"The Meaning Of Mohamed Abu Khdeir's Murder," The New Yorker

Excerpt: "Yet the murder of Abu Khdeir was not quite like any other. This was different. It was intended to communicate a message that I imagine goes like this:

We, Israeli Jews, have the right to a full life and enjoyment of this land that we call Greater Israel. And you, Palestinian Arabs, have no place here. Your fruit trees won’t be safe from uprooting, or your crops from destruction, or your private property from unlawful seizure; you can’t just visit the spring next to your village, or drive to the sea, or embrace relatives or friends, even if their homes are only a few miles away, because you don’t belong here. This land is ours. It is not yours. If you still do not get the message, we will take your children to the forest and burn them, and thus purify our land. Perhaps then you’ll finally understand."

JULY 9, 2014

THE MEANING OF MOHAMED ABU KHDEIR’S MURDER

POSTED BY RAJA SHEHADEH

On July 2nd, a sixteen-year-old boy named Mohamed Abu Khdeir was sitting outside a mosque near his home in East Jerusalem when he was pulled into a car and kidnapped by Israeli Jews. His body was found in the Jerusalem Forest; he had been battered in the head and then, according to autopsy reports, burned alive. (There was soot in his lungs, and burns on ninety per cent of his body.) Six Israeli Jews, some of whom are minors, were arrested; three have confessed to the crime, according to Israeli reports.

Abu Khdeir’s murder came in the wake of the kidnapping of three Israeli teens—Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrach—who were murdered and buried by their Palestinian abductors in shallow graves. After their abduction, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that Israel’s working assumption was that they were alive, even though the evidence, including a desperate cell-phone call from one of the boys, suggested otherwise. The search for the boys took the form of a brutal, sweeping search and arrest operation conducted by the Israeli Army throughout the West Bank, and helped to aggravate the climate of hatred and revenge. Two months after the nine-month U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations folded, Israel is now mobilizing its forces for a possible ground attack on the Gaza Strip, and Hamas is firing rockets. War, not peace, is the agenda of the day.

The media has been filled with images of the kidnapped Israeli Jews and, later, of Abu Khdeir. If you took away the baseballs cap that Abu Khdeir wore and the kippas worn by Fraenkel and Yifrach, you would not be able to differentiate among their young, fresh faces who was Israeli and who was Palestinian. The Israeli demonstrators who went through the streets in West Jerusalem shouting slogans such as “death to Arabs,” “a Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard,” looking to beat any Arab they encountered, had to ask passersby for the time in order to find out from their accents who was Jewish and who wasn’t.

Many other incidents of shooting and killing of Palestinians by the Israeli Army and Jewish settlers—and of Israelis by Palestinians—have been reported over the years. Settler violence has been going on in the West Bank since the early eighties. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Old City of Hebron as they were bent down in prayer. This is only the most famous of such crimes. There are reasons this place has often been described, to quote Thackeray, as a land of “fear and blood, crime and punishment.”

Yet the murder of Abu Khdeir was not quite like any other. This was different. It was intended to communicate a message that I imagine goes like this:

We, Israeli Jews, have the right to a full life and enjoyment of this land that we call Greater Israel. And you, Palestinian Arabs, have no place here. Your fruit trees won’t be safe from uprooting, or your crops from destruction, or your private property from unlawful seizure; you can’t just visit the spring next to your village, or drive to the sea, or embrace relatives or friends, even if their homes are only a few miles away, because you don’t belong here. This land is ours. It is not yours. If you still do not get the message, we will take your children to the forest and burn them, and thus purify our land. Perhaps then you’ll finally understand.

This is why the murder is so shocking, and why it resonates among so many, no less in Israel than on the Palestinian side. Israelis, undoubtedly, have heard a message in killings by Palestinians, too. Many take them to mean that only an ever greater show of force will keep them safe, even though only peace will bring them security. But some of them are also frightened by what they hear from each other. The names of the young people arrested for killing Abu Khdeir have not been released because a gag order is in place, but they reportedly are part of the Haredi community. Israeli commentators have pointed to racist indoctrination by everyone from extremist rabbis to Beitar Jerusalem football gangs to the Haredi education system itself.

Such introspection alone does not lessen the impact of the crime. Nor would it soften its impact to explain the particular background and community where the six accused were raised. This goes beyond their number and their community. It implicates all those in the country who have supported, assisted, or remained silent about what has been taking place next door over the past four decades, in the land over which their government and armed forces have been exercising full control. It also implicates those outside lobbyists and contributors to settlement enterprises who have worked to advance this illegal occupation. And yet it has to be said that not all segments of the Israeli public are as vulnerable to this onslaught of incitement. Those who are at the low end of the economic spectrum are the most susceptible because of the economic benefits they can derive from the settlement project.

The urgent question is this: where is the peace camp in Israel? I put the question to Judy Blanc, an eighty-five-year-old Israeli who is one of the founders of the anti-war group Women in Black; for three decades, she has stood every Friday on a corner in West Jerusalem decrying the occupation. She told me that she thought people in Israel were, in a basic sense, confused: “Much action is taking place on Facebook, but not beyond it.” I asked her if the political defeat of the right, of the sort that took place in 1992, was likely. “Now is not then,” she said.

There is no doubt that war and occupation lead to moral depravity, which is more in evidence now than ever. Nadim Nuwara, a seventeen-year-old student at the St. George School, in Ramallah, next to where I live, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier on May 15th for no apparent reason.

And yet I remain hopeful that this horrendous murder will open eyes in Israeli society and among its supporters abroad to the ills and consequences of colonialism and occupation, and cause them to change course. Seamus Heaney, referring to the tragedy of his country, once wrote, “Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing.” We, both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, live here. Kidnappings, Israeli air strikes, and Hamas Qassam rockets will not drive away or destroy either community. Israel has a mighty military arsenal and is said to be the sixth-largest arms exporter in the world, yet neither its conventional nor nuclear armaments have helped it to win the peace—nor will they this time around. Hamas has proven in this latest round that it possesses rockets that can reach not just Tel Aviv but Jerusalem, but does this mean that it can win in a military confrontation and destroy Israel?

We both live here, and will continue to do so no matter the conditions and the dangers. Violence against civilians and military force can’t change that; they can only, if they continue, doom both sides to a future neither wants.

A time will come when all these simple truths will become evident to the majority on both sides. Perhaps the time is now. Should it be so, the death of the innocent, young Abu Khdeir and all the others who are now dying in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere in this troubled land would not have been entirely in vain.

Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah. He is the author of several books, including “Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape” (2007), for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize. His latest book is “Occupation Diaries.” An expanded version of his Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Is there a Language for Peace?,” will be published next year.

Read Lawrence Wright’s 2009 article on Gaza, Hamas, and Israel’s response to the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.