Resisting History, Revoking Rights

"All those weighing whether to engage in terror, all those thinking about harming innocent citizens, all those involved in terror, need to take into account that there will likely be repercussions, not only personally, but for their families as well."
Israeli Minister of the Interior Gilad Erdan

 

Israeli rights group B'Tselem slammed the decision to revoke Nadia Abu Jamal's residency permit [AFP]

Interior Minister Erdan has canceled the residency permit given to Nadia Abu Jamal, wife of one of the two Har Nof synagogue terrorists. She is to be deported out of Israeli geography, and stripped of any entitlements to financial or social benefits. Her original permit to enter Israel was granted on the basis of the "family reunification" law when she married one of the terrorists, a resident of East Jerusalem, Ghassanm Abu Jamal. 

The two terrorists from Jabel Mukaber who carried out the attack on a Har Nof synagogue, November 18, 2014 (screen capture: Channel 2)

"[In] view of the severity of your actions, [assisting in the attack] is a blatant breach of trust as a resident of the State of Israel ... I decided to use my authority and cancel [Mahmoud Nadi] your permanent residence permits in Israel."

Interior Minister Gilad Erdan

 

"This is totally non-effective. It plays into the hands of the enemy, which accuses us of ethnic cleansing. Policies like revoking residency and destroying homes mean Israel will lose any sympathy it might have gained from the terrorist attacks."
David Newman, dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ben Gurion University

 

"The criminal justice system is based on the fact that family members of someone who commits a crime are not liable for any punishment."

"People who break the law and are a danger to society should be placed behind bars, but not their families."

Ronit Sela, head, East Jerusalem project, Association for Civil Rights in Israel

Mahmoud Nadi drove a suicide bomber to the 2001 terrorist attack in Tel Aviv at the Dolphinarium nightclub that killed Israeli 21 teenagers. Nadi served ten years in prison. Now, he will no longer receive any of the rights or services that permanent resident status confers upon Palestinians living in East Jerusalem. When Israel successfully defended itself from the 1967 combined Arab states' attack on its existence it took possession of defeated Jordan's control of East Jerusalem.

 

When it did so, it offered permanent residence status to the inhabitants, giving residents Israeli papers enabling them to travel freely about the city, enjoying social benefits awarded to Israeli citizens. About 300,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem as permanent residents, not however, as citizens of the country. They can legally vote municipally, access Israeli health care, receive social security; they pay Israeli income tax and Jerusalem property tax.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday informed the Knesset that such disenfranchisement moves now represent the policy of his government. The policy authorizing demolishing the homes of terrorists has also been renewed after a 7-year interregnum. These initiatives have resulted from recent events in Israel and Jerusalem in particular, with a spate of terrorist attacks on Jews.

 

The Bar Nof Synagogue attack was just the latest of the atrocities that riveted Israelis to the realization that violent enmity from some members of the Israeli-Palestinian community have been ramped up to the point of frustrating unresolvability. From that vantage point of frustration and fear have arisen the new polices. Lifting the previous demolition orders were not proven to be useful, so reinstating them is a signal that this particular type of punishment is merited by the actions of a few.

The Palestinian Authority and exterior agencies sympathetic to the Palestinians have made haste to make up the difference, supplying to the families of suicide bombers or killers of Jews, pensions and alternative living accommodation. And the reasons are simple enough; the glorification of martyrdom on behalf of the cause of "resisting" the oppressors and occupiers busy trying to protect themselves from the ongoing vicious depredations of Palestinian 'martyrs'.

 

If a more vibrantly destructive issue of a revolving wheel of increasing violence and reaction within a civil society attempting by all means possible to administer justice within a democracy exists one looks in vain to discover its whereabouts. One can always look to Syria for the Arab method of putting down insurrections, with the deliberate mass slaughter, the ongoing masses of displaced Syrians, the irresolvable enmity between Shiite and Sunni.

 

Attempts at the neutrality of justice requiring that the families of violent terrorists be treated equally with loyal citizens at the hands of the government haven't worked to persuade those burning with the resentment of nurtured victimhood, incited by the authorities of the Palestinian Authority, which continues to agitate the situation, while decrying the presumptively slanderous intentions of the State of Israel against the suffering Palestinians.

 

What prevails is the Israeli view of the sanctity of life against the Palestinian view of sacrifice for the idealization of returning the geographic status quo to its pre-1948 status. Idealized because there were no Arab "Palestinians" before that time, and there was no opportunity for the Arabs who now think of themselves as Palestinians to make of the geography, divided between Egypt and Jordan, a state of their own.

So Palestinians will continue their provocation, their insistence that the revocation of residency of Palestinians living in Jerusalem represents a plot by Israel to diminish the Arab population and thus weaken any connection to East Jerusalem. With the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary of Judaism and Islam the jewel in the crown awaiting that day when Israel plans to demolish any symbol of Islam and restore the sacred site to Judaism.

 

While in truth, the Jordanian-controlled Waqf does its utmost to destroy any ancient relics reflecting Judaic presence on the Mount, so it can continue to mount its insistence that no ancient Jewish temples ever existed there, that it was always the location of Islamic sanctity, even pre-dating Islam itself, in a total re-write of history and fact.