"Would there be any doubt that this was a reaction to racism, and not hatred of Christians? Wouldn't it be clear who were the oppressed and who were the oppressors?" asked Joyce Chediac in a recent article in the Worker's World newspaper in response to a Palestinian attack on a Jerusalem yeshiva a couple of weeks ago which left eight students dead.

While there was international shock and outrage over the shooting attack in Israel, the yeshiva is not the innocent bastion of learning and education that it appears to be, but a hotbed of right-wing Jewish fundamentalism and the ideological home of the settler movement.

The Merkaz Harav yeshiva (or school) is considered the flagship of nationalist-religious Zionism and also the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit. It was founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate.

The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement established after the Yom Kippur War, which encourages Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Merkaz Harav.

Shortly after the attack on the yeshiva a group of prominent rabbis, identifying with the extreme right, called on Jews to avenge their enemies, "measure for measure." Israel's Channel 1 also reported that a rabbi had given permission to yeshiva students to carry out revenge attacks.

Notices in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood where the shooting took place read: "Each and everyone is required to imagine what the enemy is plotting to do to us, and to match it measure for measure."

Among the signatories to the street notice were Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of government coalition party Shas' spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Rabbi Ido Elba, who was sentenced to a two-year prison term for incitement to racism and Rabbi Gadi Ben-Zimra, the rabbi of the Orthodox high school where girls who were arrested refused to recognize the court's authority.

The rabbis also said it was necessary "to work to create a proper Jewish leadership." This comes against the background of the assassination in 1995 of former Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin at the hand of a right-wing extremist Yigal Amir. Amir was a religious zealot who believed that Rabin deserved to die for trying to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Many in Israel believe that an atmosphere of incitement against Rabin was deliberately encouraged with the blessings and support of conservative Rabbis who, among other things, backed the settlement building on the West Bank as part of their Eretz (or Greater) Israel ideology.

The settlers have long been regarded by the majority of secular Israelis as an extremist element. Their militancy and zealous ideology, which is behind the continued expropriation of Palestinian land in flagrant violation of international law, for the enlargement of current settlements and the building of new ones, has earned them international condemnation.

One of the most infamous incidents of settler violence against Palestinians was in 1994 when Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned 29 Palestinians to death as they worshiped in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Fellow settlers from the notorious Kiryat Arba settlement nearby subsequently built a shrine to Goldstein, a doctor who immigrated to Israel from New York.

The Israeli security forces continue to play a game of cat and mouse with the settlers who build outposts illegally, which are subsequently torn down only to be rebuilt when the soldiers have left.

Furthermore, incidents of settler violence against the Israeli security forces are common, but the Israeli government appears unwilling to crack down on these renegades due to fear of losing their political support and the violent reaction this would provoke, in addition to secretly having sympathy for their cause.

Meanwhile the number of incidents of assaults on Palestinians and destruction of their property by the settlers continues to be of concern to U.N. agencies and other humanitarian organizations.

The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated in its February humanitarian report that 24 attacks against Palestinians were recorded in the Hebron area alone during the month, with children among the victims.

And while some Americans are more preoccupied with whether Barack Hussein Obama, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency, is Muslim or not and whether he attended a madrassa (Islamic school), the ideological brainwashing of a future generation of Jewish militants at various yeshivas throughout Israel continues unabated, with little concern from the West.