For
writing a poem calling on fellow Arabs to “resist
the settlers robbery” Israeli Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour is facing
gaol. Palestinians on Facebook who make any anti-Israel comment are regularly arrested for ‘incitement’
unlike Israelis who are never
prosecuted.
Similarly
Sheikh Raeed Saleh, leader of the Northern Islamic League was gaoled
for 9 months for ‘incitement’ and is facing further terms of imprisonment for
having led the resistance to Israel’s attacks on Muslim worshippers at the
Golden Dome and Al Aqsa mosque.
 |
| No attempt was made by the Police to take down this banner and prosecute those holding it. But a demonstration against the murder of Gaza's protestors was violently attacked in Tel Aviv |
By way
of contrast Israeli Jews who incite and threaten violence, including chanting
‘Death to the Arabs’ are never prosecuted. The two rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Josef
Elitzur, who authored Torat HaMelech, a religious handbook of when it is
permitted to kill non-Jews, including children and infants, have never faced
any charges. Israel’s High Court upheld
the Attorney General’s decision not to prosecute the rabbis for incitement to
racial hatred.
You can
get the flavour of the book from the following article:
‘Many saw the book as justifying violence against
Palestinians and Arabs. One chapter states that the prohibition of “Thou shalt
not kill” does not apply to a Jew who kills a gentile. It also claims that it
is permitted to kill an enemy during a state of war even if he poses no threat.
In addition to a chapter on the spiritual inferiority of non-Jews, the authors
write that even noncombatants and children, if they are non-Jewish, may be
killed in war.
But
when supporters of the murder of little baby Ali Dawabshe taunt his grandfather
with the most obscene, Nazi-like comments about his grandson being ‘grilled’
Israel’s police stood idly by, which is a eloquent testimony to the embedded
racism of Israel’s Police.
Palestinian child Ahmed Dawabsheh can be seen in hospital receiving treatment after being burnt alive by Israeli settlers [file photo]
In 2015
the home of the Dawabshehs was set alight by Molotov cocktails in the early
hours of the morning. The father and
mother both died from their burns as did 18 month old Ali. 4 year old Mohammed suffered severe burns but
survived. Israel’s authorities denied him ‘anti-terrorism’ compensation because
the family were not Jewish.
Nonetheless
after world wide outrage some of what is known as the hilltop youth were
arrested and some were tortured.
Although Palestinians are regularly tortured this was a first for Jews
and for once the settlers poured forth their outrage – not at torture per se of
course but at the fact that Jews were tortured.
Below
is an article by Jonathan Ofir, an exiled Israeli musician on these horrors.
 |
| Settlers, the 'hilltop youth' demonstrate their perverted lust |
Jonathan Ofir June 21
 |
| Hussein Dawabshe, with his grandson Ahmad, in 2016. |
There’s something
particularly disturbing about celebrating the burning alive of a baby.
This is precisely what Israeli Jewish settlers were doing yesterday,
outside the court in Lod.“’Ali was burned, where is Ali? Ali is on the
grill!”, they chanted, in reference to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, who was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma in 2015. Ali’s
mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four,
only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.
The terror-supporters were actually taunting Ali’s grandfather, Hussein
Dawabshe, who was attending a preliminary hearing at which the court decided
to indict one adult suspect who confessed to the murders, as well as a minor
who was an accomplice. Hussein was accompanied by Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers
Ayman Odeh and Ahmed Tibi. Tibi posted the video of the chanting, with
policemen standing by doing nothing, and wrote:
 |
| Settler Youth demonstrate outside the court wishing that Mohammed had also died |
“Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali.
Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill” – all this was thrown
at our face – including at the grandfather Dawbsheh concerning his 18-month-old
grandson by the riff raff of ‘price tag’. In front of us stood policemen and
officers and did nothing. No words…
The terror supporters also referred to the other family members: “Where
is Ali? Where is Riham? Where is Saad? It’s too bad Ahmed didn’t burn as well.”
 |
| Death to the Arabs is never prosecuted in Israel - if Arabs were to chant 'Death to the Jews' then not only would they be prosecuted but we would have Zionist organisations the world over telling us that this terrible antisemitism is proof that the Arabs hate us |
This is certainly not the
first time that the burning of this baby was celebrated. In December 2015, a
video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via
Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and
guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh. The wedding couple was said
to be “very well known in the radical right”. Following widespread public
outrage, Netanyahu distanced himself from the event, saying that these were
“shocking images” which “show the true face of a group that constitutes a
danger”, but he also provided the “many sides” narrative:
“That is not the proud
religious Zionism that contributes to the state, and whose sons serve in the
elite units in the army… It is also impossible to compare the scope of that
terror with Arab terror. In the last month they [Arabs] carried out hundreds of
attacks against us, and we saw just a few Jewish terrorist attacks.”
