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<h1 id="reader-title">How Israel protects its settlers who burn
Palestinian children alive</h1>
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<article class="node-14734 node node-blog view-mode-full
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<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ali Abunimah</a></span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2015-07-31T17:12:13+00:00">31 July 2015</span></span>
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Ahmad Talat</div>
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<figure class="file file-image file-image-jpeg"
id="file-31608--2"><source media="(min-width: 72rem)"><figcaption
class="group-caption field-group-html-element"><small
class="credit"><span class="field field-publisher"></span></small></figcaption></figure>
<p>Before dawn on Friday morning, Ali Dawabsha, an
18-month-old Palestinian toddler, was burned to death in
an arson attack on two homes in the village of Duma in
the northern occupied West Bank.</p>
<p>The murder of Ali Dawabsha is not the first time
Israeli settlers have burned Palestinians alive.</p>
<p>Given the impunity Israel grants its settlers, what
chance is there really that Ali’s killers will be
brought to justice?</p>
<p>“We saw four settlers running away keeping distance
between each other,” 23-year old Musallam Dawabsha, one
of the villagers who tried to assist, <a
href="https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=766758">told
Ma’an News Agency</a>. “We tried to chase them but
they fled to the nearby Maaleh Efraim settlement.”</p>
<figure class="file file-image file-image-jpeg"
id="file-31610--2"><source media="(min-width: 72rem)"><figcaption
class="group-caption field-group-html-element"><small
class="credit"><span class="field field-publisher"></span></small></figcaption></figure>
<p>The attackers also left behind graffiti making clear
their racist motives: they painted a Star of David and
the words “revenge” and “Long live the Messiah King” on
the walls.</p>
<p>Ali’s mother is now in critical condition with serious
burns over 90 percent of her body. His father has burns
on 80 percent and Ali’s 4-year-old brother has 60
percent burns.</p>
<h2>Crocodile tears</h2>
<p>Following this horror, Israeli officials from Prime
Minister <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/benjamin-netanyahu">Benjamin
Netanyahu</a> on down have put on an ostentatious show
of condemnation and sorrow and vows to bring the killers
to justice.
</p>
<p>At the same time, the occupation has begun its
collective punishment <em>of Palestinians</em>, <a
href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4686046,00.html">moving
reinforcements</a> into the West Bank to repress
potential protests and <a
href="https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=766764">barring
Palestinians</a> from al-Aqsa mosque in occupied
Jerusalem.</p>
<figure class="file file-image file-image-jpeg"
id="file-31609--2"><source media="(min-width: 72rem)"><figcaption
class="group-caption field-group-html-element"><small
class="credit"><span class="field field-publisher"></span></small></figcaption></figure>
<p>It is hard to imagine a more hypocritical display than
the crocodile tears of the same leaders who <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/balance-un-gaza-report-cant-hide-massive-israeli-war-crimes">perpetrated
the massacre of 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza last year,
more than 500 of them children</a>, now feigning
outrage at the murder of one more.</p>
<p>Of course the Israeli declarations have a specific
goal: to try to paint the killing of Ali Dawabsha as an
exceptional act and to obscure the reality that the
violence of individual settlers is integral to the
structure of Israeli colonial occupation and apartheid.</p>
<p>For Israel this is a mere public relations crisis and
the expressions of outrage and “sorrow” are no more than
the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hasbara"><em>hasbara</em></a>
– propaganda – prescribed by spin doctors for the
current news cycle.</p>
<p>Equally hypocritical would be any condemnations from
the US administration of President <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/barack-obama">Barack
Obama</a> which regularly boasts about how much it has
done to arm and finance Israel and protect it from any
accountability.</p>
<h2>“A matter of time”</h2>
<p>“A burned infant was only a matter of time,” Israeli
human rights group B’Tselem <a
href="http://www.btselem.org/press_release/20150731_killing_of_baby_in_duma">declared</a>
after this morning’s attack.</p>
<p>“This is due to the authorities’ policy to avoid
enforcing the law on Israelis who harm Palestinians and
their property,” the group added. “This policy creates
impunity for hate crimes, and encourages assailants to
continue, leading to this morning’s horrific result.”</p>
<p>“In recent years, Israeli civilians set fire to dozens
of Palestinian homes, mosques, businesses, agricultural
land and vehicles in the West Bank,” B’Tselem said. “The
