[News] Ben Uliel and the murder of the Dawabsheh Family

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://english.palinfo.com/news/2020/5/22/Ben-Uliel-and-the-murder-of-the-Dawabsheh-Family
Ben
Uliel and the murder of the Dawabsheh Family
By Ramzi Baroud - May 22, 2020
------------------------------

Israeli media and Zionist apologists everywhere are busy whitewashing
Israel’s globally-tattered image using the rare indictment of an Israeli
terrorist, Amiram Ben Uliel, who was recently convicted for murdering the
Palestinian Dawabsheh family, including an 18-month-old toddler in the town
of Duma, south of Nablus.

The conviction of Ben Uliel by an Israeli three-judge court on May 18, is
expectedly celebrated by some as proof that the Israeli judicial system is
fair and transparent, and that Israel does not need to be investigated by
outside parties.

The timing of the Israeli court’s decision to convict Ben Uliel of three
counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder was particularly
important, as it followed a decision by the the International Criminal
Court (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, to move forward with its
investigation of war crimes committed in Occupied Palestine.

Considering how Israel’s extremists, especially those living illegally in
the Occupied West Bank, are governed through a separate, and far more
lenient system than the military regime that governs Palestinians, the
seemingly-clear indictment of the Israeli terrorist deserves further
scrutiny.

Israel’s apologists were quick to celebrate the verdict by the court, to
the extent that Israel’s own internal intelligence agency, the Shin Bet,
known for its notorious torture methods of Palestinian prisoners, described
the decision as “an important milestone in the battle against Jewish
terror”.

Others labored to separate Ben Uliel’s grizzly attack from the rest of
Israeli society, implying that the man was a lone wolf and not the direct
outcome of Israel’s unhinged racism and violent discourse directed at
innocent Palestinians.

Despite the clear indictment of Ben Uliel, the Israeli court was keen on
accentuating the point that the Israeli terrorist acted alone and that he
was not a member of a terrorist organization. Based on that logic, the
court argued that the judges “could not rule out that the attack was
motivated by a desire for revenge or racism without Ben-Uliel actually
being a member of an organized group.”

The verdict was a best case scenario for Israel’s image under the
circumstances, as it deliberately absolved the massive terrorist network
that spawned the likes of Ben Uliel and the Israeli army that protects
those very extremists on a daily basis, while whitewashing Israel’s
deservingly bad reputation as a violent society with an unjust judicial
system.

But Ben Uliel is, by no measure, a lone wolf.

When the Israeli terrorist, along with other masked assailants, broke into
the house of Sa’ad and Reham Dawabsheh at 4 am on July 31, 2015, he was
clearly on a mission to elevate his name within the ardently racist,
extremist society which has made the murder and ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians a sort of a divine mission.

Ben Uliel achieved his objectives completely. Not only did he kill Sa’ad
and Reham, but their 18-month-old son, Ali, as well. The only surviving
member of the family was 4-year-old Ahmed, who was severely burnt.

The murder of the Palestinian family, little Ali in particular, quickly
became the source of joy and celebration among Jewish extremists. In
December 2015, six months after the murder of the Dawabsheh family, a
25-second video clip that went viral on social media showed a crowd of
Israelis celebrating the death of Ali.

The video showed a “room of jumping, dancing men wearing white skullcaps,
many with the long sidelocks of Orthodox Jews. Some of them are brandishing
guns and knives,” The New York Times reported.

“Two (of the celebrating Israelis) appear to be stabbing pieces of paper
they hold in their hands, which the television station identified as
pictures of an 18-month-old child, Ali Dawabsheh.”

Despite Israeli police claims that they were ‘investigating’ the hate fest,
there is little evidence to suggest that anyone was held accountable for
the unmitigated celebration of violence against an innocent family and a
toddler. In fact, Israeli State prosecutors later claimed that they had
lost the original video of the dancing extremists.

The celebration of Israeli terrorism carried on unabated for years, to the
extent that on June 19, 2018, Israeli extremists chanted openly, taunting
Ali’s grandfather as he was leaving an Israeli court, with such obscene
slogans, as “Where is Ali? Ali’s dead,” “Ali’s on the grill”.

The heinous murder of Ali and his family, and the subsequent trial were
added to an array of other events that starkly challenged Israel’s
carefully concocted image of being a liberal democracy.

On March 24, 2016, Elor Azaria killed a Palestinian man, Fattah al-Sharif,
in cold blood. Al-Sharif was left bleeding on the ground while unconscious
after, per Israeli army claim, trying to stab an Israeli soldier.

Azaria received a light sentence of eighteen months, soon to be freed in a
massive celebration, like a conquering hero. Israel’s top government
officials, including Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, supported
the cold-blooded murderer throughout the trial. It will not come as a
complete surprise if Azaria claims a top position in the Israeli government
at some point in the future.

The celebration of murderers and terrorists like Ben Uliel and Azaria, is
not a new phenomenon in Israeli society. Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli
terrorist who killed scores of Palestinian worshipers while kneeling for
prayer at Al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil (Hebron) in 1994, is now
perceived as a modern martyr, a saint of biblical proportions.

In such cases, when the nature of the crime is so overwhelmingly violent,
the extent of which forces itself on global news media, Israel is left with
only one option – to use the indictment of ‘Jewish terrorism’ as an
opportunity to reinvent itself, its ‘democratic’ system, its ‘transparent’
judicial proceedings, and so on. Meanwhile, Israeli media and its
affiliates worldwide labor to describe the collective ‘shock’ and ‘outrage’
felt by ‘law-abiding’, ‘peace-loving’ Israelis.

The murder of the Dawabsheh family, although one of numerous acts of
violence perpetrated by Jewish extremists and the Israeli military against
innocent Palestinians, is the perfect case in point.

Indeed, a quick look at the numbers and reports produced by the United
Nations indicates that the Jewish settlers’ murder of the Palestinian
family was not the exception but the norm.

In a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA) in June 2018, UN investigators spoke of an exponential rise of
Israeli settler violence against Palestinians.

“Between January and April 2018, OCHA documented 84 incidents attributed to
Israeli settlers resulting in Palestinian casualties (27 incidents) or in
damage to Palestinian property (57 incidents),” the report read. That trend
continued, at times markedly increasing, with very little accountability.

The Israeli rights group, Yesh Din, has been following up on the small
percentage of settler violence cases that were opened by the Israeli
military and police. The group concluded that, “of 185 investigations
opened between 2014 and 2017 that reached a final stage, only 21, or 11.4%,
led to the prosecution of offenders, while the other 164 files were closed
without indictment.”

The reason for this is simple: the hundreds of thousands of Jewish
extremists who have been transferred to permanently settle in the occupied
territories, an act that starkly violates international law, do not operate
outside the colonial paradigm designed by the Israeli government. In some
way, they too, are ‘soldiers’, not only because they are armed and
coordinate their movement with the Israeli army, but because their
ever-expanding settlements lie at the heart of the Israeli occupation and
its continued project of ethnic cleansing.

Therefore, Jewish settler violence, like that committed by Ben Uliel,
should not be analyzed separately from the violence meted out by the
Israeli army, but seen within the larger context of the violent Zionist
ideology that governs Israeli society as a whole. It follows that settler
violence can only end with the end of the military occupation in the West
Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and with the demise of the racist Zionist
ideology that spews hatred, embraces racism and rationalizes murder.

*- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle.
He has authored a number of books on the Palestinian struggle including
‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine
Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at
Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of
California Santa Barbara.*
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