I commend Gideon Levy’s sharp new piece to readers still reeling from news of the Palestinian toddler-roasting that just took place in the West Bank. He pulls all of the threads together, leaving little for anyone to add.
That child was Ali Dawabsheh. He was 18 months old. Say his name.
His attackers hail from a Jewish colony called Ma’ale Efraim. There are only 1,800 or so people there, but unsurprisingly, despite all the tough talk, no arrests have been made. That’s usually the case when it comes to attacks by crazed Jewish colonists on people and property in Palestine. Nine Palestinian family houses have been torched in the past three years. No prosecutions.
The pure savagery of the Ma’ale Efraim settlers is already a matter of record:
[A]rmed settlers from the Ma’ale Efraim settlement…arrived on the farmland of Sameer Mohammed Khader Bani Fadel, a forty-year-old shepherd, daring him to walk in their direction. When he refused and attempted to flee, the settlers gathered his goats and burned them alive on a wooden pyre….Bani Fadel, a father of six, said the goats were his only source of income. The Israeli army promised an investigation but never made arrests. According to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, 91 percent of investigations into crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians and their property are closed without indictments being served.
Prime Minister Netanyahu thunders appropriately, and the IDF calls it “Jewish terrorism,” but the construction of another 300 new settler homes in Palestine has just been approved. Nudge nudge, wink wink. The slow annexation of Palestine continues.
Meanwhile, the main concern of the IDF and the captive Palestinian Authority is to put a lid on protests, not to find the perpetrators.
But those brave settlers are merely a symptom in any case. You can reasonably expect this sort of thing when one nation brutally occupies another one, steals the native inhabitants’ land and most of their water, destroys their livelihoods, bulldozes their houses, and routinely harasses and shoots them. Colonists are enabled and encouraged every step of the way to carry out their depraved acts, revelling in near-impunity, the beneficiaries of an illegal occupation whose racist character is there for the world to see.
Who killed Ali Dawabsheh? The state of Israel. Full stop.
