Peace Now Activist Gets Graffiti Death Threats

By JTA November 8, 2011

Threatening graffiti was spray-painted on the home of a Peace Now activist, one day after the group’s offices were evacuated due to a bomb threat.

Monday night’s attack is the second time in recent weeks that the home of Hagit Ofran, the director of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, has been targeted.

The threatening graffiti included swastikas and the words “Rabin is waiting for you,” referring to the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Other epithets referred to the recent razing of structures in two West Bank outposts.

“They are trying to scare us, but it will not work,” Ofran told the Israeli daily Haaretz Tuesday. “The discourse in Israel has become truly dangerous. We are having an argument about the future and this discourse has crossed red lines.”

On Sunday evening, police evacuated the two-story building housing the Jerusalem offices of Peace Now after a man speaking into the building’s intercom system reportedly said that the building would soon blow up.

The words “price tag” were discovered spray-painted on the side of the building the same evening. A Star of David had been spray-painted on the building a few days ago.

Price tag refers to the strategy that extremist settlers have adopted to exact a price in attacks on Palestinians and Arabs in retribution for settlement freezes and demolitions or for Palestinian attacks on Jews.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO