Kadima leader and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday condemned a pipe bomb attack on the home of Israel Prize laureate and Haaretz columnist Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, saying that the incident was “intolerable, and cannot be glossed over.”

Sternhell was lightly wounded in the attack and was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaarei Tzedek hospital for treatment. Police suspect the attack was perpetrated by Jewish extremists opposed to peacemaking with the Palestinians, which Sternhell vocally advocates.

At a ceremony marking the Rosh Hashanah holiday at the Foreign Ministry, Livni went on to say that “the state of Israel is a lawful state, and moreover, it is populated by a society with values. It is the responsibility of the government and the Israeli society to renounce such phenomena as soon as the rear their heads.”

Earlier Thursday, Jerusalem police said they found fliers offering more than NIS 1 million to anyone who kills members of left-wing human rights organization Peace Now at Sternhell’s home following the blast.

Investigators said a number of such pamphlets were found outside the home and in adjacent streets.

The small pipe bomb exploded on Thursday at around 1:00 A.M. at the entrance to Sternhell’s home. In the wake of the attack and the discovery of the fliers, police have beefed up security around the home of Peace Now secretary-general Yariv Oppenheimer.

Police sources told Israel Radio on Thursday that signs increasingly point to extreme right-wing elements who may have been responsible for planting the explosive that wounded Sternhell.

Senior political figures expressed outrage at the news of the attack on Sternhell, which has touched a nerve given the country’s sensitive history of politically-oriented violence. In November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv by a right-wing extremist opposed to his peace policies.

“We are returning to the dark spectacle of pipe bombs that are aimed at people, in this case against a very gifted person who never shies away from expressing his opinion,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said.

“We won’t let any elements, from any dark corner of Israeli society, to harass people who let their clear, lucid, unique voices like that of Ze’ev Sternhell be heard,” Barak said.

“The attack on Professor Sternhell is a cowardly, terrorist act of those with no sense of justice,” the chairman of the Knesset’s internal affairs committee, Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz, said.

“I call on the police and the Shin Bet security service to make every effort to locate the perpetrators quickly and to make sure that they be put under lock and key for many years.”

“They better not talk to us about a few bad weeds,” Meretz chairman Haim Oron said. “These phenomena spring up on the right-wing [of the political spectrum].”

“This thuggish and dangerous act is the result of the continuing see-no-evil approach toward the vicious violence against soldiers and police officers and anyone else who doesn’t agree with the brutish section of the extreme right wing,” Oron said.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, an activist with a fringe settler group calling itself the National Jewish Front, said Sternhell was an irrelevant figure and that he did not believe settlers were behind the attack. “I don’t denounce this incident, but say categorically that we are not involved,” Ben-Gvir said.

Settlers regularly clash with Palestinians and Israeli peace activists in the West Bank, but the use of weapons against political opponents in Israel is uncommon. There have, however, been precedents. A pro-settlement extremist shot and killed Rabin in 1995 as he spearheaded efforts to strike a peace deal with the Palestinians. Another extremist killed a member of Peace Now with a grenade at a 1983 peace protest.

Sternhell frequently writes for Haaretz and was awarded the Israel Prize in political science in February 2008.

Recently, Sternhell has received threatening phone calls. Police assess that the background for the attempt to harm Professor Sternhell is politically motivated. They suspect that right-wing activists carried out the attack in response to his remarks decrying Israeli settlers.

Five months ago, the High Court of Justice deferred a petition by the Legal Forum for the State of Israel against the decision to award the Israel Prize in political science to Sternhell.

The petition condemned Education Minister Yuli Tamir and the judicial committee who awarded Sternhell the prize. Sternhell, the petition claimed, was not deserving of the prize because of his remarks in the media, specifically an article he wrote in Haaretz which justified an attack by Palestinians on settlers.