Crime And Collective Punishment

The three Israeli teenagers who went missing last month were found dead on Monday, leading Israel to step up its harsh crackdown on Hamas:

In the past two weeks, Israel has launched a massive security operation in the West Bank that has led to the rounding up of over 400 Palestinians suspected of being Hamas operatives. The house-to-house searches and mass arrests brought Palestinian youth out into the streets. At least five Palestinians have died after being fatally shot by Israeli soldiers in the resulting crackdown, including 15-year-old teenager Mohammed Dudeen. … At least three Palestinians in the isolated coastal strip have died as a result [of airstrikes].

The latest volley of violence:

Palestinian rockets hit two homes in Sderot but caused no injuries. Ten people were injured by the Israeli strikes. According to The New York Times, the Israeli military said they had launched airstrikes in response to earlier rocket fire, specifically targeted training sites associated with the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza. Israel also positioned troops along the Gaza border in what it described as a defensive measure.

Here are some young racist Israelis using the occasion to march through the streets yelling “Death to Arabs!”;

Their brazenness may well have been stirred by Netanyahu’s use of the word “revenge” to describe the Jewish state’s response to the horrifying murder of three Israeli teens. MJ Rosenberg is aghast:

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response was perhaps the most repulsive response to an event like this that I have ever seen by any national leader of a civilized country. He vows “revenge.” Revenge? Not Even George W. Bush used that term after 9/11, pledging instead to bring the people who committed the crime to justice. FDR after Pearl Harbor? The parents after Newtown?

It’s at moment like this that you realize how tenuous Israel’s commitment to Western values have become of late. Here, for example, is a tweet showing bright young things in favor of ethnic cleansing of Arabs, the obvious end-point for Greater Israel:

Many are worried about a Third Intifada in response to all this. Beauchamp:

The million-dollar question is whether this escalates militarily, especially given that the two sides were already at a tense point. Before the [Gaza] bombing, 16 rockets had been fired into Israel out of the Gaza Strip. Israel alleges that they were the first Hamas-fired rockets since 2012. Other more recent rocket fire had been from smaller groups, which Hamas arguably attempted to repress in order to avoid risking Israeli retaliation. “Either Hamas stops it,” Netanyahu said, “or we will stop it.”

Max Fisher points out:

Collective punishment is designated as a war crime by the Geneva Conventions, which regulate warfare under international law.

It’s also deeply harmful to the Israel-Palestine peace process, polarizing Palestinian political groups and civilians against Israel. It also polarizes Israelis against Palestinians. Israeli government rhetoric and actions implicitly blaming wide swathes of Palestinians for the kidnapping have coincided with incidents of Israeli mob violence against Palestinians, including what appears to be the abduction and murder of an Arab teenager. …

In any case, the Hamas political leaders based in Gaza seem unlikely to have participated in a kidnapping in the West Bank committed by rogue Hamas militants, so it’s not clear that air strikes on Hamas political leaders in Gaza are an appropriate or justified response.

And as Eli Lake observes, Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas commander believed by Israel to be the mastermind behind the recent wave of kidnappings in the West Bank, is not even in the country:

Senior Israeli officials confirmed for The Daily Beast that al-Arouri is the Hamas leader who has encouraged, funded and coordinated a campaign to ramp up kidnappings in the West Bank and that al-Arouri now resides in Turkey. …  [I]t could further complicate relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, two former allies that have tried recently to repair a broken relationship.

Meanwhile, Amjad Iraqi laments the “selective sympathy” on both sides when it comes to the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian children:

The apathy toward the “other child’s” suffering is painful to watch, including in this latest saga. In the two to three weeks following the abduction of the three Israeli boys, at least eight Palestinians were killed during Israel’s military responses in both Gaza and the West Bank. Among them were 10-year-old Ali al-Awour, 15-year-old Mohammad Dudeen and 22-year-old Mustafa Hosni Aslan. Ali died of wounds from an Israeli missile strike in northern Gaza; Mohammad was killed by a single live bullet in the village of Dura; Mustafa was killed by live bullets in Qalandiya refugee camp during clashes with an Israeli military raid.

I write the names of those three Palestinian boys not to belittle the horrific deaths of the three Israeli boys. I write their names because, while everyone will remember Gilad, Naftali and Eyal, no one will remember Ali, Mohammad or Mustafa.

And Susan Abulhawa decries the West’s double standard:

Palestinian children are assaulted or murdered every day and barely do their lives register in western press. While Palestinian mothers are frequently blamed when Israel kills their children, accused of sending them to die or neglecting to keep them at home away from Israeli snipers, no one questions Rachel Frankel, the mother of one of the murdered settlers. She is not asked to comment on the fact that one of the missing settlers is a soldier who likely participated in the oppression of his Palestinian neighbors. No one asks why she would move her family from the United States to live in a segregated, supremacist colony established on land confiscated from the native non-Jewish owners. Certainly no one dares accuse her of therefore putting her children in harms way.