Duma reaction shows gap in Israeli and Palestinian responses to terror

BY AVITAL LEIBOVICH

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JERUSALEM — I won’t soon forget the morning of July 31, when I awoke to the horrific news that a firebomb had been hurled at a Palestinian house in the West Bank village of Duma while the family living there was asleep inside. Three people were burned to death, including a baby boy.

“Nekama,” the Hebrew word meaning “revenge,” was spray-painted on a house nearby. Israelis were shocked at the news. This was especially so for Jewish-Israelis. It seemed incomprehensible that Jews could be behind this hideous act.

If anti-Arab Jewish extremists did such a thing, I thought, they must be following a Bible very different from the one that most Jews respect. A few young extremists suspected of the crime are being held in administrative detention and interrogated. Whether or not there is enough evidence to convict them, the damage to the State of Israel’s public image will be huge.

The media and human rights organizations, never reluctant to portray Israel in a negative light, will most likely omit the fact that the views of these radicals are likely held by less than 1 percent of the Israeli population. The vast majority of Israelis have condemned this violence.

On the day of the murder, President Reuven Rivlin castigated the attack on his Facebook page in both Arabic and Hebrew. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror attack.” The Knesset held a special meeting on Aug. 4 where the atrocity was condemned by members of all the political parties, from the far left to the far right.

Moreover, across the country, Israelis shared their sense of outrage at the murders, disassociating themselves from the extremists who had perpetrated it. Many published condemnations on their own social media profiles. The silence from the Palestinian Authority regarding acts of terror acts has, in contrast, been deafening. On Aug.

3, three days after the Duma attack, Palestinians hurled a firebomb at an Israeli vehicle in Beit Hanina and injured an Israeli woman. On Aug. 14, Palestinians from the village of Awartta set fire to a gas station near the Israeli settlement of Eli.

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"Duma reaction shows gap in Israeli and Palestinian responses to terror," St. Louis Jewish Light, 6 January 2016. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2016-017. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2016-017