Acts of terrorism carried out by Israeli Jews have been relatively rare throughout the existence of the Jewish State. Their number, to be sure, has paled in comparison with the outsized number of such acts by Palestinian extremist groups such as Hamas, Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But making count comparisons does not excuse any acts of violence in which civilians are indiscriminately targeted. So when horrendous acts were recently committed by Israeli Jews against both fellow Jews and Palestinians, we must insist on the same response from law enforcement as we would see if the accused were not Jewish.

Several of the recent events have caused Israelis to be morally outraged. An ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israeli, Yishai Schlissel, who had served lengthy time in prison for a previous attack, repeated his deadly assaults at a recent Gay Pride parade, stabbing six people before being subdued by Israeli police. One of them, Shira Banki, 16, died of her injuries.

On July 31, a deadly arson attack took place in the West Bank village of Duma, that killed Ali Dawabsheh, a Palestinian toddler, and severely burned his parents and his 4-year-old brother. Not only are Jewish terrorists suspects, but according to reporting by Isabel Kershner in The New York Times, a detailed instruction manual on how to set fire to a Palestinian house was discovered by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, two days before the arson at the Dawabsheh home.

The arson “instruction” manual is believed to have been written by Moshe Orbach, known to Israeli authorities as an extremist. Despite the fact that it seems likely that Orbach was involved in the arson, he was released to house arrest pending a ruling on a request by state prosecutors to detain him until trial.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the attack on and murder of Banki: “We will not allow the abhorrent murderer to undermine the fundamental values upon which Israeli society is based.”

Netanyahu’s comments are exactly on point: Israeli society is based on those values that treat human life as precious, regardless of whose life is in question.

There’s some serious question, however, about whether the government is walking the walk in addition to talking the talk. Kershner writes that while “Israeli leaders have condemned the firebombing” and that official denunciations have come from “across the political spectrum,” the relatively mild treatment of suspect Orbach “has also reinforced the sense that Israeli law-enforcement authorities have for years acted with laxness and leniency toward Israeli citizens.”

By contrast, Kershner writes, Israel has made “wide use of administrative detention without charge or trial — a draconian measure — against Palestinian suspects in the West Bank who are subject to Israeli military law and emergency regulations left over from the British Mandate.”

In the centrist Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonot, Alex Fishman, its military affairs analyst, describes Israeli security and military practices relating to Palestinian suspects as “basic coverage,” which involves collecting information about schools, mosques and communities. Fishman adds that when it comes to Jewish terror suspects, the Shin Bet “doesn’t want to spy on Jews, and the political echelon would never dream of allowing it to build a ‘basic coverage’ (close monitoring of) yeshivas, rabbis, religious and cultural institutions, regional councils.”

Such a double-standard is absolutely unacceptable. Terrorism is terrorism, whether carried out by Fatah, Hamas or by extremist Jewish settlers. In the immediate aftermath of the 1995 massacre of 27 Muslim worshippers by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron, then Israeli President Ezer Weizman warned that Jewish “religious” extremism, alongside radical Islamist extremism, could result in a horrific religious war. In other words, terrorism is terrorism, whether Jewish or Islamist.

Using harsh, even “draconian” measures against Palestinian suspects while at the same time treating Jewish terror suspects such as Moshe Orbach with kid gloves is indefensible. How can Israel claim the “moral high ground” in the battle against terrorism if it has an obvious double standard in handling terrorist crimes, reacting harshly to Palestinian terrorism and treating Jewish terrorist suspects with relative leniency?

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research center, said in an interview that with Jewish terrorism becoming more frequent and lethal, “We need to come up with a different set of legal tools that will help us deal with this new situation, and a new enforcement policy.”

Plesner is absolutely right. Strongly worded denunciations of Jewish terrorist acts by Netanyahu and other officials are not sufficient in themselves. Jewish terrorism is even more threatening to the basic fabric of the Jewish State than Palestinian terrorism. 

Nothing short of a strong and sustained campaign to stamp out this scourge is acceptable, and the time to act is now.