Arabs’ West Bank village vulnerable

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DUMA, WEST BANK Days after suspected Jewish arsonists hurled a firebomb into a house, burning an 18-month-old toddler to death and injuring his parents and brother, the mayor of Duma pondered how to increase security for the West Bank town’s 3,000 residents. He had serious limitations.

“The only thing we can carry is sticks and lights,” Abed Alsalam Dawabsheh said as he sat in the courtyard of the village’s elementary school, converted into a mourning tent for the toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, who despite a common last name was not closely related to the mayor. “We are not allowed to carry weapons.”

Officially, Israel is charged with guaranteeing the security of Palestinian residents of the West Bank, but the arson Friday in Duma underscored the holes in the arrangement. Palestinian police do not operate in rural areas, and Palestinians say Israeli police and soldiers are lax in their enforcement of the law when Israelis are the suspects.

The Israeli Yesh Din organization, which offers legal counsel to Palestinians, claims that of 1,067 police complaints Palestinians filed against Israeli assailants in the last decade, only 19 ended in a conviction. “Law enforcement really doesn’t work regarding Palestinian complaints,” said Yesh Din spokesman Gilad Grossman.

He noted that 85 percent of cases were closed for “poor police work.” “Sometimes they don’t close the crime scene,” Grossman said. “They don’t take all the necessary evidence. Or they won’t interview the complainant.”

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that Israeli law enforcement is cracking down on Jewish violence against Palestinians. She said the national police’s establishment of a unit in March 2013 devoted to nationalist crime, with 80 officers assigned to the West Bank, focused attention on such incidents.

The result, she said, was a 30 percent increase in 2014 in the number of Palestinian complaints handled and a 75 percent increase in indictments. Complicating law enforcement efforts, she noted, are the fact that many Jewish suspects are minors and that Israeli police need military escorts to conduct investigations in Palestinian areas.

Police issued a rare call Tuesday for information on the Duma case. Israeli courts imposed a gag order on the investigation; no arrests have been reported. Israel’s government has acknowledged a lack of enforcement in cases of Jewish nationalist crime.

Speaking at a rally Sunday in Jerusalem, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin decried the actions of “Jewish terrorists” in Duma. “An atmosphere has been created here that has allowed leniency toward what is naively called ‘weeds,’ ” Rivlin said.

“Every society has extremist fringes, but today we have to ask: What is it in the public atmosphere which allows extremism and extremists to walk in confidence, in broad daylight?” Following his comments, Rivlin became a target of ultranationalist Jewish Israelis, who flooded his Facebook page with comments such as “may you and your children also burn.”

To combat Jewish terrorism, Israel on Sunday approved holding Jewish suspects in administrative detention, during which they are not told the charges against them. Until now, administrative detention had been used only in cases with Palestinian suspects.

Critics call the measure undemocratic for both Israelis and Palestinians; the government says secrecy is needed to maintain its information networks. Ashraf Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the Palestinian Authority filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court about the arson in Duma.

He said the neighborhood watch underway in Duma was part of a West Bank-wide trend. “There is no faith in the Israeli legal system or police, and people under this situation need to have a feeling of protection,” Khatib said.

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"Arabs’ West Bank village vulnerable," Modesto Bee, 5 August 2015. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2015-013. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2015-013