By Samuel Sockol
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 26, 2008

JERUSALEM, Sept. 25 -- Zeev Sternhell, a leading Israeli political scientist and a frequent critic of Jewish settlement of the West Bank, was lightly wounded early Thursday when a pipe bomb exploded outside his home in Jerusalem.

Police discovered fliers in Sternhell's neighborhood offering a $320,000 bounty for the killing of any member of Peace Now, an Israeli organization Sternhell has supported that opposes Jewish settlement of lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben Ruby said investigators attributed the bombing to "elements on the extreme right" -- Israeli shorthand for radical members of the settler movement. Violent attacks against Israeli Jews by Jewish extremists are rare, but Israelis opposed to the settler movement say they are receiving an increasing number of threats.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, an activist with a fringe settler group calling itself the National Jewish Front, said, "I don't denounce this incident, but say categorically that we are not involved," the Associated Press reported.

The attack provoked condemnations from Israeli leaders across the political spectrum. "We are returning to the dark spectacle of pipe bombs that are aimed at people, in this case against a very gifted person who never shies away from expressing his opinion," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said.

Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor in his early 70s, was injured after he came to his front door at 1 a.m. A hospital spokeswoman said several fragments were removed from his leg and that he would remain hospitalized at least until Friday.

Sternhell is a Holocaust survivor and an expert on fascism who won this year's Israel Prize, an honor bestowed by the government, for his work in political science.

In comments to Israeli news media, Sternhell said he would not be intimidated by the bombing. "If this act was not perpetrated by a lone madman, but rather by an element representing a political or public movement, this is the start of the road to dismantling democracy," he warned.

Sternhell has often criticized the settler movement and the government support it has received. "Since it was impossible to take control of the lands legally, a mafia-like culture of theft, lies and deception developed in the territories, in which the various government authorities are still wallowing," he wrote in the daily Haaretz last month. "Contrary to the rules of international and Israeli law, contrary to elementary rules of justice, contrary to all logic and every genuine Israeli interest, broad areas were confiscated for the sake of the settlers and huge sums were poured in."

Following the attack, police offered to protect the home of Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer and the group's offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. "We have been getting threats over the phone and through letters, but this time, with a bomb going off, it is very unpleasant," Oppenheimer said. "We have been warning that the radical right is growing and becoming more extreme."