| Video footage. Stomping of a man in tunnel | Music | 00:00 |
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| KUZMIN: We were interested about girls, cars, | 00:09 |
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| things like that, just usual guys. | 00:12 |
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| Nothing special. | 00:14 |
| Kuzmin walks with parents | BROWN: To his parents Ivan Kuzmin seemed just an average teenager. | 00:20 |
| Video footage. Stomping of a man in tunnel | Music | 00:26 |
| Kuzmin | KUZMIN: I felt that I, er, I am with people just like me. Every group of friends has something, something between them, | 00:31 |
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| something that connects them, that was the thing that connected us. | 00:44 |
| Neo Nazi video | Music | 00:49 |
| Kuzmin at home with parents | BROWN: Ivan Kuzmin lives in a small apartment, in a middle class neighbourhood near Tel Aviv. He moved here with his family from Ukraine almost ten years ago. | 01:05 |
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| KUZMIN: There they called me things like dirty Jew and here they called me stinky Russian. | 01:15 |
| Kuzmin. Super: | BROWN: And how did that make you feel? KUZMIN: Nothing good. I don't know, I got disappointed. Because I thought once I come here I wouldn't feel this, this like, hatred. | 01:21 |
| Israel. Street scenes. People | Music | 01:38 |
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| BROWN: After the Soviet Union collapsed, in the early 1990s, around a million Russians, Ukrainians and others immigrated to Israel. | 01:43 |
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| Music | 01:51 |
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| BROWN: To qualify under Israel's Law of Return they needed only a single Jewish grandparent. But their sons and daughters often felt little or no connection to their Jewish heritage. | 01:56 |
| Kuzmin | Ivan Kuzmin had fallen in with a gang of thugs who called themselves Patrol 36 – a neo-Nazi hate group. | 02:11 |
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| KUZMIN: I don't know, when you look at those movies it really looks bad, I don't know, I didn't took it serious. | 02:19 |
| Video footage. Neo-Nazi kicking men in tunnel | Music | 02:27 |
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| BROWN: Ivan Kuzmin's initiation into Patrol 36 wasn't caught on camera – it came on a night like this, after he and his friends got drunk celebrating his 17th birthday. | 02:30 |
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| The group didn't just focus on Jews. Its victims were often illegal workers or others unlikely to go to the police. KUZMIN: They were usually Chinese and drug addicts. | 02:44 |
| Kuzmin | People that can't ask for help. BROWN: People who were vulnerable? KUZMIN: Yeah. BROWN: And weaker? | 02:59 |
| Neo Nazi video | Music | 03:09 |
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| BROWN: It's perhaps no surprise that Patrol 36 drew inspiration from a Russian neo-Nazi group, called Format 18. | 03:14 |
| Neo Nazi montage | Music | 03:21 |
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| BROWN: In a sense, the videos were a public boast to the Russian group, as if to say: ‘Look what we can do in the land of the Jews.’ But now, the gang members insist this wasn't a show of love for Nazism. | 03:26 |
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| Music | 03:40 |
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| KUZMIN: Most guys were just like usual guys without any ideology, just simple guys. | 03:44 |
| Kuzmin | We said Israelis are stupid and we don't like them. But nothing about the nazi ideology. | 03:56 |
| Taub. Super: | TAUB: They are just trying to say that they are not nazis in order to get off. | 04:08 |
| Synagogue interior | BROWN: Not far from Ivan Kuzmin’s home, the local synagogue was one of the first places to be targeted. | 04:19 |
| Photo. Swastika graffiti at synagogue | Back in early 2005, its floor was sprayed with graffiti -- the swastikas were back to front. | 04:27 |
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| TAUB: It just hurt the whole Jewish community to see what they had done. | 04:33 |
| Taub | I thought that the police have to take care of it and stop it. | 04:39 |
| Patrol 36 video | Music | 04:45 |
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| BROWN: In fact, the police paid scant attention to a string of increasingly bold attacks. | 04:46 |
| Brown walks with Levin | More than six months after the synagogue was vandalised, Avraham Levin was passing a group of young men who shouted in Russian that Jews must be killed. Levin understood his tormentors. He’s also a Russian immigrant. | 04:53 |
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| LEVIN: They said something rude about Jews, and I replied, “That's not nice, this is the land of the Jews - we live here. And they simply didn't understand. | 05:08 |
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| BROWN: As Avraham Levin tried to escape, the men threw rocks and hit him in the leg. He made it to the main street, but they pursued him. | 05:17 |
| Levin describes attack | LEVIN: I was standing here… one of them here… and another one from behind with big sticks. And I tried to defend myself, with my hands, like this. BROWN: As he fended off the blows Avraham Levin broke his hand. | 05:28 |
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| He says the police showed no interest in the attack and didn't properly follow up. | 05:40 |
| Levin | LEVIN: It was surprising to me that in the state of Israel a Jew can't receive protection against Nazis in his own country. It’s simply strange. As if there was no Holocaust, no progress. | 05:47 |
| Inside Yad Vashem memorial | Music | 06:04 |
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| BROWN: The Holocaust - the killing of an estimated six million Jews in Europe in World War Two, understandably looms large in Israel. | 06:09 |
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| The Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem serves as a constant reminder to be alert to the dangers of racism and genocide. Hence the exhortation -- Never Again. | 06:22 |
