SOMETHING rotten has ripened in Israel, breaking the skin of its body politic like a boil. It is a sickness that, far from being treated, has been encouraged to spread in the mistaken belief that it is in fact a cure.

Two events occurred in rapid succession. The home of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha was firebombed by radical religious Jewish settlers, killing the child and badly wounding his family. On Saturday, his father also succumbed to his injuries. Around the same time, an ultra-orthodox Israeli stabbed six people at a Gay Pride march in Tel Aviv, killing one girl. Interestingly, he had recently been released from jail after serving 10 years for stabbing participants in the annual Gay Pride Parade here in 2005. He said he had come “to kill in the name of God”. The men who caused the death of Ali Dawabsha undoubtedly believed the same thing.

The latter attack was high-profile enough to prompt even Benjamin Netanyahu to call it “terrorism”, a word hitherto reserved for others. Several others in the Israeli government have followed suit.

Palestinians are no longer the only targets of settler violence.

But they can hardly feign shock and surprise. After all, Israel’s justice minister defined the enemy as the entire Palestinian people, calling Palestinian children “little snakes”. Why then is it shocking that someone decided to kill one little snake before it grew fangs?

That Israel has grown steadily more right-wing is no revelation. It is a development that has been lamented by more reasonable segments of the Israeli population, voices in the wilderness though they are, and actively encouraged and abetted by successive right-wing governments. There is, as Israeli professor Idan Landau puts it, “a convergence of interests between Jewish militants and the state: namely, nationalistic supremacy”.

Violence by the settlers, who are increasingly religious radicals as opposed to their more secular nationalist forebears, has consequently been ignored when it has not been abetted, an offering at the altar of this nationalist supremacy.

In data compiled by Yesh Din, out of a sample of 1,000 cases of settler violence that included deaths of Palestinians and damage to property, 91pc were closed without indictment. In all, “only 2.5pc of complaints by Palestinians result in conviction”.

But now the Palestinians aren’t the only targets — not that settler violence against Palestinians makes the rounds on Israeli media. When it does, it is considered a ‘price tag’ for Palestinian resistance, winked at and often cheered on. Attacks on Christians — one settler leader openly called for arson attacks against churches for their “idol worship” — are on the rise as well. During the last assault on Gaza, right-wing mobs attacked pro-peace Israeli rallies with impunity.

In a familiar escalation the targets have shifted from Palestinians to Israeli-Arabs to Israelis who do not agree with the extremist views of the ultra-religious forces. And if this has set alarm bells ringing in corridors of power in Israel, even then it may be simply too late to correct course, because the dark ideology that powers this engine remains intact and encouraged.

Yigal Amir, who killed former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, did so out of religious conviction; he thought Rabin’s actions would doom Israeli Jews. Killing him was thus, in his view, God’s will. Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinian Muslims in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, was also doing God’s will. Both are heroes to the kind of people that burned Ali Dawabsha to death. In a 2006 poll, 30pc of Israelis were found to support a pardon for Amir, with the number jumping to 50pc in the case of right-wingers and the religious. Goldstein is also considered a ‘saint’ by those same rabbis who provide an ideological basis for killing children.

The bulk of Israeli settlers, especially those centred around Jeru­salem, are considered ‘economic’ settlers; they are attracted by the many subsidies and benefits provided by the state. But of the half million or so settlers, about 130,000 are known as the Gush Emunim or Bloc of the Faithful. They are those who, according to Israeli academic Gadi Taub, believe “Arabs are an alien element in the organic unity of Jews and their land”.

These are the ones who will even fight against the Israeli army when it comes (once in a blue moon) to demolish illegal structures in the settlements or when, during the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, some settlements were disbanded. Nor are the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) immune to their influence.

As early as 2009, the Israeli publication Haaretz warned that army rabbis had turned the IDF into “an instrument of divine punishment”. Statements from IDF soldiers and rabbis during the last Gaza assault indicate that the trend has picked up pace.

People have sometimes, however hesitantly, drawn parallels between Pakistan and Israel. But when it comes to this issue, while Pakistan is finally awakening from its long national nightmare, Israel’s descent into the abyss has only just begun.

The writer is a member of staff.

Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2015

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