Tuesday, July 08, 2014 3:51:38 AM
Israel’s soft stance on incitement creates tragedy
Supporters of Beitar Jerusalem cheer for their team during a soccer match against Maccabi Umm
el-Fahm at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem, Jan. 29, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman)
Twenty-four hours after the charred body of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was discovered (July 3), President-elect Reuven Rivlin paid a condolence visit to the Shaer family, whose son Gil-Ad was abducted and murdered by terrorists. When asked by journalists about the voices calling for revenge against Arabs and the wave of incitement and racism on the social networks, Rivlin responded with an analogy from the sphere of soccer. He said that when racist cries emerge from the eastern gallery of the Teddy Stadium .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ar/originals/2013/01/time-to-stop-racism-on-the-israeli-soccer-fields.html , it's befitting that the fans from the western gallery should admonish them. “I always thought that the western gallery is no less guilty than the eastern one. Even if it is horrified inside, that’s not enough.”
Summary
Print Hate of Israeli Arabs has reached a peak with the murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir,
reflecting the tolerance of Israeli society toward words and deeds of extreme-right activists.
Author Shlomi Eldar Posted July 7, 2014
Translator(s)Sandy Bloom
It's doubtful whether Rivlin knew at that moment that the police were already on the heels of the suspects, who are believed to be members of an extremist Jewish organization in Jerusalem. The organization’s activists and inciters are part of that infamous eastern gallery.
Every Arab soccer player who played in Teddy (Jerusalem’s soccer stadium that occasionally hosts the games of Israel’s top teams) was the target of a string of curses and invectives from the fans in the “eastern gallery,” only because he was an Arab.
Cries of “Death to the Arabs” are a routine part of soccer matches in Teddy. Each time, after politicians mouth feeble objections, things revert back to normal until the next match with its series of curses and incitement. Nothing significant is ever done. Official Israel treats the hatred of Arabs expressed by growing numbers of groups in Jerusalem as an almost unavoidable phenomenon. It is regarded as an inappropriate but not really dangerous one.
Evidently there were those who were sure that the distance between words and acts is very great, and that there is no rush to adopt the means to fight the phenomenon. The motto of the racist activists and their various organizations is fanatical hatred of Arabs. But they have not been placed outside the law; on the contrary, their leaders have continued with their daily routine. Most of them were not investigated or indicted for incitement, and no one imposed administrative detention on them or severed them from their sources of influence.
One of the “sources of inspiration” for the far-right Jewish movements is Michael Ben Ari, a former Knesset member of the Ichud Leumi Party. Ben Ari now heads the Otzma LeYisrael movement that did not garner enough votes to pass the electoral threshold in the 2013 elections. Ben Ari and other movement activists are working energetically to disseminate their worldview, based on Kach movement ideology. Ben Ari was one of its activists.
In 1994, the Kach movement was declared a terrorist organization by Israel. It's included in the list of terror organizations of the United States, the European Union and other countries. But its holdovers — including Ben Ari, Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben Gvir and others — continue to recruit adherents for the same goal: the expulsion of all the Arabs from the territories of ''the land of Israel.''
In their eyes, all means are acceptable in order to recruit more and more supporters and fans. On July 1, Ben Ari .. https://www.facebook.com/israelpolice/posts/10152578915599595 .. posted the following status on his Facebook page: “Riots in Jerusalem: The situation has deteriorated in the recent hour after minority youths attacked Egged’s bus line No. 1 that transported a large number of passengers to the Western Wall. A nearby Border Police force intervened but was harshly attacked by scores of minority members.” Ben Ari attached to his report harsh photos of violence, and asked his thousands of Facebook followers .. https://www.facebook.com/mkbenari?fref=t .. to disseminate them.
The problem is that nothing of the kind had taken place. The fallacious report used 4-year-old photos from a demonstration in East Jerusalem after houses had been demolished in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. There was also a photo of a bleeding casualty of an Israeli bus that capsized in 2003.
These old photos and the fallacious report received more than 3,800 ''likes'' and more than 2,100 ''shares.'' This served to heat up the already charged atmosphere that held sway on the heels of the murder of the three boys: Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach. The responders acted ''in kind'' with a gamut of curses and recommendations on how to harm Arabs, including shooting, burning, slaughtering etc.
The falsehood was exposed the next day, and Ben Ari corrected his Facebook status and argued in his defense that “I received the information and photos from a news and current events center, with your permission I won't go into details; this center was also misled .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/misleading-kidnapping-almoz-hamas-vengeance-hatred.html . This morning it emerged that the photos are old, but there’s nothing new under the sun. In [the Arab neighborhood of] Beit Hanina, the heart of Jerusalem, are difficult scenes of rocks being thrown at policemen …”
Another example: On June 30, Ben Ari wrote, “Jews—Revenge!!” and attached a picture that was written (he claims) with the blood of those slaughtered in the Holocaust, “Juden Revenge.” In addition, Ben Ari invited his friends to a lesson on the topic, “the meaning of revenge.”
The next day, the day of the funerals of the abducted boys, Ben Ari arrived in Jerusalem and was carried on the shoulders of the demonstrators .. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152276478412615&set=a.135387837614.110087.61966557614&type=1 . There, too (and simultaneously on Facebook) he egged them on to revenge and they responded by calling for “Death to the Arabs.” Afterward, dozens of extremist right-wing activists emerged from the demonstrators to the streets of Jerusalem, to “hunt” Arabs and beat them up.
Ben Ari was not investigated by the police on suspicion of incitement, even though incitement against Arabs is his daily bread and his speeches and publications are open to the entire public. If police investigators would only open the Facebook pages of Ben Ari and the fans who follow him, fans who respond with their own aroused cries to every inflamed status of his, the police would not have to work hard to indict him for incitement.
The next day, Abu Khdeir .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/04/mohammed-abu-khdeir-funeral_n_5557780.html .. was brutally murdered by activists of the radical right. It was not an especially difficult mission to capture the six suspects, some of whom are minors. According to video footage distributed by a Palestinian site, two youngsters were recorded on security cameras placed in the neighborhood of Shuafat. They supposedly approached Abu Khdeir late at night, and started talking to him. According to his father, the security footage shows also the faces of the youngsters and the plate number of their car.
Palestinian Attorney General Muhammad Abd al-Ghani Uweili, who was present at the autopsy .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/05/mohammed-abu-khdeir-autopsy_n_5559699.html .. of the body of Abu Khdeir, told the Palestinian news agency Maan that the findings point to the fact that the boy was burned alive. Flammable material .. http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Autopsy-finds-murdered-Palestinian-teen-was-burned-alive-361571 .. was detected in his respiratory channels and 90% of his body was covered with severe burns.
It's impossible to describe the intensity of the incitement absorbed by these youthful murderers, some of whom are younger than 17, which led them to burn alive the Arab youth. How much poison was inserted into their brains until they stopped seeing the Arab as a human being? And how did all this fall under the radar of the Shin Bet and the police?
But this is not the end of the affair. Law enforcement agents must conduct now a thorough examination and reach the generators of incitement and activists of the radical Jewish organizations. And the sooner the better.
Attorney Itamar Ben Gvir, a radical right-wing activist and former parliamentary assistant to Ben Ari, became famous .. http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=5422 .. in his youth for gaining access to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car and holding its logo. “We got to Rabin's car, next we'll get to him,” Ben Gvir said at the time. Ben Gvir was summoned at an investigation and released without being indicted; nothing was done regarding the wild incitement. Two months later, Rabin was assassinated .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ar/culture/2012/11/the-death-of-israeliness.html .. (1995).
Right-wing activists of that era, and additional incited supporters who joined them, are working untiringly now to fulfill the Kach movement’s ideology. As aforesaid, this movement has been illegal for 20 years.
The inciters and activists operate freely and openly. It would not be difficult to arrest them and declare the current organizations to be illegal. It is our obligation to do this, to avert the next hate murder.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/incitement-khdeir-ben-ari-gvir-kach-rabin.html
===
6 Israelis Held Over the Killing of Palestinian
By ISABEL KERSHNERJULY 6, 2014
Play Video|0:45 - Netanyahu on Death of Palestinian Youth
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke out on the killing of the youth and said of the crime, “We do not differentiate
between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them.” By Reuters on Publish Date July 6, 2014. Image CreditPool photo by Gali Tibbon
JERUSALEM — Confronting the possibility of rising retaliatory violence between Jews and Palestinians, the Israeli authorities arrested six Israelis on Sunday in the killing of a Palestinian teenager, found beaten and burned in a Jerusalem forest last week.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned what he called a horrific crime and pledged that anyone found guilty would “face the full weight of the law.” Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, said in a statement that he was “ashamed and shocked by the cruel murder,” describing those behind it as “Jewish terrorists.”
An Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said there was a “strong possibility” that the motive for the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, was “nationalistic,” indicating that it was a revenge attack by right-wing Jewish extremists for the recent kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Muhammad’s body was discovered on Wednesday .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/world/middleeast/israel.html , about an hour after he was forced into a car in East Jerusalem, a few yards from his home.
Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, arrested in the unrest, is a cousin of the victim and was shown on a video being beaten by Israeli officers. Credit Oded Balilty/Associated Press
A judicial order prevented officials from revealing details about the suspects, but a person familiar with the case said several of them were minors.
The arrests came after weeks of calls in Israel for harsher military action in the Palestinian territories after the abduction of the Israelis: Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16. After their bodies were found last week, Mr. Netanyahu called their killers “beasts.”
The crackdown in the West Bank shook the Palestinian Authority and its reconciliation pact with Hamas in Gaza, weakening the more moderate West Bank leadership in the eyes of its public as it seeks international support for statehood.
In the wave of outrage after Muhammad’s killing, Palestinian youths have clashed with Israeli security forces in East Jerusalem and the Galilee in scenes reminiscent of the Palestinian uprisings in 1987 and 2000. The killings on each side — and the subsequent arrest of the Palestinian’s American cousin, whose beating by the Israeli police was caught on video — have raised the specter of the broader conflict’s descending into a cycle of personal vendettas and bloodletting.
“It gives legitimacy to our enemies to do what they want to us,” said Shaul Marziano, 65, a retired Israeli factory worker. “They should be treated just like Arab terrorists,” he said of the Israelis suspected of killing Muhammad.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the killing of the Palestinian youth a horrific crime. Credit Pool photo by Gali Tibbon
Now, Israelis are left to face the prospect that the entrenched conflict with the Palestinians is intensifying radicalization within both populations.
On Sunday some Israelis compared the moment to that of watershed events like the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli fanatic, or the massacre by Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli doctor, of 29 Palestinian Muslims at prayer in 1994 in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Prof. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, accusing the government and the security services of not having dealt seriously enough in recent years with an extreme, nationalist fringe that has desecrated mosques and destroyed Palestinian property. Now, with the killing of Muhammad, Professor Avineri said, “a line has been crossed.”
Continue reading the main story
“This is absolute evil,” he added.
In addition to the rioting, tensions spiked along the border with Gaza in the south, with Palestinian militants firing at least 25 rockets into Israel on Sunday and Israel carrying out airstrikes.
Israeli riot police on Sunday in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Credit Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hamas, the Islamic group that dominates Gaza, said Monday that seven of its militants had been killed in airstrikes on Sunday and early Monday, probably the heaviest death toll suffered by the group since a cease-fire came into effect in late 2012. In addition, two militants thought to belong to a more radical Islamic group were killed in an airstrike. Israel said they had been involved in firing rockets.
For Mr. Netanyahu, Sunday’s arrests were clearly a pivotal moment. He has been lobbied by right-wingers in his government to take tougher action against the Palestinians since the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers were found last week, and in the wake of the increasing rocket fire from Gaza.
But Mr. Netanyahu is already out of step in some ways with world opinion, being held partly responsible by the Obama administration for scuttling American-brokered Middle East peace talks with repeated announcements of new settlement construction.
After paying a condolence call on Sunday to the family of one of the Israeli teenagers, Mr. Netanyahu stood before television cameras and sent his condolences to the Abu Khdeir family. “We do not differentiate between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them,” he said.
Yet after weeks of taking the Palestinian leadership to task for having entered into the pact with Hamas, which Israel accuses of killing the three Israelis, Mr. Netanyahu also appeared unbowed.
A Palestinian youth walked through the rubble of his destroyed home after an Israeli airstrike
in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. Credit Mohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency
“The murderers came from the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority; they returned to territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority,” he said. “Therefore, the Palestinian Authority is obliged to do everything in its power to find them, just as we did, just as our security forces located the suspects in the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir within a matter of days.”
Mr. Rosenfeld said the police and security services were trying to determine whether the suspects had also tried to kidnap a Palestinian child, Mousa Zaloum, 8, from the same area of East Jerusalem a day before Muhammad was abducted. Mousa was later photographed .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/world/middleeast/autopsy-suggests-palestinian-boy-was-burned-alive-reports-say.html .. with red marks on his neck, and in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News the boy said the would-be kidnappers had choked him with a rope. Mousa’s mother struggled with the kidnappers, who she said were speaking Hebrew, and her son escaped.
Muhammad’s relatives, who were convinced from the outset that the killers were Israelis, felt no immediate comfort or satisfaction over the arrests.
“I feel pain,” his father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, said, as he sat in a tent surrounded by mourners outside the family home in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem. “There is no justice in Israel.”
The Palestinian leadership demanded an international commission of inquiry into the killing.
During the clashes in Shuafat, Muhammad’s cousin Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, a high school sophomore visiting from Tampa, Fla., was caught on an amateur video .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/world/middleeast/beating-of-palestinian-american-boy-caught-on-video.html .. being severely beaten by Israeli border police officers. The footage was spread worldwide on Saturday, fanning local and international outrage.
On Sunday, Tariq, who is suspected of involvement in violence against police officers, appeared in court, his face and lips swollen from the blows. He was released on bail but will be under house arrest at his uncle’s home, not far from where Muhammad lived. A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, called for “a speedy, transparent and credible investigation and full accountability for the apparent excessive use of force.”
Tariq said he lost consciousness during the beating and was taken to a hospital. He said he had only been watching the clashes. Seeing the video of himself being beaten and kicked for the first time on Sunday afternoon, he said he was shocked. “I don’t believe what happened to me,” he said.
He added that he had been with Muhammad five minutes before he was kidnapped.
Said Ghazali contributed reporting from Jerusalem; Nayef Hashlamoun from Hebron, West Bank; and Fares Akram from Gaza.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/07/world/middleeast/israel-palestinians-muhammad-abu-khdeir.html
Supporters of Beitar Jerusalem cheer for their team during a soccer match against Maccabi Umm
el-Fahm at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem, Jan. 29, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman)
Twenty-four hours after the charred body of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was discovered (July 3), President-elect Reuven Rivlin paid a condolence visit to the Shaer family, whose son Gil-Ad was abducted and murdered by terrorists. When asked by journalists about the voices calling for revenge against Arabs and the wave of incitement and racism on the social networks, Rivlin responded with an analogy from the sphere of soccer. He said that when racist cries emerge from the eastern gallery of the Teddy Stadium .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ar/originals/2013/01/time-to-stop-racism-on-the-israeli-soccer-fields.html , it's befitting that the fans from the western gallery should admonish them. “I always thought that the western gallery is no less guilty than the eastern one. Even if it is horrified inside, that’s not enough.”
Summary
Print Hate of Israeli Arabs has reached a peak with the murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir,
reflecting the tolerance of Israeli society toward words and deeds of extreme-right activists.
Author Shlomi Eldar Posted July 7, 2014
Translator(s)Sandy Bloom
It's doubtful whether Rivlin knew at that moment that the police were already on the heels of the suspects, who are believed to be members of an extremist Jewish organization in Jerusalem. The organization’s activists and inciters are part of that infamous eastern gallery.
Every Arab soccer player who played in Teddy (Jerusalem’s soccer stadium that occasionally hosts the games of Israel’s top teams) was the target of a string of curses and invectives from the fans in the “eastern gallery,” only because he was an Arab.
Cries of “Death to the Arabs” are a routine part of soccer matches in Teddy. Each time, after politicians mouth feeble objections, things revert back to normal until the next match with its series of curses and incitement. Nothing significant is ever done. Official Israel treats the hatred of Arabs expressed by growing numbers of groups in Jerusalem as an almost unavoidable phenomenon. It is regarded as an inappropriate but not really dangerous one.
Evidently there were those who were sure that the distance between words and acts is very great, and that there is no rush to adopt the means to fight the phenomenon. The motto of the racist activists and their various organizations is fanatical hatred of Arabs. But they have not been placed outside the law; on the contrary, their leaders have continued with their daily routine. Most of them were not investigated or indicted for incitement, and no one imposed administrative detention on them or severed them from their sources of influence.
One of the “sources of inspiration” for the far-right Jewish movements is Michael Ben Ari, a former Knesset member of the Ichud Leumi Party. Ben Ari now heads the Otzma LeYisrael movement that did not garner enough votes to pass the electoral threshold in the 2013 elections. Ben Ari and other movement activists are working energetically to disseminate their worldview, based on Kach movement ideology. Ben Ari was one of its activists.
In 1994, the Kach movement was declared a terrorist organization by Israel. It's included in the list of terror organizations of the United States, the European Union and other countries. But its holdovers — including Ben Ari, Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben Gvir and others — continue to recruit adherents for the same goal: the expulsion of all the Arabs from the territories of ''the land of Israel.''
In their eyes, all means are acceptable in order to recruit more and more supporters and fans. On July 1, Ben Ari .. https://www.facebook.com/israelpolice/posts/10152578915599595 .. posted the following status on his Facebook page: “Riots in Jerusalem: The situation has deteriorated in the recent hour after minority youths attacked Egged’s bus line No. 1 that transported a large number of passengers to the Western Wall. A nearby Border Police force intervened but was harshly attacked by scores of minority members.” Ben Ari attached to his report harsh photos of violence, and asked his thousands of Facebook followers .. https://www.facebook.com/mkbenari?fref=t .. to disseminate them.
The problem is that nothing of the kind had taken place. The fallacious report used 4-year-old photos from a demonstration in East Jerusalem after houses had been demolished in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. There was also a photo of a bleeding casualty of an Israeli bus that capsized in 2003.
These old photos and the fallacious report received more than 3,800 ''likes'' and more than 2,100 ''shares.'' This served to heat up the already charged atmosphere that held sway on the heels of the murder of the three boys: Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach. The responders acted ''in kind'' with a gamut of curses and recommendations on how to harm Arabs, including shooting, burning, slaughtering etc.
The falsehood was exposed the next day, and Ben Ari corrected his Facebook status and argued in his defense that “I received the information and photos from a news and current events center, with your permission I won't go into details; this center was also misled .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/misleading-kidnapping-almoz-hamas-vengeance-hatred.html . This morning it emerged that the photos are old, but there’s nothing new under the sun. In [the Arab neighborhood of] Beit Hanina, the heart of Jerusalem, are difficult scenes of rocks being thrown at policemen …”
Another example: On June 30, Ben Ari wrote, “Jews—Revenge!!” and attached a picture that was written (he claims) with the blood of those slaughtered in the Holocaust, “Juden Revenge.” In addition, Ben Ari invited his friends to a lesson on the topic, “the meaning of revenge.”
The next day, the day of the funerals of the abducted boys, Ben Ari arrived in Jerusalem and was carried on the shoulders of the demonstrators .. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152276478412615&set=a.135387837614.110087.61966557614&type=1 . There, too (and simultaneously on Facebook) he egged them on to revenge and they responded by calling for “Death to the Arabs.” Afterward, dozens of extremist right-wing activists emerged from the demonstrators to the streets of Jerusalem, to “hunt” Arabs and beat them up.
Ben Ari was not investigated by the police on suspicion of incitement, even though incitement against Arabs is his daily bread and his speeches and publications are open to the entire public. If police investigators would only open the Facebook pages of Ben Ari and the fans who follow him, fans who respond with their own aroused cries to every inflamed status of his, the police would not have to work hard to indict him for incitement.
The next day, Abu Khdeir .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/04/mohammed-abu-khdeir-funeral_n_5557780.html .. was brutally murdered by activists of the radical right. It was not an especially difficult mission to capture the six suspects, some of whom are minors. According to video footage distributed by a Palestinian site, two youngsters were recorded on security cameras placed in the neighborhood of Shuafat. They supposedly approached Abu Khdeir late at night, and started talking to him. According to his father, the security footage shows also the faces of the youngsters and the plate number of their car.
Palestinian Attorney General Muhammad Abd al-Ghani Uweili, who was present at the autopsy .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/05/mohammed-abu-khdeir-autopsy_n_5559699.html .. of the body of Abu Khdeir, told the Palestinian news agency Maan that the findings point to the fact that the boy was burned alive. Flammable material .. http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Autopsy-finds-murdered-Palestinian-teen-was-burned-alive-361571 .. was detected in his respiratory channels and 90% of his body was covered with severe burns.
It's impossible to describe the intensity of the incitement absorbed by these youthful murderers, some of whom are younger than 17, which led them to burn alive the Arab youth. How much poison was inserted into their brains until they stopped seeing the Arab as a human being? And how did all this fall under the radar of the Shin Bet and the police?
But this is not the end of the affair. Law enforcement agents must conduct now a thorough examination and reach the generators of incitement and activists of the radical Jewish organizations. And the sooner the better.
Attorney Itamar Ben Gvir, a radical right-wing activist and former parliamentary assistant to Ben Ari, became famous .. http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=5422 .. in his youth for gaining access to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car and holding its logo. “We got to Rabin's car, next we'll get to him,” Ben Gvir said at the time. Ben Gvir was summoned at an investigation and released without being indicted; nothing was done regarding the wild incitement. Two months later, Rabin was assassinated .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ar/culture/2012/11/the-death-of-israeliness.html .. (1995).
Right-wing activists of that era, and additional incited supporters who joined them, are working untiringly now to fulfill the Kach movement’s ideology. As aforesaid, this movement has been illegal for 20 years.
The inciters and activists operate freely and openly. It would not be difficult to arrest them and declare the current organizations to be illegal. It is our obligation to do this, to avert the next hate murder.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/incitement-khdeir-ben-ari-gvir-kach-rabin.html
===
6 Israelis Held Over the Killing of Palestinian
By ISABEL KERSHNERJULY 6, 2014
Play Video|0:45 - Netanyahu on Death of Palestinian Youth
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke out on the killing of the youth and said of the crime, “We do not differentiate
between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them.” By Reuters on Publish Date July 6, 2014. Image CreditPool photo by Gali Tibbon
JERUSALEM — Confronting the possibility of rising retaliatory violence between Jews and Palestinians, the Israeli authorities arrested six Israelis on Sunday in the killing of a Palestinian teenager, found beaten and burned in a Jerusalem forest last week.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned what he called a horrific crime and pledged that anyone found guilty would “face the full weight of the law.” Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, said in a statement that he was “ashamed and shocked by the cruel murder,” describing those behind it as “Jewish terrorists.”
An Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said there was a “strong possibility” that the motive for the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, was “nationalistic,” indicating that it was a revenge attack by right-wing Jewish extremists for the recent kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Muhammad’s body was discovered on Wednesday .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/world/middleeast/israel.html , about an hour after he was forced into a car in East Jerusalem, a few yards from his home.
Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, arrested in the unrest, is a cousin of the victim and was shown on a video being beaten by Israeli officers. Credit Oded Balilty/Associated Press
A judicial order prevented officials from revealing details about the suspects, but a person familiar with the case said several of them were minors.
The arrests came after weeks of calls in Israel for harsher military action in the Palestinian territories after the abduction of the Israelis: Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16. After their bodies were found last week, Mr. Netanyahu called their killers “beasts.”
The crackdown in the West Bank shook the Palestinian Authority and its reconciliation pact with Hamas in Gaza, weakening the more moderate West Bank leadership in the eyes of its public as it seeks international support for statehood.
In the wave of outrage after Muhammad’s killing, Palestinian youths have clashed with Israeli security forces in East Jerusalem and the Galilee in scenes reminiscent of the Palestinian uprisings in 1987 and 2000. The killings on each side — and the subsequent arrest of the Palestinian’s American cousin, whose beating by the Israeli police was caught on video — have raised the specter of the broader conflict’s descending into a cycle of personal vendettas and bloodletting.
“It gives legitimacy to our enemies to do what they want to us,” said Shaul Marziano, 65, a retired Israeli factory worker. “They should be treated just like Arab terrorists,” he said of the Israelis suspected of killing Muhammad.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the killing of the Palestinian youth a horrific crime. Credit Pool photo by Gali Tibbon
Now, Israelis are left to face the prospect that the entrenched conflict with the Palestinians is intensifying radicalization within both populations.
On Sunday some Israelis compared the moment to that of watershed events like the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli fanatic, or the massacre by Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli doctor, of 29 Palestinian Muslims at prayer in 1994 in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Prof. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, accusing the government and the security services of not having dealt seriously enough in recent years with an extreme, nationalist fringe that has desecrated mosques and destroyed Palestinian property. Now, with the killing of Muhammad, Professor Avineri said, “a line has been crossed.”
Continue reading the main story
“This is absolute evil,” he added.
In addition to the rioting, tensions spiked along the border with Gaza in the south, with Palestinian militants firing at least 25 rockets into Israel on Sunday and Israel carrying out airstrikes.
Israeli riot police on Sunday in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Credit Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hamas, the Islamic group that dominates Gaza, said Monday that seven of its militants had been killed in airstrikes on Sunday and early Monday, probably the heaviest death toll suffered by the group since a cease-fire came into effect in late 2012. In addition, two militants thought to belong to a more radical Islamic group were killed in an airstrike. Israel said they had been involved in firing rockets.
For Mr. Netanyahu, Sunday’s arrests were clearly a pivotal moment. He has been lobbied by right-wingers in his government to take tougher action against the Palestinians since the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers were found last week, and in the wake of the increasing rocket fire from Gaza.
But Mr. Netanyahu is already out of step in some ways with world opinion, being held partly responsible by the Obama administration for scuttling American-brokered Middle East peace talks with repeated announcements of new settlement construction.
After paying a condolence call on Sunday to the family of one of the Israeli teenagers, Mr. Netanyahu stood before television cameras and sent his condolences to the Abu Khdeir family. “We do not differentiate between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them,” he said.
Yet after weeks of taking the Palestinian leadership to task for having entered into the pact with Hamas, which Israel accuses of killing the three Israelis, Mr. Netanyahu also appeared unbowed.
A Palestinian youth walked through the rubble of his destroyed home after an Israeli airstrike
in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. Credit Mohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency
“The murderers came from the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority; they returned to territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority,” he said. “Therefore, the Palestinian Authority is obliged to do everything in its power to find them, just as we did, just as our security forces located the suspects in the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir within a matter of days.”
Mr. Rosenfeld said the police and security services were trying to determine whether the suspects had also tried to kidnap a Palestinian child, Mousa Zaloum, 8, from the same area of East Jerusalem a day before Muhammad was abducted. Mousa was later photographed .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/world/middleeast/autopsy-suggests-palestinian-boy-was-burned-alive-reports-say.html .. with red marks on his neck, and in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News the boy said the would-be kidnappers had choked him with a rope. Mousa’s mother struggled with the kidnappers, who she said were speaking Hebrew, and her son escaped.
Muhammad’s relatives, who were convinced from the outset that the killers were Israelis, felt no immediate comfort or satisfaction over the arrests.
“I feel pain,” his father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, said, as he sat in a tent surrounded by mourners outside the family home in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem. “There is no justice in Israel.”
The Palestinian leadership demanded an international commission of inquiry into the killing.
During the clashes in Shuafat, Muhammad’s cousin Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, a high school sophomore visiting from Tampa, Fla., was caught on an amateur video .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/world/middleeast/beating-of-palestinian-american-boy-caught-on-video.html .. being severely beaten by Israeli border police officers. The footage was spread worldwide on Saturday, fanning local and international outrage.
On Sunday, Tariq, who is suspected of involvement in violence against police officers, appeared in court, his face and lips swollen from the blows. He was released on bail but will be under house arrest at his uncle’s home, not far from where Muhammad lived. A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, called for “a speedy, transparent and credible investigation and full accountability for the apparent excessive use of force.”
Tariq said he lost consciousness during the beating and was taken to a hospital. He said he had only been watching the clashes. Seeing the video of himself being beaten and kicked for the first time on Sunday afternoon, he said he was shocked. “I don’t believe what happened to me,” he said.
He added that he had been with Muhammad five minutes before he was kidnapped.
Said Ghazali contributed reporting from Jerusalem; Nayef Hashlamoun from Hebron, West Bank; and Fares Akram from Gaza.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/07/world/middleeast/israel-palestinians-muhammad-abu-khdeir.html
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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