The video of Israeli Orthodox Jewish wedding-goers celebrating the killing of a Palestinian toddler has prompted strong condemnation but that’s not enough, for it clearly shows there are ideological people in Israel who are happy to kill Palestinian children and others who are happy that it happened.
Aired by Israeli TV, the footage depicts Israeli youth dancing with guns and knives during a wedding party in Jerusalem. One young man repeatedly stabs a photo of Ali Dawabsheh, the 18-month-old Palestinian toddler who was killed in an arson attack carried out by Israeli settlers in July. That attack happened when settlers torched the Dawabsheh family home in the occupied West Bank village of Duma and killed Ali and his parents. Although Israeli police have arrested a number of settlers in connection with the killings, no one has yet been charged.
Herein lies one of the occupation’s biggest problems. Even though the bride and groom of the wedding are well-known hardline right-wing activists, were close to suspects in the deaths of the Dawabshehs, and more dangerously, the groom had previously been questioned over acts of Jewish terrorism, this ugliness passes. The couple might not have committed the crime but they certainly were not upset by it.
Israeli politicians were quick to condemn the wedding attendees but incitement and policies of Israeli leaders are responsible for such groups. The condemnations by the right-wing Israeli government formed this year are mere dust in the eyes. The extremist right-wing government encourages the crimes of settlers who benefit from the support of that government, its refusal to freeze settlement construction, and persistence in the process of settlement expansion. It is the Israeli government that commits crimes like that in Duma whenever it encourages settlement expansion, builds new settler housing units in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and encourages the flocks of settlers to do what they do.
The crime brings back memories of earlier instances in which Palestinian children were killed by Israelis. One was Mohammed Al-Durrah, shot in his father’s arms when he was 11 in the early days of the second Intifada in 2000. Another is Mohammed Abu Khodeir, 15, who was burned to death in Jerusalem in 2014 by extremist settlers. And during its 51-day war on Gaza last year, Israel killed 2,200 Palestinians, including 530 children. In none of these murders has even one Israeli been brought to justice.
Had Israeli authorities treated Jewish terrorists the way they have been treating Arab freedom fighters, they could have prevented many of these acts of murder, arson and vandalism. But settlers have carried out 11,000 attacks on Palestinian targets in the West Bank since 2004. None have been brought to justice.
If anything, extremist settlers have been waging price tag attacks on the Palestinians, burning their cars, destroying their orchards, and desecrating their places of worship for months now. Yet police rarely take action. The lack of progress in the Duma case is one of the causes of the wave of knife, gun and car-ramming attacks targeting Israelis that began in October.
The outrageous claim by Donald Trump, the frontrunner US Republican presidential candidate, that he saw on American TV “thousands of thousands” of Arabs living in Jersey City celebrating when the Twin Towers caved in on Sept 11, 2001 could not be supported by video evidence. But there is a video of the merry Israeli wedding and it is deplorable.
If Israeli laws will not help, Palestinians should make full use of international law. The Dawabsheh murders must be brought to the International Criminal Court of which the Palestinians are now signatories. Religious extremists who have settled in the West Bank believe that it is their religious duty to attack Palestinians, even burn and kill their children, to drive them away.