A year later, 13 people
from what became known as the “murder wedding” were indicted for incitement to terrorism.
Meanwhile, last month, in
what was probably much less noticed, the Dawabsheh family home was torched once again:
“A group of settlers
attacked my home at dawn today, breaking a window and throwing a Molotov
cocktail inside before fleeing the scene,” Yasser Dawabsheh said. “We were
lucky that I was able to hear them when they attacked, so I was able to
evacuate all my family,” he said. “Fire crews reacted quickly and put out the
fire before the whole house burnt down…”
The defense had made a
central issue of the torture that was applied in the early interrogations close
to the time of the arson, and this was a can of worms for the court.
The defendants made an
issue of their interrogations by Shin Bet officers, saying that they were
tortured. In fact, the settlers had held a press conference to this effect at
the very same hall in which the “murder wedding” was held.
The court announced at
yesterday’s preliminary hearing that confessions obtained under torture by the
Shin Bet interrogators would not be admissible, but that later confessions
would be admissible. Haaretz note:
“If the confessions had
been declared admissible, they probably would have ended in a conviction of the
two suspects, legal experts had said. The rejection is a blow to the State
Prosecutor’s Office as it will now be more difficult to obtain a conviction.”
Of course, Israel and the
court refer to torture with euphemisms such as “moderate physical pressure” and
“special methods”. But it’s torture – and the Haaretz coverage is clear about
that, and even charts out some of the torture methods. The thing is, that
torture (under whatever euphemism) is legal in Israel under certain
circumstances, known as the “ticking bomb” scenario – where there is knowledge
of other network members at large, who are bound to perpetrate an attack.
Haaretz:
“Law enforcement agencies
said the interrogation was justified because the two suspects had knowledge
about a group that sought to perpetrate similar attacks. In the event, there
were two failed attempts to commit similar attacks.”
So is the court now saying
that torture is not permissible under any circumstance?
In 2007, the Israeli
Supreme Court ruled that torture was permissible under those ‘special
circumstances.’ The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) slammed it, saying the ruling was interpreted by the
Shin Bet as a green light to torture almost every Palestinian detainee. “Today
in Israel, there is no effective barrier – not legal and certainly not ethical
– that stands in the way of using torture. A secret service organization such
as the GSS (Shin Bet) decides independently to use torture and, afterwards,
investigates itself as to whether the use of interrogation was justified,” the
committee said.
Israel has effectively been
permitting torture in various modes. In 1987 the Landau commission overtly
legalized torture. This prompted the outspoken scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz to
call Supreme Court judge Moshe Landau a “Judeo-Nazi”. Israel has wandered back and forth with
the legality and its more or less overt modes, but the practices have
continued.
Yet now the Lod court is
effectively saying that confessions from such practices are simply inadmissible
under any circumstances. Would this also apply to Palestinians? This is
doubtfully the case. The court is only a District Court, and it is only
relating to this particular case, which happens to involve Jewish – not
Palestinian – terrorists.
Judge Ruth Lorach was
particularly effusive in her appraisal of the “special methods.” She
said, “These methods have hurt the basic rights of the defendants in a
severe manner – rights concerning preservation of the wholeness of the body and
soul, and they have hurt their dignity.”
So how much “dignity” are
Palestinians really going to get from all this?
The virulently hateful
scenes outside the court yesterday did not bode well.
Ahmed Tibi told Ynet that
he asked police officers to do something about those chanting and taunting, but
that they responded with indifference.
“What would have happened
had the situation been reversed?”, he asked. “If 20 Arab youths were shouting
about a Jewish fatality ‘he’s on the grill, he’s burning’? How many of them
would have gone home with broken legs? How many would have been arrested?” Tibi
wondered. “Part of the reason it was horrifying was the police’s indifference,
like nothing had happened,” he explained. “They (the police) could have at
least removed them from the court. (No need) to break legs. Legs are only
broken to Arabs in Haifa, not to Jews. But they could have at least removed
them,” he added.
Tibi notes that there were
expressions of disgust from across the political spectrum, but silence at its
top:
“But lo and behold—not a
single minister (said anything), not Miri Regev [minister of culture], not
Yisrael Katz [minister of intelligence], not Ayelet Shaked [justice minister],
not Naftali Bennett [education minister] and in particular not the prime
minister, who knows how to retweet awful things. He remained quiet instead of
condemning this sickening phenomenon”.
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