(Dimi Reider-972mag.com).The sheer viciousness of this cold-blooded butchery should have provoked furious condemnation from those unequivocally opposed to the targeting of civilians – Israel’s civil society,the Left and the activist (“radical”) Left. However, at the time of writing, only two organizations spoke out: B’tselem,, announcing on Facebook and on its website that it is “appalled by the attack in Itamar and strongly condemns it. Intentional killing of civilians is a war crime and is unjustifiable. The Israeli and Palestinian authorities must work to locate and bring to justice those responsible for the attack.” About an hour later, Physicians for Human Rights joined in, announcing that the organization “strongly condemns the appalling attack in Itamar and calls the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to act in order to bring those responsible individuals to trial. Once again we learn that fences and security systems are not a guarantee for security. Only brave steps towards peace agreement and putting end to the conflict will bring end to these murderous acts.”
Apart from these two voices, and a quite a few individual activists expressing shock and dismay at the killings, much of Israel’s famously vibrant, undoubtedly committed activist Left remained silent.
The activist Left’s confused and muted response reveals a shameful double standard – one that is not necessarily thought-out and intentioned, but one that needs to be urgently confronted and weeded out. It demonstrates that despite political awareness and commitment to human rights and international law, our community has yielded to one of the most common afflictions of a conflict area, and dehumanized an entire community, consciously or subconsciously rendering it second-class, semi-legitimate target for brutal violence. I remember the same pattern of thought going back throughout the past decade of the second Intifada, certainly through less graphic and intimate attacks on civilians – right up to the road shooting some six months ago, when four settlers driving on a deserted road late at night were sprayed with gunfire, and then dragged out of the car and calmly executed; two of them were spouses who left nine orphans behind, but the radical Left’s silence was even more deafening than today.
I want address this silence here and confront some of the arguments that were raised today in its defense on my Facebook feed and in conversations with fellow activists.
To those among us citing the illegality and illegitimacy of the settler enterprise:
None of this justifies retaliatory violation of the very same laws, just like being robbed does not justify walking into the robber’s house and butchering him and his entire family. More generally, international law clearly allows armed resistance by occupied population to the armed forces of the occupier, but just as clearly bans targeting the occupier’s civilian population. The power of the law, certainly of international law, is in its totality and universality. We cannot call for selective application of the law against one party, and completely ignore the same law being broken by another; our legal argument loses any and all merit if we do that.
To those of us saying that no Israeli has the right to criticize any political violence by Palestinians, no matter how abhorrent: This is a subject for an entire separate post, but let me just say this – the inability to formulate your own opinion or criticize the party you generally support wins you no respect on either side of the conflict; the manifest double-standard used to apply supposedly universal principals completely undermines your argument; you afford Palestinian resistance fighters no dignity when you paint them as imbeciles completely deprived and excused of the human duty of distinguishing good and evil; and finally, you do your Palestinian comrades no service when you imply by your silence that the brutal murder of a family of five is just as legitimate as engaging in combat with occupation troops or holding mass protests of civil disobedience in Bilin, Nialin and Nebi Salach.
To those among us saying settlers serve an aggressive policy and that such violence, while regrettable, is aimed at the legitimate goal of driving “invaders” out: Watch your step. You’re wading deep into legitimizing one of the acts of war most despised and hated by all decent human beings, especially by progressives. It’s one thing if you support partitioning Israel-Palestine once again, and believe that populations should be moved to make this partition possible and to redress the illegal acts of occupation and land grab incremental to the establishment of the settlement enterprise in the first place. But killing innocent members of a civilian community in order to get the rest of the community to leave has one name and one name only in international law – ethnic cleansing. In fact, this is exactly the method used, to everlasting shame, by Israel to ethnically cleanse many of the Palestinian communities in the Nakba of 1948. You don’t’ want to be justifying the Nakba, or the crime of ethnic cleansing, do you?
Finally, a word about the perpetrator. It’s tempting and comforting to denounce him as lunatic, or to say, as I was told this morning, that the insult to the Palestinian cause is not the act itself but our association between the two. But while it seems plausible to believe that a person or persons involved in such an act would need to be at least a little unhinged, this isn’t the point. It’s safe to assume that neither this person, nor dozens of others who committed unjustifiable atrocities in the name of Palestinian freedom, nor many dozens of others who committed unjustifiable atrocities for what they believed was Israel’s defense, would have considered bathing their hands elbow-deep in innocent blood if it wasn’t for the situation of conflict.
The murderer of the settlers in Itamar is part of a bigger picture of violent strife, in which people do appallingly brutish things to each other; and he also bears personal responsibility for the act he had chosen to commit. If there is ever a peace agreement, in whatever format, between Israelis and Palestinians, the rehabilitation of perpetrators on all sides can and must be a part of it, and difficult though it may be to accept, the person who carried out last night’s atrocity should be included, along with military and paramilitary perpetrators on all sides. But he must not be exempt from paying some sort of price for his individual responsibility – whether through looking into the eyes of the families of his victims at a truth and reconciliation committee years from now, or by serving a lengthy prison term, or both.
Until then, we on the Left – especially the activist Left – must find a way of loudly and unreservedly condemning atrocities committed in the names of causes we believe in. We owe it to ourselves, to our struggle and to our comrades – as progressives and as human being