| Knesset vision. Avital in parliament | As the number of Nazi themed attacks increased, members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, expressed outrage. | 06:42 |
| Avital. Super: | AVITAL: It was like a stab in my stomach. I can't even tell you in words, it was almost physical. I'd just -- I just couldn't believe it was like going back in history and seeing we have learned nothing, we don't -- how is that possible? | 06:49 |
| Patrol 36 video of bashing | Music | 07:07 |
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| BROWN: The gang's own videos brought them down when the police moved in. And, for Patrol 36, it was the end of the line. | 07:15 |
| Gang members in court | Eight gang members have been on trial now for the best part of a year. Ivan Kuzmin doesn't sit with them because, when the police came knocking on the Kuzmin's door, he turned on his friends and became an informant. | 07:34 |
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| KUZMIN: They had nothing, that's what I know now. They had nothing without me. So | 07:48 |
| Kuzmin | I gave them all the information they wanted. BROWN: What kind of information helped them? KUZMIN: I explained them who's in the movies and where, because the faces are covered. | 07:55 |
| Ivan reports to the police station | BROWN: Throughout the trial Ivan Kuzmin's been under house arrest. During the week he attends boarding school. On the weekends he's only allowed out of his apartment to report to the local police station. | 08:08 |
| Gang members in court | Meanwhile, his erstwhile peers are in jail. | 08:25 |
| Eli in court | Ivan's best friend in the gang was Eli Bonayatov – he was one of the instigators of the violence. | 08:28 |
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| KUZMIN: First the police officer asked Eli, | 08:35 |
| Kuzmin. Super: | did you beat this person in a certain movie, and then Eli said no, and then he asked me, did Eli beat him, and I had to say yes. BROWN: That must have been difficult in front of Eli. KUZMIN: It was hard. | 08:38 |
| Petach Tikvah at night | Music | 09:03 |
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| BROWN: Israelis often debate ethnicity, genealogy and the way a high Palestinian birth rate threaten Israel's Jewish identity. | 09:11 |
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| When Israel offered the Jews of the former Soviet Union a refuge, it also received a welcome boost to its numbers -- they swelled the notionally Jewish population by nearly twenty percent. AVITAL: We have to ask ourselves if people like that do come to Israel, because they benefit from the law of return, | 09:22 |
| Avital. Super: | nobody has forced them to come to a country, if they don't like us and they hate the Jews. I don't think they should be here, basically that's my personal opinion. | 09:41 |
| Kuzmin at home | BROWN: Ivan Kuzmin says his gang days are over. Israel’s made it illegal to hold meetings and espouse racist violence or neo Nazi ideology. And Ivan wants to move on by joining a popular unit in the Israeli army. KUZMIN: I want to join a combat brigade, golani, because I want to prove myself | 09:54 |
| Kuzmin | and the others that I’m not really the one they think I am, that I’m not nazi. | 10:14 |
| Kuzmin at home setting table. Focus on tattoo on arm | BROWN: And yet he's had himself branded as precisely that. Ivan Kuzmin has a tattoo that he doesn't like to display. Its gothic script spells out the German phrase, "got mit uns" – it’s the same slogan that members of the Nazi Wehrmacht had embossed on their belt buckles. | 10:25 |
| Kuzmin | IVAN: It says 'god with us' BROWN: And what does that mean? KUZMIN: I don't know, from when I was a child | 10:44 |
| Family in court | my grandma always teach me to believe in god. There is only one god, for everyone. | 10:52 |
| Sapir shows medals and photos | BROWN: Ivan Kuzmin's grandmother, Tanya Sapir, lived through the Second World War in Ukraine. | 11:00 |
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| SAPIR: This medal is for the defence of Stalingrad during the whole defence operation. This is for the victory over Germany. | 11:10 |
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| BROWN: Tanya Sapir was the first of the family to move to Israel and she’s horrified at the thought that Nazi ideology found a place in her own home. | 11:21 |
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| SAPIR: It is impossible to imagine anything more absurd. This is the biggest absurdity, biggest nonsense I’ve heard in my life… that my grandson is… It's just absurd. What else can I say? | 11:30 |
| Brown questions defendant | BROWN: With plea bargains on the table, the evidence against the neo-Nazis hasn't been properly explored. | 11:55 |
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| DEFENDANT: I don’t want to answer your questions. | 12:00 |
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| BROWN: There's a sense that, while the trial sparked a brief media blitz, the nation hasn't seriously examined the issues it raised. | 12:05 |
| Avital | AVITAL: Have we done enough to make them feel at home? Have we done enough to integrate them in our society? Has our educational system dealt with it properly? So I don't think that the answer is very simple. | 12:15 |
| Kuzmin | KUZMIN: I think that once everyone in this country understands that there is no place for some kinds of ethnical hatred and dislike and whatever, there won't be such things like that any more I am sure. | 12:29 |
| Kuzmin walks with parents | They think everything's ok. But it's not. It just became a part of our life. | 12:47 |
| Inside Yad Vashem | Music | 12:57 |
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| BROWN: When Israel was founded 60 years ago, those who'd survived the Holocaust would have hoped it would be impossible for young Israelis to behave like Nazis thugs. | 13:11 |
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| But it seems even Israel can't escape the scourge of chauvinism and racism. | 13:25 |
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| Music | 13:31 |
| Credits: | Reporter : Matt Brown Camera : Brant Cumming Editor : Garth Thomas | 13:36 |