Orthodox Israeli wedding party celebrates murder of Dawabsheh family
Still from the Orthodox Israeli wedding party which celebrated with guns and delight in killing Palestinians.
Israeli wedding party celebrates Dawabsheh killings
Video of Israeli wedding-goers dancing with guns as one stabs a photo of a killed Palestinian toddler sparks outrage.
By Patrick Strickland, Electronic Intifada
December 24, 2015
A video of Israeli Orthodox Jewish wedding-goers celebrating the killing of a Palestinian toddler has prompted strong condemnation.
Aired on Wednesday night by Israel’s Channel 10, the footage was filmed three weeks ago and depicts Israeli youth dancing with guns and knives during a wedding party in Jerusalem.
A masked youth is seen raising a firebomb, while another young man repeatedly stabs a photo of Ali Dawabsheh, an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler who was killed in an arson attack carried out by Israeli settlers in July.
Duma village bids farewell to arson attack victim
That arson attack took place when settlers torched the Dawabsheh family home in the occupied West Bank village of Duma and killed Ali and his parents, Saad and Reham. The couple’s four-year-old son, who was severely burned, is the only survivor of the attack.
Although Israeli police have arrested a number of settlers in connection with the killings, no one has been charged yet.
At certain points in the film, military-grade rifles and pistols are passed from person-to-person, including to children. Channel 10’s report says the weapons were issued to the settlers by the Israeli army.
“Let me with one blow get revenge on Palestine for my two eyes,” they sing, slightly changing a Biblical verse, reports the Times of Israel news site.
The report also notes that the bride and groom of the wedding are well-known as hardline right-wing activists and were close with suspects in the fatal Dawabsheh arson case, as reported by the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Israeli politicians were quick to condemn the wedding attendees, while many Palestinian and Israeli rights groups argue that Israeli leaders’ incitement and policies are responsible for such groups.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose ultra-nationalist Likud party supports the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, said the “shocking pictures” show “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security”.
Isaac Herzog, leader of the Zionist Union electoral coalition, accused the wedding attendees of having “forgotten what it is to be Jews”.
“Whoever dances at a wedding and celebrates the murder of a sleeping baby is not Jewish and not Israeli. He should be put behind bars as quickly as possible,” Herzog wrote on Twitter.
‘Structural violence’
Israeli Agricultural Minister Uri Ariel, an outspoken supporter of the settler movement and a member of the expansionist Jewish Home party, denounced the wedding-goers on Facebook.
“The clip published by Channel 10 news this evening is shocking and one cannot allow the activity of radical groups fueled by hate,” he wrote on Wednesday night, arguing that the people in the video do not represent “the settler movement”.
Steven Beck, international relations director at the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, said that rising tensions in recent months have been accompanied by “shocking rhetoric”.
“The words of political leaders and settler leaders, as well as the silence of others who should be speaking out against this sort of incitement, actually play a role in the current tensions,” he told Al Jazeera.
More than 547,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements that weave throughout the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
Ramy Abdu, director of the Gaza chapter of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, pointed out that the Israeli government subsidises settlements and provides settlers with military protection.
“The settlers are merely part of a system that promotes structural violence against Palestinians,” Abdu told Al Jazeera. “The Israeli government is only outraged because settlers are showing off and celebrating their happiness about the crimes they do with the [government’s] direct or indirect encouragement.”
A report published by the rights group Yesh Din in October paints a picture of impunity amid growing settler violence.
At least 91.6 percent of investigation files were closed without an indictment being served, while the number of violent attacks carried out by settlers doubled between August 2014 and August 2015.
“Israeli leaders condemn [settlers’] crimes as part of a propaganda push, but in reality settlers are given a free hand to commit any crimes they want against Palestinians,” Abdu said.
On Thursday morning, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed a law to further entrench governmental support for Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank.
Yousef Jabareen, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a lawmaker in the Knesset, dismissed Israeli leaders’ condemnation of the wedding video as “lip service”.
These extremist activities are the natural fruit of occupation’s poisoned tree
Yousef Jabareen, Palestinian legislator in Israeli Knesset
“Meanwhile, they continue to support settler groups and provide them with financial and logistical backing” he told Al Jazeera.
