[3] His mother Tova is the daughter of Rabbi Meir Kahane, regarded as the father of far-right Jewish militancy[2] and the founder of Kach, a radical Orthodox political party and movement later banned by the Israeli government under its anti-terrorism laws.
[8] Meir Kahane, according to Ehud Sprinzak, espoused a view of the world, based on his reading of Kiddush Hashem, called catastrophic messianism, requiring the exaltation of Jews and the humiliation of their enemies.
[5] Many similarities between Meir and his grandfather, once dubbed "Israel's Ayatollah",[11] have been noted: the cheerful outlook, articulateness, the absolute self-assurance of being right, the shared belief that most Palestinians must be expelled in order to make way for a Jewish state and accomplish Biblical prophecy.
In a work written when he was 19, The Rebel Manifesto, he declared his refusal to have anything to do with Israeli political formations,[b] since the state itself, and its multiculturalism, was an impediment to the recreation of Biblical Israel.
[13] According to Mark Juergensmeyer, Ettinger's grandfather's extremist message influenced the execution of terroristic acts like the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre carried out by the Kach militant Baruch Goldstein and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir.
Shlomo Fischer, a sociologist at Hebrew University, states that Ettinger represents violent activists who trust themselves to be endowed with prophetic authority, and compared the group to the militant 1980s Jewish Underground,[2] Ettinger's rise to dominance, also as leader of a movement called The Revolt, was earmarked by acts, observed at the time by Israeli security officials, such as attacking a Palestinian shepherd's flock, stoning a sheep, and then slaughtering it in front of the terrified herder.
[2] According to the Shin Bet, the internal Israeli security service, Ettinger set up in September 2013 an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the state in four stages by striking it where it was most vulnerable.
[18] On 7 January 2014, he and a band of between 8 and 10 other settlers were surrounded and detained at Qusra, which had already lost half of its land to Israeli settlements, had hundreds of olive trees destroyed, 18 sheep killed and 6 cars torched.
[19] Settlers at the Esh Kodesh outpost had planted olive trees on privately owned Palestinian land, and the Israeli civil administration had them removed.
On descending a hill, while "stoning" farmers and damaging olive trees at Qusra, they were cornered, and either "retreated" or were "pushed" into a partially built local house.
[21] The Duma arson attack, near the outpost of Adei Ad,[22] was defined officially as an act of Jewish terrorism,[22] and was the most severe of at least 120 settler assaults on Palestinians that took place leading up to the incident.
[2] With a high profile as a religious ultra-nationalist, Meir, together with Eviatar Slonim[h] and Mordechai Meyer, was arrested in a government crackdown as a suspect for the arson given his association with numerous prior attacks.
He was imprisoned under administrative detention laws, which are mainly applied to Palestinians, and rarely to Jews,[25] for six months leading to widespread assumptions that he was the ringleader of several violent terrorist actions.
[30] He has called there for the "dispossession of gentiles",[2] whose religions are deemed a form of idolatry, and wrote, when the Church of the Multiplication was torched near the Sea of Galilee: "I don't know what those anonymous lighters intended to set alight, but that fire touched my heart.