Calls for Revenge and Retaliation not being cooled

UPDATE: At least 13 “rightwing” demonstrators were arrested after breaking through or outwitting thousands of deployed and prepared police, and then throwing stones at various houses in the Jebal Mukaber neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and breaking car windows. One or two Israeli policement were reportedly lightly injured. Israel’s YNet news reported: “Hundreds of police officers attempted to block the protestors, but about 200 managed to break through the barriers and reach the neighborhood. The rightists called for revenge, and one of them told Ynet, ‘We are fed up with keeping silent. Jewish blood will not be abandoned. It’s time to stop the defamation of God and this disgrace. We are going to destroy the terrorist’s house’ … ‘This is the beginning of our war on the fifth column. We shall not let them live amongst us’, said one of the demonstrators, Nadia Matar of the Women in Green organization” … Ten days after the deadly terror attack in the capital, the political and legal arenas continue to engage in the question whether the terrorist’s house should be destroyed. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that he supported the demolition of the house, and Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter issued an order for its demolition. However, Colonel (res.) Ilan Katz, the former deputy chief military prosecutor, told Ynet that ‘there would be a legal difficulty in destroying the house, due to a decision made by a military committee in 2005 that the effectiveness of the deterrence in such cases has worn out’.” The full YNet article can be read here .

Casting doubt, at the very least, on the seriousness of the police preparations or intentions, the Jerusalem Post reported Sunday night that “According to reports, the protestors marched through the streets of the village, carrying signs baring the words, ‘Enemies don’t earn livings’, ‘Expel the Arab enemy’, and ‘Israel for Israelis’, while chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ … Ahead of the protest, police raised their level of alert and reinforcements were in place around Jebel Mukaber … Police said Sunday that they would allow the activists to hold a protest on the promenade in Armon Hanatziv, but vowed to stop anyone attempting to march toward Jebel Mukaber” … The full JPost report can be read here .

Warnings have been issued to stay away from what is being called “a protest march” called in Jerusalem late Sunday afternoon – though the protest is far from being a democratic expression of differences of opinion.

Instead, this particular “protest” is a shocking call for violent taking of revenge.

A group of persons who are being referred simply as “right-wing” have said that if the Israeli government does not act, they will take charge and, behaving as a vigilante mob, they will attempt to demolish the family home, and expel the family (either to the West Bank or to Gaza) of the East Jerusalem Palestinian taxi driver who was killed ten days ago while reportedly shooting young students who were studying the Torah, the Jewish books of the Bible, at a religious school, or yeshiva, in West Jerusalem.

Of the eight students who died in that attack, four were children under the age of 18. Two others were 18.

Hours after the attack, the Israeli Defense Forces demolished a home in Bethlehem belonging to long-wanted Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed Shehadeh. Shehadeh himself was killed last Wednesday, almost a week later, along with three other men who were all sitting together in a car after eating at a restaurant, when they were attacked by Israeli border police special forces. According to news reports, the Israeli police shot 500 bullets at the four men – which is the same number of bullets the East Jerusalem Palestinian reportedly shot at students in the yeshiva.

One Israeli news outlet, the YNet website, said in a headline after the attack on the yeshiva that the East Palestinian home had already been demolished. But, this claim was not repeated in the text of the story, and it was not true.

Rumors circulated throughout Jerusalem, and even as far as UN Headquarters in New York, where journalists asked questions at the daily briefing by the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-Moon, but the spokesperson insisted that the demolition had not happened.

The American Consulate has issued a warning to U.S. citizens to exercise caution and avoid the area of the “protest march”announced for 1700 hours, “beginning at the Haas Promenade (Tayelet) in Talpiyot and proceeding to Jabel Mukaber” – where the home of the slain attacker is located. Other Western consulates are presumably issuing similar notices. The U.S. warning add, drily, that “there will be a large police presence, and there is a possibility of heightened tensions”.

The Jerusalem Post reports today that “Jerusalem police were preparing Sunday morning to prevent right-wing activists from marching to the east Jerusalem home of the terrorist who perpetrated the Mercaz Harav shooting attack. Police raised their level of alert and reinforcements were in place around the terrorist’s hometown of Jebel Mukaber. The heightened state of alert followed a weekend campaign by several right-wing organizations that hung posters around the capital”.

It was Dalia Itzhik, the young and attractive woman speaker of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, who made the first public call to tear down the attacker’s family home, while she was making a condolence call at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva. Her call came a day after the considerably more “left-wing” but equally attractive Minister of Education, Yuli Tamir, was attacked, verbally abused, spat upon, and apparently also kicked “in the back” by onlookers outside the yeshiva after she visited to pay her condolences for the deaths and injuries.

The Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva was not just any target. As Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said at a meeting of the Israeli cabinet last Sunday, it is a “flagship of religious Zionism”, and many of its graduates are leaders of the militant settler movement. It is significant that the attacker was gunned down by two gun-carrying students at the school.

Israeli analysts said that the choice of target was demonically brilliant, and express the belief that this is near-conclusive proof of Hizballah involvement.

In any case, following Dalia Itzhik’s remarks, the Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter asked the Israeli police to take steps towards demolition of the Jebel Mukaber home. The Israeli police said they were seeking legal advice. The Minister of Defense (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Olmert impatiently brushed these legal formalities aside, and either “orderered” the house demolition, or at least that the demolition should happen.

The Israeli Arab Knesset member Ahmad Tibi was one of the few public figures to issue a reminder that the destruction of the family home would be punishment of innocent civilians.

But many in Israel simply do not believe that family members could not have known an attack was being planned. And, even if that might have been the case, many in Israel feel, such punishment of the family should act as a deterrent and make future attackers at least think twice about the possible consequences.

Why there has been hesitation about this house demolition is not entirely clear. Avi Dichter suggested that there were several layers of judicial review ahead of the demoliotion. Other Israeli news reports suggest that there was a 2005 “decision” by the government and/or military establishment not to carry out punitive house demolitions in Israel — including in Jerusalem which the Israeli government effectively annexed in 1980.

What is notable, however, about the latest cycle of attack and revenge and retaliation and retribution is that there has been little or no call for restraint by official government figures. The Israeli government is responsible, under its international obligations as signatories of major UN human rights treaties, as well as under Israeli law, to avoid any stoking of hatred between communities living under its jurisdiction.

To the contrary, several announcements were made during the week that official approval had been given to the construction of new homes in existing settlements in the West Bank and within the “Greater Jerusalem” municipal area unilaterally defined by Israel after its victory in the June 1967 war.

And, there was at least one reported discussion within the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva itself of the pros and cons of revenge attacks on unspecified but general “Arab” targets, but most of the Rabbis who participated or who were polled later discouraged such action.

The Israeli Shin Bet (Shabak) security services stated on Saturday evening, after the end of the weekly observance of Shabbat (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) that “it had completed an investigation into media reports of such plans and has found them all to be false and baseless”, also according to the Jerusalem Post.

But neither this, nor large displays of police force, is or are enough to cool the rising calls for revenge and retaliation.