“These extremist activities are the natural fruit of occupation’s poisoned tree,” Jabareen said. “Israeli leaders cannot continue to control the lives of millions of Palestinians and deprive them of basic rights and speak of moral behaviour.”
Nadim Nashif, director of Baladna, a Haifa-based Palestinian rights group, said the wedding video depicts “a different arm” of Israel’s occupation. “Sometimes the Israeli leaders openly support the support, then sometimes they try to hide their support when it looks too bad,” he told Al Jazeera.
On Saturday, dozens of right-wing Israelis marched through the streets of Jerusalem to protest the detention of suspects in relation to the Dawabsheh killings, according to local media.
“We aren’t really surprised by this [wedding] video,” he said. “We have seen this [behaviour] before. Clearly, there are ideological people [in Israel] who are happy to kill and burn children.”
Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_
Who Taught the Jewish Radical Settler Youth to Celebrate Murder?
It’s now clear from the shocking video of hilltop youth celebrating the Dawabsheh infant’s murder that incitement to hatred is being taught in Israel’s religious Jewish education system.
Samuel Heilman, Haaretz
December 24, 2015
The news in Israel this morning is filled with shocked reactions to a video broadcast on a national TV channel of celebrations at a wedding attended by the so-called ‘hilltop youth’. We see yarmulke-clad young men dancing, their long earlocks flying, some with rifles in the air, and one with a knife with which he is skewering a photo of the infant from the Dawabsheh family who was burnt to death in an arson attack by suspected Jewish terrorists. A number of young people from this same group of ‘revellers’ are currently under arrest and undergoing interrogation for their part in the murder.
The claims made previously by right-wingers connected to the hilltop youth, to the effect that the Dawabshehs were killed by a fire caused by an electrical malfunction in their house, or that they were the victims of an intra-Arab feud rather than of Jewish terrorists, are undermined by this film.
The images suggest that, if nothing else, these dancers see the murder of the innocent Dawabsheh child as something to celebrate, and the use of the knife to hold the picture up as a way of symbolically suggesting that as an act of revenge for Palestinian knife attacks, it is a murder that can be justified. The sight of these dancers is eerily similar to scenes we have seen among Hamas youth celebrating the murder of Israelis. But all this raises more important questions for me, particularly as an Orthodox Jew.
I was raised to believe that a fidelity to Jewish observance and law would endow me with a kind of moral superiority over those who ignore the precepts of Jewish law and fail to observe Judaism with the same loyalty. I was taught that wearing a yarmulke was a practice that would remind me always of the higher authority, the One above me, who was always watching my behavior and whose Torah provided me with positive values, morals and behavior. The reason my parents sent me to get a Jewish education that taught me Torah, and instilled in me the values of Orthodoxy, and demanded I observe all the commandments, was to make me a better Jew, which meant unquestionably to make me a better human being.
But when I see these youngsters with the same or even a bigger yarmulke, whose appearance is meant to clearly identify them as sharing my Orthodoxy, perhaps even with a greater fervency, acting in ways that demonstrate that their moral values point them toward hatred and the celebration of the murder of innocents, it makes me wonder: what has the nature of their religious education been? What do they understand being an observant Orthodox Jew means? Were my parents and teachers wrong? Or has something gone terribly wrong with religious education?
Much has been said and written – justifiably – about the ‘education’ of Palestinian children in the hatred of Jews, including and especially among those who are part of the Islamist community that claims to be its most religious sector.
But seeing these Jewish zealots of the hilltop youth and their supporters makes me think that education for incitement and hatred is going on no less in their schools and communities. The same calls that have been heard demanding the Palestinians change and reform their children’s education if they truly want peace must now be issued in the Jewish community.
It is not sufficient for politicians and public figures to denounce the behaviour at the wedding in the media. This is a time to examine our religious schools, the curriculum, teachers, and education that has allowed people to continue to see themselves as loyal to religion while spewing hatred and encouraging murder. It is time for the religious leaders, the rabbis, the Orthodox educators, the guardians of Torah, to take the lead in both condemning this behavior and reforming Jewish education so that no one who has gone through it can claim to be a good Jew and have murder in his heart.
Samuel Heilman holds the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Centre and is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York.