A day before Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive allegedly by six Israeli Jewish youths, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked (left) published on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians.
It is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”
It is a call for genocide because it calls for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”
If Shaked’s post does not meet the legal definition of a call for genocide then nothing does.
Shaked is a senior figure in the Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party that is part of Israel’s ruling coalition.
Her post was shared more than one thousand times and received almost five thousand “Likes.”
Uri Elitzur, to whom she refers, and who died a few months ago, was leader of the settler movement and speechwriter and close advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Here’s a full translation of Shaked’s posting:
This is an article by the late Uri Elitzur, which was written 12 years ago, but remained unpublished. It is as relevant today as it was at the time.
The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to define reality with the simple words that language puts at our disposal. Why do we have to make up a new name for the war every other week, just to avoid calling it by its name. What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy. A declaration of war is not a war crime. Responding with war certainly is not. Nor is the use of the word “war”, nor a clear definition who the enemy is. Au contraire: the morality of war (yes, there is such a thing) is founded on the assumption that there are wars in this world, and that war is not the normal state of things, and that in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.
And the morality of war knows that it is not possible to refrain from hurting enemy civilians. It does not condemn the British air force, which bombed and totally destroyed the German city of Dresden, or the US planes that destroyed the cities of Poland and wrecked half of Budapest, places whose wretched residents had never done a thing to America, but which had to be destroyed in order to win the war against evil. The morals of war do not require that Russia be brought to trial, though it bombs and destroys towns and neighborhoods in Chechnya. It does not denounce the UN Peacekeeping Forces for killing hundreds of civilians in Angola, nor the NATO forces who bombed Milosevic’s Belgrade, a city with a million civilians, elderly, babies, women, and children. The morals of war accept as correct in principle, not only politically, what America has done in Afghanistan, including the massive bombing of populated places, including the creation of a refugee stream of hundreds of thousands of people who escaped the horrors of war, for thousands of whom there is no home to return to.
And in our war this is sevenfold more correct, because the enemy soldiers hide out among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.
Shocking words like this from Israeli leaders have an impact. And they are words backed by actions.
When Israel rampages against the entire Palestinian population, subjecting them to what Human Rights Watch calls “collective punishment,” it sends a clear message to the Israeli public that any Palestinian is fair game for “revenge.”
Shaked evidently has much worse in mind.
Hate trickles down
In another sickening example of the country’s endemic racism, Israeli website shtieble.net, which is oriented toward an Orthodox Jewish audience, referred to lynching victim Muhammad Abu Khudair in a headline as a “little terrorist.”
בינתיים באתר החרדי שטיבל: נער ערבי בן 17 שנשרף בעודו בחיים=מחבל pic.twitter.com/h7bgtO2sHT
— LiatBS (@liatbs) July 7, 2014
The hate trickles down. These two images were posted on the photo-sharing website Instagram – they are among hundreds posted on various social media sites inciting “revenge” and celebrating violence against Palestinians. The first image, posted on 3 July, apparently shows an Israeli soldier with a weapon on his shoulder and the word “revenge” with two bloody daggers tatooed or drawn on his back.
In the second image, posted on 6 July, the badly injured face of Palestinian American 15-year-old Tariq Abukhdeir appears next to an image of a pig.
Abukhdeir was savagely beaten by Israeli forces in eastern occupied Jerusalem last Thursday. He is a cousin of Muhammad Abu Khudair.
Not “fringe”
In a New York Times article today, Isabel Kershner presents the rampant racism that apparently led six Israeli youths to lynch Muhammad Abu Khudair as a “fringe” phenomenon. It is no such thing. Incitement comes from the top, Shaked is not alone in inciting this kind of genocidal hatred and it was Netanyahu who was the first to incite “revenge” after the bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers were found in the West Bank one week ago. And the Times is not alone in helping to whitewash it. I strongly recommend David Sheen’s latest article for Muftah on the phenomenon of racism in Israel and its widespread denial: “Jewish Groups’ Whitewash of Israeli Racism Ensures It Will Fester.” With thanks to Ofer Naiman for assistance with research and Dena Shunra for translation.
