Israeli police have arrested an American-born Jewish settler accused of waging a 12-year campaign of murder and violence against Palestinians, homosexuals and even a Holocaust survivor who defended the rights of Palestinians to armed resistance against Israeli occupation.

Yaakov Teitel, who is married to an English ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman, has been charged with murdering a Palestinian taxi driver in East Jerusalem, apparently in “revenge” for Palestinian suicide attacks in the 1990s, and a Palestinian man near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

Mr Teitel, 36, who was born in Florida but moved to the Jewish settlement of Shvut Rachel in the northern West Bank after becoming an Israeli citizen in 2000, is also suspected of having planted the explosives last year that wounded Zeev Sternhell, an Israeli history professor who survived the Holocaust in Poland and who has angered many on the Israeli Right by supporting Palestinian armed resistance inside the West Bank.

Police also believe that Mr Teitel, a father of four, left an explosive device last year outside the home of a family of Messianic Jews in the settlement of Ariel. Messianic Jews believe that Jesus was the Messiah but maintain their Jewish identity. Mr Teitel accused them of being “missionaries who intended to entrap weak Jews”. A 15-year-old boy was wounded in the blast.

In another attack for which Mr Teitel is blamed, a bomb was placed near a monastery because the suspect “heard that the monks there were enticing Jewish children with candy”, the Israeli press reported. The explosion wounded a Palestinian tractor driver.

Mr Teitel is also suspected of having stabbed an Arab Israeli man who he believed was making sexual advances towards him, and boasted of having participated in a deadly shooting attack on a gay community centre in Tel Aviv this year, although police believe that he was not in fact involved in that crime.

Despite having no military experience, Mr Teitel was said to have successfully experimented with bomb-making in his home and to have smuggled his first gun into Israel from America in pieces on board a British Airways flight in the late 1990s. He is also accused of having left poison-laced bottles of juice in a Palestinian village in an attempt to kill, although there were no reports of injuries in that case.

Settler groups were swift to condemn the trail of violence Mr Teitel left in his wake, as his acts evoked the killing of 29 Palestinians in a Hebron shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims in 1994 by Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Jewish settler, who was beaten to death during the attack. His grave inside the Jewish settlement in Hebron has become a pilgrimage site for extreme rightwingers. News of the arrest also came in the same week as the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister who was gunned down at a rally by a right-wing Israeli opposed to the Oslo peace accords.

The case has stirred shock and anger in the Israeli press, with many asking how Mr Teitel — who was arrested by the internal security forces in 1997, but later released for lack of evidence — had been allowed to commit so many crimes over so long a period. Some commentators said that the security services had only really started looking for him after he allegedly started killing Jews, while ignoring the attacks on Palestinians.

Ami Ayalon, the head of Israel’s internal security forces, welcomed the condemnations from Mr Teitel’s fellow settlers but hinted that the ideology of some of the hardline settler communities — which claim the entire West Bank as part of Israel — may have helped to spur the suspect to violence.

“I think the condemnation was in place and it’s good it was made,” he told Israeli radio. “But I still must note the fact that naturally, terror grows in a place where ideologically it has a source of food.” Mr Teitel was arrested last month but his detention kept secret under a gag order. His wife, Rivka Pepperman, a dance teacher from Manchester, was also detained for questioning and police warned that other Jewish extremists may still be at large.

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