My son had no freedom or dignity
Palestinians in Sa’ir at a rally last week after the funeral for one of 12 young people killed by Israeli forces in suspected attacks on Israelis. Photo by Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Anger in a Palestinian Town Feeds a Cycle of Violence
By Steven Erlanger, NY Times
January 19, 2016
SA’IR, West Bank — Raed Jaradat was 22, an accounting student from a well-to-do family here, already working part time with his father in his stone quarry and construction business. After Dania Ersheid, 17, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers who said she had pulled a knife at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, a version disputed by Palestinians, Mr. Jaradat wrote an angry post on Facebook: “Imagine if this were your sister!”
Then Mr. Jaradat said he was going to university in Hebron, gave his mother his gold bracelet and his married sister his necklace, and went to a nearby Israeli military checkpoint of Beit Anoun, where he stabbed and seriously wounded a soldier before being shot to death himself.
Hours later, his cousin Iyad Jaradat, 19, was killed at an angry demonstration at Beit Anoun, hit in the head by a rubber-coated steel bullet.
The cousins are among 12 young Palestinians killed over three months who were from this town of about 24,000 people, a few miles from the city of Hebron, a flash point. Sa’ir, with a long history of resistance to Israel, has become heralded in Palestinian lore as the hotbed of this latest wave of stabbings and attempted stabbings by young people.
Sa’ir [above], a West Bank town, is heralded by Palestinians as the hotbed of the latest wave of stabbings. Photo by Bryan Denton for The New York Times
The Jaradats’ deaths in October are part of the cyclical violence increasingly being called a third intifada, one bubbling like lava with little organization or strategy from a weak Palestinian leadership and spilling around Israeli political and security officials’ attempts to curtail it.
On Sunday alone, for example, Dafna Meir, an Israeli mother of six, was stabbed to death in her home in a settlement just south of Hebron (a 15-year-old Palestinian boy was later arrested), and Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian who attempted a stabbing near Nablus and arrested a Palestinian woman they said had approached a checkpoint with a knife.
As Raed Jaradat’s heartbroken father, Sakit, spoke last week in his large home — which has already been measured for retaliatory demolition by Israeli troops as part of a revival of a deterrence policy largely abandoned in 2005 — a funeral was underway for Moyyad Jabarin, 19. in Sa’ir’s little Cemetery of the Martyr. Mr. Jabarin, a plumber, had been killed at the Beit Anoun checkpoint after trying to stab a soldier.
“We live well; my son needed nothing,” said Sakit Jaradat, 53. “But the only thing missing in the lives of these youths is freedom. They have lost hope and dignity, they are humiliated at the checkpoints, and now we are afraid. I tell my family to go through checkpoints in groups, never alone. You can say that safety and security have vanished from the lives of these young people.”
Since Oct. 1, some 25 Israelis — along with an American Jewish student and a Palestinian bystander — have been killed in near-daily attacks by knife, vehicle and gunfire, along with 155 Palestinians, most of whom Israel describes as assailants. Some Israelis, like the defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, say this wave will peter out when it produces no clear results. Others, like Isaac Herzog, the leader of the opposition in Parliament, believe it is the beginning of a third intifada.
Palestinian political leaders fear a harsher crackdown by Israel and more useless sacrifice, but they embrace the young dead as martyrs to the cause of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, accuse Israel of an excessive “shoot to kill” policy, which the military strongly denies, and are under increasing pressure to act.
Sunday’s killing of the Israeli mother, in the settlement of Otniel, and a stabbing the next day of Michal Froman, a pregnant Israeli in the settlement of Tekoa, near Bethlehem, may represent another new phase in this round of violence, with attacks inside the settlements themselves. But the suspect in the Tekoa attack, a Palestinian 15-year-old who was shot and wounded, told the police that a relative who tried to stab Israelis had been killed two months earlier near Hebron, an echo of the now-familiar circular story involving the Jaradats of Sa’ir.
Daoud al-Zaatari, Hebron’s mayor, sees the violence as a “boiling up of anger from a young generation who were born after Oslo,” the agreements of the mid-1990s that set up the interim Palestinian Authority and were supposed to lead to an independent Palestinian state.
“But now they and we find ourselves lost,” he said. “Travel is restricted, there are few jobs, and doors are closed.”
Sakit Jaradat, right, the father of Raed Jaradat, pictured in the poster behind him. Raed was shot to death after he stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli soldier. Photo by Bryan Denton for The New York Times
These young people, he said, “are not political, but angry at the political system that delivers them nothing.” The violence has sprung with “no plan or strategy by the Palestinian Authority or Fatah,” he said, referring to the party of the Palestinian Authority’s leader. “That’s what makes things confusing, both for us and the Israelis.”
Israeli military officials, speaking anonymously after interviewing assailants and their families, see a long-term phenomenon that began with anger about the fate of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City but has morphed into a relatively intimate cycle of outrage and revenge.
Checkpoint for leaving / entering Sa’ir.
In Sa’ir, for example, most of the dead have come from two other extended families: the Shelaldehs and the Qawazbehs. On Jan. 7 alone, three Qawazbeh cousins were killed after they tried to stab soldiers who approached them near the Gush Etzion Junction. The 16-year-old brother of one of them was killed later that day at Beit Anoun after he tried to avenge their deaths by stabbing soldiers, and then Muhammad Qawazbeh met the same fate trying the same thing at the same checkpoint five days later.
Sakit Jaradat said Raed was polite and respectful, “and I swear, if I knew my son would carry out an attack, I would have bound his hands with metal.”
He began to cry softly, and his youngest son, Muhammad, 9, brought in a box of tissues. “They say when someone dies, you start forgetting,” Mr. Jaradat said. “But with me, day by day I miss him more.”
He spoke then of his Israeli friends and customers from an earlier, happier time and said some of them had telephoned him with their condolences. “But now all I see, and all these youth see, are Israeli soldiers and settlers,” he said.
At his son’s funeral, Mr. Jaradat met the father of the woman whose death Raed Jaradat had sought to avenge, and “to ease everyone’s tension and misery,” he said, he suggested a posthumous marriage. Some in the conservative village consider the ceremony they conducted un-Islamic, but Palestinians broadly have celebrated it as a macabre romance of national sacrifice.
Shawan Jabarin, the director of the Palestinian human rights group Al Haq and a relative of the plumber buried Friday, said Sa’ir was well known from the 1970s for fighting Israeli efforts to establish civilian administrative councils and is now hemmed in by checkpoints designed to protect the Israeli settlements around Hebron. The day of the plumber’s funeral, for example, the town was reachable only by a circuitous route, and soldiers had raided the place the night before, looking for potential attackers.
“The politicians of both sides promised this Oslo generation, these youth of 16 to 22 or 23, many things — dignity, freedom, development — and everything failed,” Mr. Jabarin said. “Because the political parties failed, the Palestinian leadership failed, they take things into their own hands against the occupation.
“It’s like a snowball,” he added. “It starts with Raed Jaradat when he reacted to Dania on Facebook. And then there was more reaction, and when the Israelis kill anyone, and you see the funerals and the anger of the people, but the young don’t take everything into account, they react.
“And now it’s horrid, because the killing becomes routine, and no one family, no one father or mother can give you a guarantee that their children will not do something.”
Rami Nazzal contributed reporting.