Merciless
Israeli mobs are hunting Palestinians
27
July, 2014
All
eyes are on Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s merciless
bombing campaign has topped
1,000.
But
back in Jerusalem, where sixteen-year-old Muhammad
Abu Khudair
was burned alive by Jewish vigilantes in a “revenge killing”
incited by Israeli politicians early this month, right-wing lynch
mobs continue to roam the streets in search of Arabs to attack.
Their
most recent victims are twenty-year-old Palestinians Amir Shwiki and
Samer Mahfouz from the Beit Hannina neighborhood in occupied East
Jerusalem. The pair were severely beaten into unconsciousness on
Friday night by Israeli youths armed with iron bars and baseball
bats.
Mahfouz
told
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
that he and Shwiki were on their way to the light rail when they were
stopped by “a man [coming] from the direction of Neve Yaakov,”
an illegal Jewish-only Israeli settlement in occupied East
Jerusalem.
“He
said give me a cigarette. I told him I don’t have any, and he heard
[from my accent] I’m Arab and went away, coming back with his
friends, maybe twelve people. They had sticks and iron bars and they
hit us over the head,” Mahfouz recounted.
Haaretz
added, “According to the victims, police officers that arrived at
the scene did not call an ambulance, and they were instead evacuated
by passersby to receive medical treatment at a Beit Khanina [sic]
clinic. They were later rushed to Hadassah University Hospital, Ein
Karem in serious condition.”
Police
complicity
Amir
Shwiki and Samer Mahfouz were hospitalized after being beaten by
Israeli settlers Friday. (Facebook)
Israeli
police have a pattern of ignoring hate crimes against Palestinians,
as was the case immediately following the reported kidnapping of
Muhammad Abu Khudair. Police did
not immediately respond
when his family called to report that he had been kidnapped and they
actively thwarted efforts to locate those who murdered him by
spreading
false rumors
that Abu Khudair was murdered by his family in an “honor killing”
over his sexuality.
Police
also neglected
to respond
when Abu Khudair’s murderers tried to kidnap ten-year-old Mousa
Zalum from the same East Jerusalem neighborhood two days earlier.
When
police aren’t busy ignoring Jewish vigilante violence against
Palestinians, they are actively participating in it.
On
Thursday night last week, police teamed up with a Jewish mob
assaulting two Palestinian men while they were delivering bread to
grocery markets on Jaffa Street in West Jerusalem from their van.
The
men — identified by Ma’an
News Agency
as twenty-year-old Amir Mazin Abu Eisha and Laith Ubeidat (age not
specified) — were encircled and beaten with empty bottles by a mob
of some twenty to thirty Israelis, according to their attorney,
Khaldun Nijim.
Rather
than assist the men as they were being attacked, Nijim told
Ma’an, “The Israeli police stopped them in their van and pointed
guns at them.”
Nijim
added: “After they drove away a few meters, the police shot at
them. They then stopped and were assaulted again.”
After
barring an ambulance from transferring Abu Eisha, who sustained head
and ear injuries, to the hospital for medical treatment, police
detained the two Palestinian men at the Russian Compound police
station close to the scene and charged them with “having a knife
and obstructing the work of police,” according to Nijim.
Abu
Eisha and Ubeidat were eventually released on bail but are currently
under ten days of house arrest. Meanwhile, several of the mob
participants filed complaints against their victims, accusing the men
of trying to assault them with a knife.
Racist
activism on the rise
The
same Ma’an article notes that in Jerusalem, “Jaffa street has
been covered with flyers warning Arabs not to ‘touch’ Jewish
women in recent weeks, as part of a right-wing Jewish campaign to
prevent mixing among Jews and Arabs.”
The
fliers were probably designed and distributed by Lehava,
a fanatical anti-miscegenation group whose sister organization,
Hemla, receives
state funding
to “rescue” Jewish women from romantic relationships with Arab
men.
Leanne
Gale, an anti-racist activist living in Jerusalem, recently reported
on her blog that Lehava has been holding
nightly gatherings
in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square and littering all of Jerusalem with
stickers and fliers in Arabic that state, among other things, “Do
not even think about a Jewish woman.”
Other
catchphrases adorned on Lehava T-shirts and stickers include “Jews
love Jews” and “The women of Israel for the nation of Israel,”
according to Gale.
Fascist
mobs from Haifa to Tel Aviv
Violent
mobs of anti-Arab fascists aren’t isolated to Jerusalem.
Last
week in Haifa, the Arab deputy mayor and his son were
brutally beaten by
a mob of Jewish supremacists chanting “death to Arabs” and “death
to leftists” in response to a rally against the Gaza onslaught.
Police did nothing to stop the assault.
Similar
fascist demonstrators have surfaced in supposedly liberal Tel
Aviv as well,
verbally and physically attacking
Palestinians and leftists protesting the war on Gaza.
Israeli
blogger Elizabeth Tsurkov, who has been regularly attending and
live-tweeting
the racist attacks against anti-war demonstrators in recent weeks,
heard a new racist chant mocking the more than two hundred children
slaughtered by Israel’s merciless bombing campaign in Gaza:
“Tomorrow there’s no school in Gaza, they don’t have any
children left.”
Incitement
from the top
While
calls for extermination have been rampant both in
the streets of Israel
and on Israeli social
media
for months, the “death to Arabs” sentiment is not isolated to
vigilantes.
Take
for example Israeli lawmaker Ayelet
Shaked,
a rising star in the far-rightwing Jewish Home party, who recently
called
for genocide by
slaughtering Palestinian mothers to prevent them from giving birth to
“little snakes.”
Fast
forward several weeks, and the United Nations is reporting an
alarming
rise
in miscarriages and premature births in Gaza, where newborn
infants are dying
due electricity blackouts that shutdown their incubators.
Another
Israeli public official inciting violence is Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of
the illegal West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, who issued
a religious edict declaring
that it is permissible under Jewish religious law for the Israeli
army to “punish the enemy population with whatever measures it
deems proper,” even if that means “exterminat[ing] the enemy.”
Since
then, portions of Gaza have been reduced to rubble in apocalypse-like
scenes that look indistinguishable from the flattened cities of
Syria.
With
all eyes glued to Israel’s destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip,
little attention is being paid to the heightened levels of racism in
Israeli society as demands for “death to Arabs” echo across the
country with devastating consequences for Palestinians
from Shujaiya to Qalandiya to Jerusalem
to Haifa
