The murder, on Tuesday, of four rabbis and a policeman in occupied Jerusalem’s Bnei Torah synagogue continues to dominate headlines across the world. This was an appalling act by any standards. However, the equally appalling lynching of a Palestinian bus driver, Yousuf Hassan Al Ramuni, by Jewish extremist colonists, which preceded the synagogue attacks and was the last in a recent rash of colonist atrocities and provocations, has been only briefly touched upon in most reports.
In July, Jewish extremist colonists abducted, tortured and then burned alive an innocent Palestinian teenager, Mohammad Abu Khudair. Last Tuesday, when the 16 year-old’s traumatised parents attended the court hearing for the murder case, a gang of colonists spat on them as they left the courtroom.
The colonist movement — which establishes colonies on stolen Palestinian land in order to commandeer them — is peopled by violent, hate-fuelled racists. This is the brutal truth. These are no brave pioneers, surrounded by vicious savages, like some Middle Eastern version of Shane. Known locally as “la familia”, these extremists are as ruthless as the Italian mafia. One of their leaders, Benzari Gopstein, incites ‘righteous Jewish force’ and has a picture of himself holding a noose on his Facebook page.
The first act of the ‘religious war’ that everybody is suddenly talking about occurred 20 years ago, when Jewish extremist colonist Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshippers at a morning prayer in the Ebrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125. For years now, Jewish extremists have been vandalising and attacking mosques all over Palestine. The past months have seen ‘La Familia’ colonists storm the Al Aqsa Mosque in Al Haram Al Sharif, protected by Israeli police.
Peace activists say that 90 per cent of Israeli police investigations into colonist violence fail to lead to any indictment. In contrast, since the murder of Abu Khudair, 1,400 Palestinians have been imprisoned without trial in occupied Jerusalem alone, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society. This, then, is the context is which two Palestinian cousins, Gassan and Uday Abu Jamal launched their horrific assault on the extremist Har Nof synagogue in a ‘la familia’-dominated area of occupied West Jerusalem, previously considered the safest zone in the occupied areas. Using meat cleavers and a gun, they killed three American rabbis and another rabbi holding a British passport. The fifth person killed was a policeman. The event came swiftly on the heels of other ‘lone-wolf’ attacks by young Palestinians, in which, five Israelis and a foreign visitor were deliberately run over or stabbed — and was celebrated on the streets of Gaza and commended by Hamas — so great is the burgeoning anger and resentment among many Palestinians. Twelve Palestinians were killed during the same period, including those accused of the murders and two school students were blinded by rubber bullets fired by the Israeli police.
This spiral of hatred and violence is accompanied by religious polarisation and rampant extremism on both sides. Palestinian youths see themselves as the victims of injustice and humiliation; Israelis act with apparent impunity, while Palestinian freedoms and rights are curtailed, their homes destroyed and their places of worship attacked and vandalised. The Palestinians are largely disenchanted with the political process that has seen the Palestinian National Authority (under Mahmoud Abbas) actively collude with Israel rather than stand for and with its own people. They are saddened, too, by the failure of the rest of the Arab world to support them. These days, Arab governments are mainly concerned with internecine squabblings in the Gulf and the fight for Kurdish Kobani.
This brings me to my final point, which is regarding the rise of Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). This unprecedented spate of ‘lone-wolf’ attacks in Israel is straight from the Al Qaida copy book and can be a response to Daesh leader, Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi’s repeated urgings to attack “the infidel ... by any means possible”. The Daesh brand of psychological warfare advocates the ‘management of savagery’ and terrifying the enemy into submission. The Daesh extremists — who are more brutal, more ruthless and more ‘successful’ than any terror group the world has ever known — are admired by a significant section of Arab youth.
Nobody can condone acts of violence on either side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, yet those who thought that the Palestinian people had begun to accept their fate, surrender to occupation, accept injustice and humiliation will have to revise their opinions. Did anybody really think that the Palestinians would welcome violent intruders into their mosques and congratulate the murderers of Abu Khudair and bus driver Al Ramuni (a young father of two)?
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned to America and Europe, where he finds willing shoulders to cry on, a media uproar against the Palestinians and funding and arms to continue the oppression. None of this changes the reality that this Israeli leader, through his intransigence, arrogance and contempt, destroyed the peace process. Even as Abbas sat at the negotiating table, Netanyahu gave the go-ahead for thousands of new illegal colonist homes to be built on Palestinian lands and plotted another massacre in the world’s largest outdoor prison — Gaza.
The people of the entire world know the meaning of the word Intifada because of the Palestinians and associate this struggle with dignity, pride and the yearning for freedom and a homeland. It is a horrible reality that, when politics fail, violence takes up its sword.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan.
