Israeli right rallies behind the settler who killed a Palestinian family

Amiram Ben-Uliel at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, in March 2023

The Haaretz lead editorial on 21 September 2023:

In July 2015, Amiram Ben-Uliel set out to murder Arabs, any Arabs, as an act of vengeance. Ben Uliel burned to death three members of the Dawabshe family: 18-month-old Ali and his parents, Sa’ad and Riham. Ben-Uliel hurled a Molotov cocktail at their home in the West Bank village of Duma and set it alight. Ali’s brother Ahmed, who was four years old at the time, suffered severe burns.

The District Court convicted Ben-Uliel on three counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, two counts of arson and one count of conspiracy to commit a racially motivated crime, and sentenced him to three life sentences plus 20 years. Ben-Uliel appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal, and stated, “There is no doubt that he committed the deed.”

But while most people look at Ben-Uliel and see a despicable murderer, MK Limor Son Har-Melech of Otzma Yehudit sees a “holy tzaddik.” Son Har-Melech declared the other day that Ben-Uliel’s conviction for three murders and his incarceration were “in vain” and insisted that she “knows that he is innocent.” She made these remarks at the launch of a crowdfunding campaign for Ben-Uliel by a group called “Justice for Amiram” (Mateh Tzedek Le’Amiram).

Son Har-Melech also initiated a petition to ease the conditions of Ben-Uliel’s incarceration, a request that was signed by 14 coalition MKs and sent last week to Prison Service chief Ronen Bar. Now that the cat is out of the bag, and the attempt to ease his prison conditions can be seen as one stage in a plan to prove the “holy tzaddik’s” innocence and win his release, the public would do well to memorize the names of the elected officials who affixed their signatures to this request, for a better understanding of just what type of human material this coalition is made of: Amit Halevi, Nissim Vaturi, Eti Atiya, Tally Gotliv, Keti Shitrit, Ariel Kallner, Eliyahu Revivo and Avihai Boaron from Likud; Zvika Fogel, Yitzhak Kroizer and Son Har-Melech from Otzma Yehudit; Yitzhak Pindrus from United Torah Judaism, Michal Waldiger from Religious Zionism, and Yossi Taieb from Shas. This is pure Kahanism courtesy of the “fully right-wing” coalition.

Minister Moshe Arbel from Shas once again showed himself to be a voice of reason. “I am deeply pained by these things,” he said. “In a Jewish state, from the time he is very young, every child is taught the Ten Commandments, including the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ which absolutely forbids the taking of another person’s life.”

Unfortunately, it appears that a growing segment of the Israeli public needs to be taught this commandment all over again. As of yesterday, a million shekels had been donated to the crowdfunding account for Amiram Ben-Uliel. Thousands of people were ready to give money to get a baby’s murderer out of jail.

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