Reserve soldier Master Sgt. Efi (Yonah Efraim) Feldbaum, H’yd, who was killed yesterday in Gaza, was targeted in the past by the Shin Bet, which tried to recruit him as an informant against his friends in the settlement movement, journalist Elchanan Groner reported in HaKol HaYehudi.

Groner wrote, “Efi, H’yd is another hero who was labeled by the Shin Bet as an enemy.”

“I met him 14 years ago when he was in Nachliel, and the Shin Bet’s Jewish Department tried to turn him into an agent against his friends.”

“They revoked his pistol license after he was attacked with stones by Arabs and fired into the air, and then the Shin Bet exploited that to force him to talk to them so they could supposedly return his pistol to him. The conversations suddenly turned into ones that ended with payment, and they started asking him about his friends.

“When he realized that the scoundrels were trying to trap him, he turned to me for help so that we could publicize and expose the incident. I went to him in Nachliel, and that was one of the first filmed interviews we published on HaKol HaYehudi.”

In his testimony from 14 years ago, Feldbaum recounted how a Shin Bet representative tried to recruit him: “He presented himself as a friend, saying he wanted to help me get my gun back. During that meeting, he gave me 500 shekels and said, ‘Here, take this.’ Later, we met again—probably at a Shin Bet facility—and he tried to get me to talk about my friends. He tried to show me a list of names he said were ‘problematic,’ to read my facial reactions and see what I really thought. At the second meeting, he gave me 300 shekels. I told a friend about the incident. I told him that if if I don’t report these meetings within a certain time, he should do it so they can’t use psychological pressure against me.”

“At the third meeting, I saw that I still hadn’t gotten my gun back. They told me that if I continued meeting with them, they’d return it. At that meeting, I received another 500 shekels. I told my Rabbi about the meetings, and he sent me to report it to Honenu [a right-wing legal aid organization]. I met with Honenu, and since then, the Shin Bet has never contacted me again.”

Shmuel (Zangi) Medad, the head of the Honenu legal aid organization, which assisted Feldbaum in his dealings with the Shin Bet, stated, “We have no idea how devious and cruel the Shin Bet’s methods are—and they continue to this day.”

“I call on the new Shin Bet chief, David Zini: bring order to the organization you are now responsible for. Only recently, I received a leaked internal Shin Bet directive ordering them to ‘take down’ the Honenu organization and me personally.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)