 |
| Hussein Dawabshe and his surviving grandson (mondoweiss) |
Earlier today, an Israeli court held a hearing in the case of two Jewish suspects accused of firebombing the home of a Palestinian family in 2015, killing 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha and his parents, Riham and Saad. According to a report in The Times of Israel, as the victims’ relatives walked into the courthouse, a gaggle of about two dozen Jewish protestors started taunting them, chanting “Where’s Ali? There’s no more Ali. Ali was burned. Ali’s on the grill.”
There are no words to describe the level of contempt I have for these people. As Tablet notes, it doesn’t matter whether suspects in this case are guilty of doing that or not. Nor does it matter that their confessions may have been made by virtue of being tortured by the Shin Bet - Israel’s version of the FBI. Those are completely separate issues regardless of how one feels about them. What these ‘animals’ did had nothing to do with their guilt or innocence. In fact calling them animals is insulting to animals!
What they showed was a celebration of cruelty and inhumanity rivaling those that celebrated the cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazi Germany in the 1930s. That anyone calling themselves human, let alone a Jew, could celebrate the burning alive of an innocent 18 month old baby and his parents – while severely burning his older brother who survived - is a new low.
I have no sympathy for the extreme right wing religious Zionist settler types. They have disgusted me for some time now. It is people from their ranks that have been terrorizing innocent Palestinians – and even their own government when they objected to a policy they didn’t like - in what they call ‘price tag’ attacks.
These people might think their attitudes and actions are justified because vile acts like this have been done to Jews in far greater number by Arab terrorists. But that is no justification at all. It is pure unadulterated murder of innocent people in a cruel and irrational act of revenge. You don’t kill their innocent people in retaliation for their killing our innocent people.
That is not justice. Celebrating it is vile – especially at the expense of the bereaved who like the victims of that fire have done nothing wrong. Had it been vigilante justice where taking the law into your own hands is at least done to those who have harmed you or a loved one it might have been understandable – wrong though it would be. But they were celebrating the kind of pure evil reminiscent of 1930s Nazi Germany.
What happened at that courthouse deserves to be condemned in the strongest possible terms by anyone calling themselves a human being. There is no justifying it in any way. There can be no ‘understanding what they’ve gone through’. There can be no ‘they have been brought to desperation by what has been done to them’. There can only be disgust!.
As far as I am concerned, people like this ought to be completely ostracized – virtually exiled from the Jewish world in its entirety. They should be treated with contempt wherever they go - made unwelcome and asked to leave when they enter any facility where actual human beings are present. They want to act like animals? Fine. Let them go out in the forests and live with them. Because they are unfit to live with actual human beings.