After years of treating Palestinians as rubbish how come THIS arson is wicked?


August 5, 2015
Sarah Benton

There are two articles, the first by David Grossman, the second by Amos Harel. The Inset between these two quotes from the Minister of Justice’s inflammatory diatribe against Palestinians.


When the largest item in Palestinians’ GDP appears to be rubble how are the people forced to live among it to be treated with respect, as sharing a common humanity? Photo of Uma Omar and daughter in front of their smashed up home, 2012. Photo from Jean Riesman, ICAHD, posted by Donna Gold.

Will the Israeli Right Finally Come to Its Senses?

The terrifying burning of the baby in Duma is a symptom of a much deeper illness: It signals to us Israelis how very serious our situation is, and indicates – in letters writ in fire – that the path to a better future is closing before us.

David Grossman, Haaretz
August 04, 2015

I cannot get this baby, Ali Dawabsheh, out of my mind. Nor can I stop thinking of that image: the hand of a human being opening a window in the middle of the night, and throwing a Molotov cocktail into a room where parents and their children are sleeping.

These thoughts and images tear my heart in two. Who is the person or persons capable of doing this? They, or their friends, continue to walk among us this morning. Will the act that they committed leave any mark on them? What did they have to expunge within themselves to be capable of wiping out an entire family in this way?

Benjamin Netanyahu, and several ministers from the right wing, rushed to harshly condemn the murder. Netanyahu also paid a visit to the hospital where the rest of the family is still hospitalized, and expressed his shock at the act. His response was human and genuine, and it was also the right thing to do.

What is difficult to understand is how the prime minister and his cabinet ministers are able to distinguish between a fire that they have been stoking for decades and this most recent conflagration. It is hard to conceive how they are capable of not seeing the connection between the occupation regime that has been continuing for 48 years, and the dark, fanatic reality that has been forged at the frontiers of the Israeli consciousness – a reality whose agents and disseminators grow more numerous each day, a reality that is now growing closer and closer to the mainstream, and is becoming increasingly more acceptable and legitimate in the Israeli street, in the Knesset and at the cabinet table.

In a reality-denying obstinacy, the prime minister and his supporters refuse to comprehend in a profound way the worldview that has been forming in the consciousness of an occupying people, after nearly 50 years of occupation: The idea according to which there are two kinds of people, and the fact that one is apparently subordinate to another mean that it is naturally also inferior to the other. That, how shall we put it, the occupied is less of a human being than the occupier, all of which helps to explain – for people of a certain constitution – the unbearable ease with which the other’s life can be taken, even if he is a year-and-a-half old.

In this sense, both acts of violence that took place a few days ago – the murder and stabbings at the Pride event in Jerusalem and the murder of the baby – are interrelated, and derive from a similar worldview. In both, hatred itself – bared and primal – constitutes among certain people a legitimate, ample reason to commit murder, to annihilate the hated human being.

The person who burned down the Dawabsheh family home knew nothing about the family, about their desires or aspirations. Only that they were Palestinians. And this was adequate reason in his eyes – and in the eyes of those who sent him and their supporters – to kill them. In his opinion, their mere existence justified their murder and their removal from this world.

For over a century now Israelis and Palestinians have been going around and around in circles of murder and vengeance. In the course of their struggle against us, the Palestinians have murdered hundreds of Israeli babies and children, wiped out entire families, and committed crimes against humanity. In its struggle against the Palestinians, the State of Israel has committed these same sorts of acts, with the help of aircraft and tanks and sniper’s rifles. We certainly remember what took place one year ago during Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip.

However, the process that has been underway in recent years within Israel, its malevolent intensity and its malignant branches, are dangerous and destructive in a new and deceptive manner. There is a sense that even now, Israel’s leadership doesn’t yet understand – or perhaps refuses to admit to itself a fact that it finds intolerable – that the Jewish terror faction within Israel has declared war on the state. Either our leaders are not capable, or they fear, or they are wholly ambivalent to the necessity of translating this declaration into explicit words.

With each passing day, dark, fanatically savage forces are being released, inflaming themselves in a fire of religious and nationalist faith. They flout the limits of reality and the limits of morality and the rules of simple logic. Their spirit is associated with an extremist and at times thoroughly lunatic nature of the human psyche. The more dangerous and fragile the general situation becomes, the more they flourish.

No compromise is possible with these people. The government of Israel must fight them just as it fights Palestinian terror. They are no less dangerous to the wellbeing of the country. They are no less determined. They are “total” people, “all or nothing” people, and total people, as we know, are liable to make total mistakes, as well – for example, launching an attack on the Temple Mount mosques, an attack whose outcome is liable to bring tragedy to Israel and the entire Middle East.

Could the horror of burning a baby provoke leaders of the right to come to their senses and finally understand something that reality has been shouting in their ears for years now? That the prolongation of the occupation and the avoidance of a dialogue with the Palestinians are liable to expedite the end of the State of Israel as the land of the Jewish people? As a democratic state? As a place with which young people can identify and in which they would want to live and raise their children?

Does Netanyahu really and profoundly understand that, during these past years, in which he has invested all his energies in torpedoing the agreement with Iran, a no-less-dangerous reality than the Iranian threat has festered here? In the face of the domestic existential threat, he seems to be acting as if he has no idea of what to do.