vast majority of these cases were never solved, and in
many of them the Israeli police did not even bother to
take elementary investigative actions.”</p>
<p>Impunity and laxness is the norm even in the most
brutal and egregious cases.</p>
<p>Just over a year ago a group of Israeli youths abducted
and burned to death the eastern occupied Jerusalem
teenager <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-abu-khudair">Muhammad
Abu Khudair</a>.</p>
<p>In that case, Israeli police took their sweet time to
find the suspects, despite the fact that they had video
footage of their faces and getaway car (<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/video-shows-faces-suspected-killers-palestinian-teen">first
published</a> exclusively by The Electronic Intifada).</p>
<p>It was perhaps only due to the massive international
outrage that they bothered to find them at all.</p>
<p>Their case is grinding its way through Israeli courts
but there’s little reason to trust a system that treats
Israelis who attack or kill Palestinians with
exceptional leniency.</p>
<p>This month, two Israelis who burned a Jewish-Arab
school in Jerusalem got a light sentence despite the
fact that they were totally unrepentant. On leaving
court, they declared that the crime was “<a
href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4682990,00.html">worth
it</a>” in order to deter Jewish and Arab
“assimilation.”</p>
<h2>Burned in a taxi</h2>
<p>Then there was the case of the family who settlers
burned alive on 16 August 2012.</p>
<p>Jamila Hassan, her husband Ayman and their children
Iman, 4, and Muhammad, 6, were riding in a taxi south of
Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, along with another
passenger and the driver.</p>
<p>The car was hit by a Molotov cocktail. Ayman and the
two children were badly injured. Muhammad suffered
severe burns all over his body.</p>
<p>“We are lost, our life has turned upside down. The
father, son and daughter are each in different worlds,
our life is difficult and miserable,” <a
href="http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=515766">Jamila
told Ma’an News Agency</a> two weeks after the attack.</p>
<p>Muhammad had just emerged in agony from yet another
surgery. “He screams from the pain a lot,” his mother
said.</p>
<p>At that time too there were Israeli promises of
“justice.” But what happened?</p>
<p>Police arrested three minors from a nearby Jewish
settlement and told the judge that they <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-police-link-fingerprints-to-boys-suspected-of-hurling-fire-bomb-at-palestinian-taxi-1.461007">had
found fingerprints</a> at the scene linking the
suspects to the crime.</p>
<p>According to <em>Haaretz</em>, Judge Yaron Mintkevich
ruled to keep the boys in custody “with a heavy heart,
due to their age” – they were reported to be between 12
and 13.</p>
<p>But in January 2013, Israeli prosecutors <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/case-dropped-against-israeli-teen-suspected-of-firebombing-palestinian-taxi.premium-1.492307">dropped
the case</a>, citing a “lack of evidence.”</p>
<p>Had they been Palestinian children accused of throwing
stones at occupation soldiers, they would have been kept
in custody for months, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-child-faces-10-years-israeli-jail/14707">subjected
to horrific abuse</a> amounting to torture and forced
to confess.</p>
<p>Obviously, that’s not how Israel treats its own
settlers who are subject to Israeli civil law, while
Palestinians, including children, are subject to
Israel’s <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/israeli-military-court-system">military
kangaroo courts</a>.</p>
<h2>Dismantle Israeli apartheid</h2>
<p>That built-in colonial equality is a reminder that the
settlers are not the cause, but merely an ugly
manifestation of Israeli colonial violence, rooted in
Zionism, that is fed from the top.</p>
<p>Who can believe that a “justice” ministry led by <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/ayelet-shaked">Ayelet
Shaked</a> – who in her <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes">notorious
genocidal appeal</a> last year called for the killing
of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes”
– can do justice for Palestinians?</p>
<p>Perhaps the settlers who burned little Ali to death had
taken the words of Shaked or any of the other Israeli
politicians who routinely incite against Palestinians in
the most extreme and violent terms to heart.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this: the murder of hundreds of
children in Gaza last summer, the burning of Muhammad
Abu Khudair, the attack that killed Ali Dawabsha are all
part of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/gaza-massacre-price-jewish-state">the
price Palestinians must pay</a> for Israel to continue
to exist and expand on their land as a racist
self-declared “Jewish state.”</p>
<p>The only way Ali Dawabsha or any other Palestinian can
ever get justice from the Israeli apartheid system is if
it is completely dismantled.</p>
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