Another day, another act of extreme “price tag” violence. It’s all getting to be terrifyingly, horrifyingly routine.
Early this morning, suspected Jewish extremists — or heck, let’s just call them what they are, suspected Jewish terrorists — set a mosque on fire on fire in Tuba Zangaria, a Bedouin village in the northern Galilee. The blaze caused “serious damage” to the mosque, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told The New York Times, and destroyed copies of the Koran as well as walls and rugs. The arsonists also took the time to spray-paint a message in Hebrew on the outside walls of the mosque: the words “Price Tag,” “Revenge” and “Palmer.” “Palmer,” it is believed, is a reference to Asher Palmer, a settler from Hebron who was killed last week in a car crash that Israeli police have labeled a terrorist attack — though what the people of a small Bedouin village in northern Israeli have to do with the death of an Israeli settler near Kiryat Arba remains utterly perplexing.
This was the third arson attack on a mosque in the last month, but the first such attack committed inside Israel (the other two mosque-burnings have taken place in the West Bank). It is part of a growing trend of right-wing Jewish attacks on Palestinians, Palestinian property, and Jewish leftists that has grown so frequent and so organized that even the Shin Bet has begun, rather stunningly, to describe the attacks as “terrorist” incidents. According to a September 13th Haaretz article published titled “Shin Bet: Israel’s extreme rightists organizing into terror groups”:
Extreme right-wing Jewish activists in the West Bank have moved from spontaneous acts against Arabs – following the demolition of Jewish homes by Israeli authorities, or terror attacks against Jews – to organized planning that includes use of a database of potential targets, according to new analysis by the Shin Bet security service.
The small groups of Jewish extremists are difficult to infiltrate and carry out surveillance on Arab villages and collect information about access points and escape routes in the villages. They are also collecting information about left-wing Israeli activists.
The fruits of this all this busy terrorist organizing have been widespread, vicious, and alarming, and have included everything from assaulting and brutalizing Palestinians to torching cars in Arab villages, uprooting and burning olive orchards, setting fire to mosques, attacking an Israeli military base in the West Bank, and vandalizing the property of well-known peace activists. And yet, much of it goes unreported or unremarked upon, gets treated as non-events by Israel’s media, security services, politicians, and public. “We’ve become used to it,” wrote Yossi Gurvitz in a disturbing article this past June in +972 titled “Settler ‘price tag’ pogroms against Palestinians go under the radar.” “Pogroms are a daily event – nothing to write home about, as long as they are kept within bounds. It’s background noise. A dog bites a man. Nothing to see here, move along.”
For whatever reasons, this morning’s attack on the Tuba Zangaria mosque did manage to break through the consensus of silence, enough at least to wrench statements out of both Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres. Peres later jogged up north with Israel’s two chief rabbis to survey the damage and express solidarity with Tuba Zangaira’s residents (and, perhaps, try to quell their protests). The only problem is that statements of outrage have only so much meaning when every other act, intention, and ambition of your administration is dedicated to displacing and disempowering the wounded population. They’re almost as absurd as, say, condemning the atrocities at Abu Ghraib when you and your advisers have given the green light to waterboarding, Guantanomo, and Shock-and-Awe.
Actually, come to think of it, George W. Bush didn’t condemn the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, not really, not initially. As the ever-brilliant Susan Sontag observed, he merely expressed shock and disgust at the photographs, “as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.” And sure enough, Netanyahu harped on the representation of the crime as well: “The images are shocking and have no place in the State of Israel,” he said (emphasis added).
Which means: expect more Price Tag attacks.
I applaud Lizzy for using the same language that *they* use. If a Palestinian so much as sneezes in the direction of an Israeli Jew, it is referred to as terrorism and the term “price-tag” doesn’t come close to describing the terror that settlers routinely engage in. Any unsuspecting American perusing headlines wouldn’t really grasp the reality of Israeli terrorism or that such a thing even exists if they were relying on watered down headlines from the mainstream media.
We can welcome the statements in the US in reaction:
In a statement released in wake of the mosque attack, national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham H. Foxman said on Monday that his group joined “the leadership and people of the State of Israel in expressing shock and outrage at this heinous attack.”
“Israeli society must make clear that violence is never acceptable, whatever the grievance, whatever the issue, and must continue to reinforce this core value of Israeli society,” the ADL chief said.
In another statement by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the group’s president Simcha Katz and vice president Rabbi Steven Weil condemned “the reported acts of vandalism, in which Israelis are alleged to have entered a mosque and set fire to it, destroyed holy objects and wrote hateful graffiti messages on the walls. There is no justification for such actions. Jews should know very well that such actions are beyond the pale.”
However, what Lizzy said of Israeli authorities is equally applicable here:
“The only problem is that statements of outrage have only so much meaning when every other act, intention, and ambition of your administration is dedicated to displacing and disempowering the wounded population.”
the MONSTER is now totally unleashed, on-the-loose, out for blood, emboldened by its master (the state and IDF), and this is just the beginning … the right-wing theo-fascists who now run israel (at least in a de facto sense) are bringing the pain, violence, thuggery, racism, all of it … the last few people in the world who had any doubts about what kind of regime the gov’t of israel has become and what kind of people now rule there can no longer claim ignorance or be apologists for these criminals
Pretty horrible stuff, my thoughts are with the residents of Tuba Zangaria today. Israel’s reaction to this atrocity will say be important for many reasons. If they don’t reign in on those who perpetrated this and put an end to these disgusting actions, the settlers will only become more brazen.
I hope they do the right thing here, a lot of Jews in the diaspora are watching this carefully, Israel’s actions will dictate their support.
Wait until they’re facing their Red Army. It’s going to get very ugly. No more excuses.
Hej!