It’s hard to see how this complex situation can be untangled and restored to a state of sanity. The reality forged by Netanyahu and his friends (as well as most of his predecessors in the Prime Minister’s Office), their vacillation in the face of settler activism, their deep identification with it – this reality has ultimately snared them in its vortex, paralyzing them and rendering them helpless.

For decades now, Israel has turned its dark side toward the Palestinians, but that darkness has infiltrated into its own internal organs. This process has been greatly accelerated since Netanyahu’s victory in the last election; all this time, there has been no force standing up to the right’s recklessness.

Terrifying acts like the burning of a baby are ultimately a symptom of a much more profound illness. They signal to us Israelis how very serious our situation is. They tell us, with letters writ in fire, that the path to a better future is closing before us.


Israeli Minister of Justice speaks:

Ayelet Shaked, on her Facebook page:

They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists. They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists. …

Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

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Mourners carry the remains of Ali Dawabsheh for burial.

Analysis: Israel’s Meekness in the Face of Jewish Extremism Carries a Heavy Price

The terrorists who murdered Palestinian infant Ali Saad Dawabsheh have exacerbated the situation in the territories to its most dangerous since the last Gaza war.

By Amos Harel, Haaretz
July 31, 2015

The Jewish terrorists who murdered Palestinian infant Ali Saad Dawabsheh before dawn on Friday morning have exacerbated the situation in the territories to its most dangerous point since the end of the Gaza war last summer.

In coming days, the Israeli and Palestinian security forces will make a supreme effort to keep the lid on and prevent a spillover into extensive violence – like we saw in the West Bank last year after the abduction and murder of three Israeli teens, and the immolation of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir in Shoafat.

Murderous terror attacks on Jews, alongside fatal shootings of Palestinians by the Israel Defence Forces during demonstrations or attempts to detain suspects, have occurred throughout the past year, in both the West Bank and, mainly, Jerusalem. But the accumulation of events this past week – the violent confrontations surrounding the demolition of the Dreinoff buildings in Beit El; the indictment of two men for arson at the historic Church of the Multiplication on the shores of Lake Kinneret; the tensions on the Temple Mount during the observance of Tisha B’Av; the killing of three Palestinians by IDF gunfire within a week; the “Day of Rage” declared by Hamas in protest at those shootings – constitute a possible recipe for a larger conflagration.

The army understands this. That’s why four battalions have been sent to the West Bank and two more brigades have been confined to base, on alert. Those who were scalded once – like in the aftermath of Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 – are more cautious even when the temperature in the cauldron is a bit lower. The army maintains that the Palestinian Authority leadership is against terror and isn’t interested in violent conflict. But in the immediate term, at least, the intention is to take every precaution.

Even though it’s a small group on the ideological margins of the settlement movement that is responsible for the murder of an 18-month-old Palestinian boy and the attempted murder of his family – as it was for previous terrorist attacks on mosques, churches and Palestinian homes – it’s impossible to be impressed by the condemnations and professions of shock that came from Israel’s leadership and settler heads on Friday morning.

The forgiveness the state has shown over many long years toward the violence of the extreme right – which was also evident this week at Beit El (none of those attacking the police are now in detention) – is also what makes possible the murderous hate crimes like Friday’s in the village of Douma. There is a price for the gentle hand.

Political struggle, including when it is waged against implementation of a court order, is part of the legitimate discourse. However, when the elected (and appallingly weak) settlement leadership tacitly accepts this rampage, while government ministers and Knesset members vie to show contempt toward the High Court of Justice, it’s hard to perceive the infant’s murder as a bolt from the blue – even if the clear majority of settlers are opposed to the deeds of the handful of Jewish terrorists.

It appears the murderers who set fire to the homes in Douma will ultimately be apprehended. The police unit that investigates nationalist crimes was established very late in the day, but has learned its job quickly – as proven most recently by the apprehension of the alleged church arsonists – after a long series of previous failures. The Jewish unit in the Shin Bet security service is also now devoting more resources to dealing with Jewish terror than it had until a few years ago.

However, the war on the Jewish terrorists cannot be confined to security-services measures. This is a long chain, which should begin by shaking off those rabbis and politicians on the far right, and culminate in a strong hand at the courts, which tend to show disproportionate consideration to the personal circumstances of Jewish fanatics.

Due to the authorities’ softness, those who used to be dismissively called “price-tag offenders” have developed into a real terror organization. The arsonists at the Galilee church appear to be a separate branch of the group that focuses on attacks on Christian religious sites. Their indictment included a startling document that the police confiscated from one of the accused: a detailed “How to” guide for the rookie terrorist – from strict operational security instructions to recommendations for escalating levels of terrorism, including bodily harm. We shouldn’t let the spelling mistakes and substandard language in it lead us astray. There is a determined hard-core developing here, one that is unimpressed by ministerial condemnations or the efforts by the Shin Bet and police to track them down.

These people want to ignite a religious war, which is not much different from what the jihadists on the Palestinian side have in mind. If the authorities don’t take action against them in a coordinated and comprehensive manner, and if the security coordination with the Palestinians that the IDF praises so highly isn’t maintained, they’re liable to achieve their aim.

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