More on the settlers' cumulative price tag:
Attacks by settlers against Palestinian property in the West Bank has risen by 57 percent in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period last year, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which documents violence in the Palestinian territories.
A reader chimes in:
Thank you for posting that disturbing video. The mosque burning that you refer to actually happened in Northern Israel, specifically, in Galilee. Northern Israel is heavily populated with Israeli Arabs and Galilee as a whole is majority Arab, although the demographics of the sub-regions within Galilee vary. There is an important point here: unlike the attacks in the West Bank, this bit of arson was committed against fellow Israeli citizens. While Netanyahu and others are condemning this attack, the settlers responsible for it decided to extend their "reprisals" to an Israeli Arab community inside Israel proper, which should give you some idea of their attitude towards Israelis of Arab descent.
Goldblog covers this as a matter of sin (which it is) but not as a matter of politics (because that would require scales falling from eyes about the increasingly ugly nature of the fundamentalists who now dominate the Jewish state). An Israeli reader has more detail:
The mosque burned yesterday is in Tuba-Zangria, which is a Bedouin village inside Israel, which arguably makes the item even more ominous. Tuba-Zangria is close to Safed, which is now the home of many extremist Jews, and in particular the city's municipal rabbi, Shmuel Eliahu, who is responsible among other things for spearheading campaigns against rental of apartments to Arabs, and against Arab students studying at Safed. In case it wasn't clear, this Shmuel Eliahu is on a government payroll. Needless to say, he was not fired for his hate speech, and probably will not be fired.
This is another escalation in my country's sad decline into a racist theocratic cesspool.
That's the kind of language only Israelis use, isn't it?
(Photo: An Arab-Israeli boy inspects a burnt mosque after it was torched overnight in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria, in the northern Israeli Galilee, on October 3, 2011. Vandals torched the mosque in northern Israel in a suspected revenge attack by right-wing extremists that sparked a 'furious' response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images.)
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