Jonathan Freedland - Israel’s hawks can't dodge blame for this day of violence
The condemnations are striking but still they ring hollow.
Binyamin Netanyahu denounced the arson attack by Jewish settlers on the West
Bank home of the Dawabsha family, in which Ali
Saad, a baby just 18 months old, was burned to death, as an “act of
terrorism in every respect”. Netanyahu was joined by Naftali
Bennett, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which is
close to being the political wing of the settlers’ movement. Bennett described
the murder as a “horrendous act of terror”. The defence minister,
the army, they all condemned this heinous crime.
Which is welcome, of course. It’s good that there were no
ifs or buts, no attempts to excuse the inexcusable. But still it rings hollow. The words sound empty partly because, while this act is
extreme in its cruelty, it is not a freak event. Talk to the Israeli human
right groups that monitor their country’s 48-year occupation of the West Bank
and they are clear that the masked men who broke into the Dawabsha family home
in the early hours and set it alight committed a crime exceptional only in its
consequences. “Violence by settlers against Palestinians is part of the daily
routine of the occupation,” Hagai El-Ad, director of the B’tselem organisation, told me.
Indeed, El-Ad says this attack was the eighth time since
2012 that settlers have torched inhabited buildings. There have been dozens of
assaults on property, too: mosques, agricultural land, businesses. “In most of
these cases, they didn’t find the perpetrators, despite having the best
intelligence agencies on the planet.” He is referring to the culture of
impunity that has always protected the settlers.
That charge can be directed at past Israeli governments of
the centre-left as well as the hawkish right: while the latter actively
sponsored the settlement that followed the 1967 war, the former indulged it.
But the right’s guilt runs deeper, which is why its tearful words of regret now
sound so false.
Take Bennett. Put aside his repeated insistence that there
will never be a Palestinian state, thereby crushing the dreams of an
independent life for all those living under Israeli rule. Focus only on his
conduct this week. Today’s murderous arson attack is assumed to be an act of
revenge for the court-ordered dismantling
on Wednesday of two buildings in the West Bank settlement of Bet El. The
buildings were unfinished and empty. Israel’s supreme court ruled them illegal
and ordered the army to demolish them. The settlers raged at the decision,
demonstrating violently against the soldiers and police who were there to
enforce it. And guess who stood on a roof at Bet El,
egging the protesters on, stirring them to ever greater heights of fury? Why,
it was Naftali Bennett.
Netanyahu himself is not much better. You don’t have to
recall his own disavowal
of Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution on the eve of
March’s election, or his racist warning that Arab citizens of Israel were
heading to the polls “in droves”. Look only at his actions in recent days.
Stung by the protests at Bet El, he announced construction of another 300 units
in Bet El and 504 in East Jerusalem. In other words, he did not punish the
settlers for their lawless behaviour: he rewarded it.
There is a pattern here. The hawks of the Israeli right pump
ever more air into the ultra-nationalist balloon – only to feign shock when it
explodes. A small, but telling example: yesterday an ultra-orthodox Jewish
fanatic went on the rampage at the Jerusalem
Pride march, stabbing wildly at anyone his knife could reach. He injured
six, one critically. Among those who condemned his actions was Jewish Home
Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich. Yet Smotrich calls himself a “proud
homophobe”: in 2006 he helped organise “the beast parade” which saw
demonstrators mock Pride by walking through Jerusalem with donkeys and goats, as
if to equate homosexuality with bestiality.
The prime example of turning on the tap – only to be
appalled by the flood – is Netanyahu himself. Twenty years ago he stirred up
crowds livid at then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s apparent concessions to the
Palestinians. They waved placards depicting Rabin as a Palestinian terrorist,
even as an SS officer – but Netanyahu said nothing. They carried a mocked-up
coffin of Rabin and still Netanyahu said nothing. But when a far rightist
assassinated Rabin, Netanyahu was of course among the first to be shocked, shocked,
by such wickedness.
It’s true too that each “price tag” attack like yesterday’s
– designed to show that even the slightest brake on the settlement venture will
come at a price – helps entrench the position that territorial compromise is
impossible, that the evacuation of settlements will trigger civil war. That is
a conclusion that can only boost support for the Bibi-Bennett hostility to a
two-state accord with the Palestinians. And yet, for all that, it would be
wrong to see the Israeli right as a monolith – and even more wrong to see Israel itself that way.
There are distinctions and they matter. This week’s men of violence illustrate
them.
The graffiti left by the murderers of baby Ali Saad offered
a clue. “Long live the messiah,” said one. I’ve seen slogans like that before,
in the radical
settler enclave of Hebron: they point to a strand of settler extremism that
denounces the actual state of Israel, and especially its army, as godless
institutions of secular democracy, demanding in their place the creation of a
“Judean kingdom”. To them, Netanyahu is a traitor and apostate.
Similarly, the would-be assassin of the Pride rally, Yishai
Schlissel, told the Jerusalem court where he appeared today that he did not
recognise its authority because it “does not follow the rules
of the holy Torah” (as if he does). That suggests he belongs to the
strand of anti-Zionist ultra-orthodoxy that regards the modern, secular state
of Israel as a blasphemous pre-empting of the divine plan for the Jews.
It can be baffling, but such are the deep divisions within
Israeli society, often missed by those looking on from afar. Israel’s
president, Reuven Rivlin – who, though a hawk on territorial issues,
has emerged as the country’s most
urgent voice against bigotry and intolerance – spoke in June of
Israel’s four
tribes: the strictly orthodox, the secular, the national-religious and the
Arab minority.
Back when we used to speak of the “Middle East peace
process” there was an assumption, contained in that very phrase, that if only
Palestinians and Israelis could reach an accord, peace would come to the entire
region. Now we surely know that even if there were such a pact, it would not
end the killing in Yemen, the slaughter in Syria or the carnage in Iraq. Even
if Palestinians and Israelis embraced, Isis would keep on beheading those it
deems the wrong kind of Muslim.
But something else is true too. If the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict were solved tomorrow, there are no guarantees it would bring
tranquillity to Israel or indeed to the divided Palestinians. It might simply
unleash the internal conflicts that the external clash has bottled up and
contained for so long.
As the Dawabsha family mourns, and as Israelis and
Palestinians hold their breath, trembling at the prospect of yet another dread
cycle of retaliation and escalation, it is worth remembering that this conflict
involves enmity piled upon enmity, hatred upon hatred, within and without –
making it harder to solve with each passing day.
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