Privilege Versus Right: Vigilantism Against Israel's Palestinian Citizens

ABSTRACT This article addresses three core questions: What is the social origin of vigilantism? How do vigilantes justify extra‐legal violence and intimidation? What are vigilantism's long‐term effects? The analysis focuses on a period in which Israel's Palestinian‐Arab citizens increased their access to legal rights, social mobility, spatial integration, and political visibility. It then maps Lehava's violent backlash to this progress onto Stanley Cohen's concept of moral panic. By integrating the concepts of vigilantism, moral panic, and privilege/right, the article develops a general theory of political vigilantism that explains how expansion of rights may provoke extra‐legal violence, and how vigilantes may ultimately convert such violence into formal political power.