Israel's fear of abandoning Jewish morality will backfire

Four days after a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped outside of an East Jerusalem mosque and burned alive in a forest nearby, the Shin Bet revealed partial details of its investigation: Six Israeli Jews believed to belong to an ad-hoc extremist group have been arrested.

A cloud of secrecy has hovered over the police investigation, but suspicions that Jewish rightists were behind the murder was clear from the start, in both the Israeli and Palestinian public. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself condemned the murder immediately after on the basis of it having been the act of Jewish extremists, even as a strict gag order kept the details of the probe undercover.

Rumors began flying as the police kept mum that 16-year-old Mohammed Abu-Khdeir was killed by members of his own family over unsubstantiated claims that he was a homosexual, or by a rival clan for some yet-to-be-determined settling of debts. The teenager's family insisted that this was not an honor killing and that their son was a good student with no enemies. The false claims continued to circulate, with the Israeli right-wing eager to prove to themselves and to others that Jews could not be behind such a heinous crime.

There was little doubt that this was the work of Jewish terrorists. The abduction was carried out less than 12 hours after the three Israeli teenagers abducted and murdered three weeks before were laid to rest and amidst rampant demonstrations of Israeli Jews in Jerusalem calling for blood and death to the Arabs.

The gag order was sealed again Sunday just hours after the initial details of the investigation were revealed, at the behest of the Shin Bet, which is holding the Jewish suspects in custody. One small piece of information managed to filter through before the file was removed from public information, however: that the same six suspects were linked to the abduction attempt of a 9-year-old boy in the same East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shoafat just a day before Abu Kheidar's kidnap and grisly murder.

Netanyahu again condemned the murder, in his first press conference in more than two years. "Israel does not differentiate between terror," Netanyahu said, vowing to crack down on Jewish extremists with the same vigorousness Israel uses against Palestinians. "As I condemn the calls of death to Arabs, I condemn calls of death to Jews." In the same breath, he followed by declaring that what differentiates Israel from its neighbors is that the latter welcomes murderers and terrorists and names streets and squares after them.

Netanyahu's weakened condemnation, to play into the Israeli sentiment that Jews could not be responsible for such an act, were followed by a harsher and more surprising remark by his right-wing Economy Minister, Naftali Bennett, who proposed subjecting Jewish terrorists to the same legal retributions accorded to Palestinians convicted of security offenses.

The prime minister's quick clarification of Jews' moral superiority will do little to douse the flames engulfing Israel, nor will the gag order reinstated on the investigation, leaving open conspiracy theories and unsettled suspicions.



Arab rioters have taken to the streets of Israel, from Wadi Ara to the highways leading to wealthy suburbs in both north and south, hurling firebombs and stones, and lighting tires aflame. Israel's highways are beginning to look like the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The riots subsided briefly on Sunday morning and resumed at full force on Sunday evening, following news of the arrest. Police were forced to shut down major thoroughfares over the course of the demonstration, as the rioters targeted cars entering the Jewish neighborhoods. Nearly 200 demonstrators were arrested in a single day of clashes.

Jewish claims to moral superiority must not be taken at face value. Extremists are capable of and have carried out far more extensive massacres over the course of Israel's recent history. Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Palestinians in Hebron is the most well-known of these attacks, but many other examples exist: the Bat Ayin underground's plan to wipe out a Palestinian girls' school, deserted soldier Eden Natan-Zada's murder of four innocent Arab passengers on a bus in Shfaram, contractor Asher Weisgan's targeted shootout of four of his Palestinian workers, the arson of a home in Sinjil which trapped and killed an entire Palestinian family.

The Israeli Arab demonstrations and concurrent clashes with police have drawn the war between Jews and Arab across the Green Line, into the affluent suburbs of secular Israel. Their riots were preceded by a venomous popular campaign among right-wing Israelis – not even those considered extreme - calling for bloody revenge over the murder of the three Israeli teens. What will stop these Jewish revenge-seekers from countering their Arab counterparts in Israel in a bloody face-off?

Those who are capable of burning a teenager alive are capable of taking up arms against their enemy masses in the Israeli Arab sector. The Israeli government, however, is not capable of issuing a firm declaration without forgiving society for its Jewish morality in comparison with its neighbors and the "lone" extremists responsible for these attacks.

Unless Netanyahu acts on his pledge of cracking down on the right-wing violence, his claims of Jewish superiority will backfire and leave Israel not only in further isolation but in a bloody sectarian war.