Convoluted Contortions

"...A not insignificant number of requests regarding employers firing or wishing to terminate the employment of Arab male and female employees [were received], solely on racial grounds."
Commission for Equal Employment Opportunities, Israel

As police in Israel hand over home demolition notices to families of the four Palestinian attackers from east Jerusalem, two who killed five people in a synagogue among them, tension between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis hovers on high flame. Said Abu Jamal, a cousin of the two synagogue attackers, themselves cousins, said that police had summoned their families and issued demolition orders on Thursday.

Jewish worshippers prayed on Wednesday at a synagogue in Jerusalem where two Palestinian militants killed four rabbis and a policeman in an attack the day before. Ronen

Relatives of Abdel al-Shaludi assess the interior of his home, demolished by explosives. (Photo: Allison Deger)

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/palestinians-shaludi-demoliton#sthash.u3GBZRH4.dpuf

Tragic in one sense, making families homeless by destroying their abodes. These are the same families, on the other hand, Israeli citizens all, who jubilantly celebrated the wild success of their family members' abhorrent attack killing four rabbis and a Druze Israeli policeman who arrived on the scene to stop the carnage. It was these family members who felt so empowered by the slaughter that they handed out candies and proclaimed their pride in their family members' heroic act.

Which places matters in some kind of perspective. Logically when people are citizens of a country and one or more of their family members creates a scene of violent bloodshed, there is shame and regret and a profound sense of loss. Not, however, in Israel. So what can be done about it? The wall that physically separated West Bank and Gaza Palestinians from Israel, making it infinitely more difficult for terrorists to carry out those infamous suicide bombings has morphed into discrete killing opportunities from within.

No one knows quite where, who, when and how another attack will present itself. And since it is not Jews who are so intent on killing other Jews or Arabs, or Christians or Druze, but Arab Israelis whose psychotic pathology of hatred and vengeance commits them to such violence, distrust and fear results, unsurprisingly. To describe that fear and apprehensive as 'racist' is to completely ignore the background and the reality on the ground.

Families of two other Palestinian attackers received similar demolition notices. A practise that had once been the subject of great controversy has, through desperation, been renewed. What else to do, how else to react, other than to imprison all family members as a collective form of punishment more suitable to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and other stout exemplars of democracy and rule of law? So, demolish the symptom of disaffection for lack of any other possible recourse to exampling.

The tensions brought on by Palestinians believing in their brazen entitlement in a Jewish state to insist that Jews may not defile what they consider to be an Islamic holy site by their praying presence has continued to escalate, as Jews, understandably, feel it is their right in their own homeland, to approach their most sacred site and there honour their god in prayer. But because such an intolerable insolence infuriates Muslims, hysteria prevails and with it the goad to murder.

Wailing Wall, east Jerusalem

So, if one cannot predict or even begin to imagine where and when the next target for Palestinian rage will eventuate, nervous and fearful Jews seek to protect themselves by lessening the opportunities to come into direct contact with Arabs who in the aggregate would never think of harming anyone, but the occasional loose screw would not only think of it, but act on it. Hardly racism, but self-protection

Racism perhaps more logically is the refusal by Arabs to recognize the rights of Jews to live in their ancestral land in peace, and to worship where their ancestors did, in security.