Are the Israeli Jews Capable of Hate Crime and Hate Speech?

Are Israeli Jews capable of hate crimes? Many American and European Jews would answer – no way. After all, are the Israeli Jews not the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe who had fled the dens of hatred and intolerance? How could they be exhibiting the same hatred that was once the monopoly of the Christian Nazis?

Facts are, however, quite the opposite. It won’t be any exaggeration to say that they – i.e., from Prime Minister Netanyahu in the top down to a Jewish teenager - have learned the trade well from their former tormentors.

Abu Khudair, a 16-year old Palestinian boy from the eastern occupied Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, was abducted outside of his family’s home during the early morning on 2 July and his badly burned body was found in a Jerusalem forest hours later. A preliminary autopsy report indicated that Abu Khudair was burned alive.

Israeli media reported on Sunday that six suspects were arrested; a government official told media that they were “Jewish extremists.” Three of the suspects were released and the remainder three reportedly confessed to the crime and re-enacted it for investigators.

A day before Abu Khudair was lynched to death by Israeli Jews, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked published on Facebook a previously unpublished article of (late) Uri Elitzur who was leader of the settler movement and speechwriter and close advisor to Netanyahu. She endorses his views which are a call for genocide of the Palestinian people.

As noted by Ali AbuNimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, Shaked’s (and Elitzur’s) is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people are the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948.)


Shaked quotes, “And the morality of war knows that it is not possible to refrain from hurting enemy civilians… 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.”

It is a call for genocide because it endorses the slaughter of unarmed civilians including Palestinian mothers who give birth to the so-called “little snakes.”

It should be noted here that 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.”

It would be wrong to assume that such postings are a fringe phenomenon. Incitement for Jewish violence and hatred towards Arabs and Palestinians come from the top. Netanyahu was the first person to use the term “vengeance” after the bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers were found in the West Bank.

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.” When Abu Khudair’s cousin – Tariq Abukhdeir – a Palestinian/American was savagely beaten by Israeli forces in eastern occupied Jerusalem last Thursday, his beaten up face was compared with a pig in a Israeli website on July 6. Eye witness accounts show that Israeli police disguised as Palestinian civilians ambushed Tariq in his uncle’s back yard without provocation or warning, severely beating him for several minutes.

How about hate speech?

An Israeli Facebook page called for killing “a terrorist every hour” until three Israeli youths who were then missing were returned (the teens were found dead in the West Bank on 30 June). Nearly 21,000 Facebook users “like” the page.

A simple search of Twitter for the string ARAVIM, which means "Arabs" in Hebrew, produces a long list of messages by young Jewish Israelis calling to ethnically cleanse the country (courtesy of David Sheen@davidsheen) https://storify.com/davidsheen/israeli-army-the-next-generation


Some of these calls for genocide were from young men, but a majority of them seemed to be authored by young women:

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @maylevi1203: "Death to these f***ing Arabs" http://twitter.com/maylevi1203/status/487178189618159618

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @OrelPery: "I wish a painful death to Arabs" http://twitter.com/OrelPery/status/487105475855392768

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @OrtaL1ysaScar: "From the bottom of my heart, I wish for Arabs to be torched"

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @amit_ezra_new: "In the end there will be no more Arabs, God willing" http://twitter.com/Amit_Ezra_New/status/487183273848606720

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @noypausner: "I spit on you, you stinking Arabs" https://twitter.com/noypauzner/status/487181254303830016

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @dekelderi9: "We wage war so this will be our land without any Arabs" http://twitter.com/dekelderi9/status/487168028828643328

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @almasulin82: "Hating Arabs isn't racism it's a commandment from God" http://twitter.com/almasulin82/status/487145220086042

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @shira_agiv: "Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!" http://twitter.com/Shira_agiv/status/487111810701484033

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @Zohar_siso1: "Stinking Arabs, may you die, Amen" https://twitter.com/Zohar_siso1/status/487102207393685504

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @yarden_meir: "Kill them already, Arabs are w****s" https://twitter.com/yarden_meir/status/487100884543750144

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @stav_madmoni: "Arabs are not human, they're beasts" https://twitter.com/stav_madmoni/status/487022733876686848

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @shirzarfaty: "Death to Arabs you son of a w***e" https://twitter.com/shirzarfaty/status/487195295952805889

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @aviv_sahar: "Death to all of you Arabs you transfag" https://twitter.com/aviv_sahar/status/487197444170461184

#ZionStandUp for Israeli @ashlisade: "Kill Arab children so there won't be a next generation" https://twitter.com/ashlisade/status/487204733669498880

.@shirzarfaty: "Not just on our summer vacation we hate stinking ugly Arabs all our lives, for the rest of our lives" http://twitter.com/shirzarfaty/status/487197345574965249 …

Many Israeli Facebook users have posted violent and disturbing content on their personal accounts. Talya Shilok Edry, who has more than one thousand followers, posted the following “status”: “What an orgasm to see the Israeli Defense Forces bomb buildings in Gaza with children and families at the same time. Boom boom.” Edry’s Facebook timeline shows a pattern of calls for bloodshed against Palestinians. Writing about the murdered Abu Khudair, who was kidnapped and burned alive by Israeli youth, she stated: “Sweet settlers, next time you kidnap an Arab boy, call me and let me torture him!! Why do you get to have all the fun?”

It is long known that dehumanization – e.g., by denying the humanity of a targeted group and making it look subhuman - overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder; it becomes easy to justify the elimination of the targeted group. Nazis mastered this strategy, and as I hinted earlier, the Zionists are perfecting it. One simply has to dig up the pages from Der Sturmer to see the parallel between how the Jews were portrayed in the 1930s and the early 1940s by the Nazis and how the Palestinian Arabs are portrayed today inside Israel by the hateful Zionists and their supporters.

With such a caricature of the Palestinians, it has become all kosher for the Zionist leaders – all racists – to commit heinous crimes against their victims since the unholy birth of the state of Israel. Truly, racism and intolerance against the Palestinians, whose land they have grabbed, run so deep that many Israelis are unaware that what they are perpetrating are war crimes. How long will they be able to defy the world opinion with their wanton massacre of unarmed civilians whose only crime is that they are Palestinians?

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