West Bank firebombing reignites old hatreds in Israel

Both Israelis and Arabs hope to contain tensions after the lethal firebombing of a Palestinian family’s home.

Firebombing reignites old hatreds

If the lethal firebombing of a Palestinian family’s home in the dead of night on the Israeli-occupied West Bank proves to be a turning point, let’s hope it is for the better.

Some acts are beyond the pale, and the only bright spot in this dark episode has been the universal condemnation heaped on the fanatics responsible for torching the Dawabshas’ house in Duma, a dusty village outside the Palestinian city of Nablus, on July 31.

No one seriously disputes that the arson was carried out by Jewish settlers, possibly as a “price tag” revenge attack over an Israeli government move earlier that week to demolish two buildings in the West Bank settlement of Beit El.

Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called it for what it was — an act of terrorism — and the hardliners in the settler movement and the far Right of Israeli politics echoed him or bit their tongues.

The starkness of the tragedy brooked no other response. Little Ali Dawabsha, barely a toddler at 18 months, died in his cot when the house went up like a bonfire as the family of four slept.

In saving his wife and their other son, Saad Dawabsha was burned from head to toe and lingered until last Saturday, his funeral inciting a fresh burst of Palestinian anger across the West Bank. Wife Reham and Ahmad Dawabsha, 4, face long, painful recoveries.

The security forces of Israel and the Palestinian Authority so far have kept a lid on the tensions. They co-operate far more closely than is generally acknowledged and, in this case, both sides have a vested interest in dialling down the temperature.

Memories of the last intifada — Palestinian uprising — remain raw. The street violence, shootings and suicide bombings killed an estimated 3000 Palestinians and 1000 Israeli civilian and military personnel between 2000 and 2005, and led Israel to wall off the West Bank with a security barrier, devastating the economy of the Palestinian territories. A return to anything approaching that level of violence is the last thing reason would dictate.

Unfortunately, history shows how hard it is to see sense through the red mist of emotion. Much will depend on the vigour of the Israeli police investigation into the Duma atrocity. Netanyahu has promised justice for the victims and, as the saying goes, this must not only be done but seen to be done, especially on the Palestinian street. On any fair reading, the Israeli record in pursuing settlers is poor.

By most credible assessments, settlements are illegal under international law, having emerged after the seizure of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war inspired movement of ultra-Orthodox Jews back to the biblical lands. (Gaza and much of the Sinai were also occupied, but have since been let go by Israel.)

Some settlements present like middle-class suburbs, but most are off-limits to Palestinians and outsiders, fortified and guarded by heavily armed settlers, often with the Israeli army in close attendance. According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that keeps tabs on settler activity, there are 125 government-sanctioned settlements in the West Bank, plus another 100 mostly unapproved “outposts” that tend to attract radical toughs.

The settler population is estimated to be more than 350,000 by B’Tselem, citing Central Bureau of Statistics data, and is growing at twice the overall rate of Israel’s. The idea, say critics, is to plant Jewish roots so deep in the West Bank they can never again be dislodged. Make no mistake: the thorny issue of Jewish settlement is a key impediment to reviving the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

True, Netanyahu has tried to back away from the incendiary statement he made on the eve of the Israeli election in March dis­avowing support for a Palestinian homeland, the two-state solution pushed by Washington and the Europeans and also backed by Australia.

But his endorsement of settlement construction stands. This underpins the resentment of Palestinians on the ground in the West Bank who complain bitterly that settlers routinely get away with crimes of violence against them. “There is no point calling the police because the settlers have immunity,” says Issa Amro, a 34-year-old electrical engineering graduate who devotes his energies to running what he insists is a nonviolent youth resistance in Hebron, a hot spot on the West Bank.

When his house off Shahuda Street was firebombed in 2009 by men he believed to be from a nearby Jewish settlement, Amro went to the Judea and Samaria district police and, by his account, was fobbed off. A few months later, his outdoor furniture was torched, and this time an Israel Defence Force soldier who saw it happen professed to be willing to make a statement. Again, no action.

The 800-odd settlers in Hebron occupy a compound in the historic heart of the old city near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, protected by at least twice that number of Israeli troops, surrounded by 200,000 Palestinians whose homes dot the hillsides overlooking the Jewish community.

The settlers live in a pocket known as H2, under firm military control. But Amro says armed settlers regularly try to strongarm Palestinians into leaving or to sell. People are roughed up and pelted with rocks; sometimes there’s sniping from the settlement, he says. Homes are generally firebombed when no one is home, as was the case when his property was hit. But the tragedy in Duma proved what a recklessly dangerous business this can be.

Following the fatal strike on the Dawabshas’ home, the Palestinian Authority alleged there had been 369 attacks by Israeli settlers this year to July 27 — an average of 12 incidents a week. The list ran to the poisoning of water wells, destruction of olive trees, assaults and shootings.

