.

There are concentric circles of actors that are growing this thing, starting with the terrorists themselves, and the extreme rightwing-settler circles surrounding them such as here, or the rabbis at radical yeshivot. There’s then the Occupation and the institutions that establish it, the national and national-religious camp of the Zionist political and educational class in Israel and the West Bank, the State of Israel and Zionism itself, and, yes, also Orthodox Judaism and Judaism have a part in all this.

Students of Jewish folklore will want to file this under “Jewish dance.”