In the hushed aftermath, one of the firebrands of the Israeli Right, Naftali Bennett, a one-time tech millionaire and cabinet minister who heads a party that wants Is­rael to formally annex the contested Area C of the West Bank, bracketed the “fringe group” of extremist Jewish settlers probably responsible for the firebombing with the threat posed by Islamist militants and Iran.

“They are terrorists … anarchists, a fifth column” and must “be eradicated swiftly and forcefully”, he wrote in The New York Times. The police were certainly goaded into action. Netanyahu ordered that punitive administrative detention orders used against Palestinian terrorism suspects — allowing them to be held for months without trial — be applied for the first time to Jewish extremists.

Two such orders were issued last Sunday as police raided settler outposts of Adei Ad, near Duma, and Baladim to the north. The subjects of the orders were well known to the Israeli security services. Meir Ettinger, a bespectacled 23-year-old who wears tangled pe’ot sidelocks, has boasted of participating in “price tag” attacks and did jail time for running what was dubbed by the Israeli media as a spy operation, tipping off settler outposts of moves by the army against them.

He is the grandson of Meir Kahane, a radical rabbi who was assassinated in New York in 1990 after founding the ultranationalist Kach movement, now banned. One of the young man’s claims to notoriety is to have terrorised a Palestinian shepherd by butchering a sheep in front of the poor man; on another occasion, he and his companions bungled an incursion into a Palestinian village and narrowly escaped being lynched by the infuriated mob, Israeli media reported.

Through his lawyer, Ettinger has insisted he had no part in what happened in Duma. However, domestic intelligence service Shin Bet says he was a ringleader of an extremist group that in June burned down the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fish, marking the site of a miracle attributed to Jesus. Ettinger also denies this.

The other detainee, Eviatar Slonim, also in his 20s, is reported to be prominent in the Hilltop Youth, the circle of radical young settlers in which Ettinger moves. A third administrative detention order, lasting six months, has been slapped on alleged fellow traveller Mordechai Meyer, one of five arrested over the arson attack on the Catholic church on the Sea of Galilee in Israel’s north.

The outing of Ettinger has trained the spotlight on a violent underground that seems to have become increasingly emboldened. James Dorsey, a senior fellow with the school of international studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, says a fan group supporting Kach stirred up racial trouble during a Europa League soccer match in Belgium last month between Israeli club Beitar Jerusalem and home side Sporting Charleroi, a “wake-up call” for Israel that was amplified by the Duma outrage.

Noam Arnon, the spokesman for Hebron’s settlers, says the community is horrified by the firebombing, just as Israelis on the quiet side of the security fence were.

“We oppose any terror and we hope that the criminals involved will be arrested and punished,” he explains. “Anyone … who conducts such a crime is not in our mind of our movement.”

As Arnon tells it, the settlers are the victims of unjust Israeli government polices, not the Palestinians. At 60, he is one of the old stagers in Hebron, having arrived in the first wave of settlers as a young man. The combination of religious zeal and neo-Zionism was incendiary even by West Bank standards: the Tomb of the Patriarchs is the second most sacred site in Judaism after Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the evident burial place of biblical giants Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. The site is revered by Muslims and Christians, too.

Still, the criticism that settlement expansion has taken off under Netanyahu doesn’t entirely stack up, which is what Arnon is driving at. While the number of settlers is growing — the small but conspicuous population in Hebron doubled from 400 in the past decade, he says — construction outside of Jerusalem and the main settlement blocs has been checked by the Israeli government’s “quiet freeze” on greenfield development. “Jews are not permitted to build a house or develop in any way,” Arnon complains. “We cannot buy houses. But they can’t stop us from having children.”

Controversy and contradiction go hand in hand with the settlements. But the constraints on construction, limited as they are, preserve a flicker of hope that the land will be available to strike a peace deal and make viable the repatriation of settlers — or provide security for those who stay in a future Palestinian state.

No one is holding their breath, especially after the events of the past fortnight. Sarit Michaeli, of B’Tselem, says the tragedy in Duma rammed home to Palestinians how the system has been stacked against them. The agency has logged nine cases of Palestinian homes being set alight in presumed settler attacks during the past three years, “and if there is a police investigation, it is usually shoddy”, Michaeli says.

This may be the exception. In Hebron, Amro certainly hopes so. There already has been trouble, with stones flung at soldiers and a Jewish community hit by flaming molotov cocktails. Worse will come unless there is more than a “few token arrests”, he warns, after settlers were blamed for further attacks on the West Bank on Thursday.

“There is no patience because there is no accountability,” Amro says. “Palestinians will take their revenge in their own way and the violence will feed into more violence. That is the tragedy we live with.”