iEngage: Against the Racism of Fear & Hatred

By SHLOMIT HARROSH

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 13 July, 2014

Gil-Ad Shaer, Eyal Yifrah, Naftali Fraenkel, and Muhammad Abu Khdeir: four names,
four faces, four murdered Israeli youths. All were innocent. All were killed because of
their ethnicity. Who they were and what they did as individuals was irrelevant. Set
against decades of violence between Jews and Palestinians over Israel’s right to exist as a
homeland for the Jewish people and the ongoing occupation and dispossession of the
Palestinian people, it was enough for their murderers that their victims were members of
a feared and hated group.

It was enough that Gil-Ad, Eyal, and Naftali were Jews, and that Muhammad was a
Palestinian, to render their basic right to life null and void, for when tribalism and racism
govern our perceptions of each another, there are no innocents. It is then possible to
rationalize kidnapping three Jewish teenagers and executing them at point-blank range, or
forcing a shy-looking Palestinian boy to drink gasoline and then burning him alive. In the
escalating violence between the two groups, atrocities become “necessary acts of war” or
“vengeful justice.”

In such dark times, ruled by suspicion, fear and righteous anger, it is difficult for both
sides not to give in to despair and indiscriminate hatred. In downtown Jerusalem,
hundreds of right-wing Jewish extremists attacked innocent Palestinians and shouted
“Death to Arabs,” and “Kahana was right,” while the funerals of Gil-Ad, Eyal and Naftali
were taking place.

On Facebook, tens of thousands of young Israeli Jews, including IDF soldiers, echoed the
call for vengeance against Arabs. While many called for revenge against the kidnappers,
others posted pictures of themselves with slogans like, “Hating Arabs is not racism; it is
values.”

On the Palestinian side, after Muhammad’s autopsy revealed that he had been burned
alive, violent riots erupted in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods and in Arab towns in
Israel. Hundreds of Palestinians clashed with the police, throwing rocks, setting tires and
trash bins on fire, vandalizing public property, starting brush fires, and in some cases
deliberately attacking passing Jewish vehicles with stones and firebombs.

In the face of so much fear, hatred and violence, it is difficult not to react viscerally. It is
easier, seemingly safer, to adopt an “us versus them” mentality and treat every person not
a member of my tribe as potential enemy. This is the racism of fear, which presupposes
that “in their roots” all Jews hate Arabs, and vice versa. This is the imagination ruled by
fear, which rationalizes the stigmatization and penalization of individuals based solely on
group membership, grounded in the notions of collective guilt and collective punishment.
I reject this mindset. To embrace it is to embrace the tribalism and racism which resulted
in the horrific murders of Gil-Ad, Eyal, Naftali, and Muhammad. It is to ignore the fact
that out of the 6.1 million Jews and 1.6 million Arabs in Israel, at most only a few
thousand engaged in rioting and hate speech. The majority of Jews did not cry “Death to
Arabs,” and the majority of Palestinians did not cry “Death to Jews.”

We are standing at a moral crossroad, Jews and Palestinians alike. We can succumb to
fear and hatred, or we can choose courage and faith. It takes courage to face each other as
individual human beings, free from the racist stereotypes surrounding Jews and
Palestinians, and it takes faith to believe that openness to each other will improve
relations between our two peoples.

Indeed, courage and faith are most needed particularly in situations of extreme
uncertainty, when facing potentially irreversible choices. Bringing children into the world
is an act of courage and faith, and so is the choice not to let the murder of innocent
children trap us in a cycle of fear, hatred, and vengeance. Insisting on the equal dignity of
every human being and judging each person on the merits of their character and actions –
this is the right moral response to the evil of racism.

Last Tuesday, I paid my condolences for the brutal murder of Muhammad at the
mourners’ tent of the Abu Khdeir family in Shoafat, together with more than 300 Jews
who came as part of "Tag Meir" (“spread the light”), an Israeli group combating Jewish
hate crimes against Palestinians, known as Tag Mehir (“price tag”).

I did not come because I felt ashamed. I am not. My identity as a Jew is not tarnished by
the fact that Muhammad’s murderers were Jews. Whatever it means to be a Jew, burning
an innocent boy alive is not part of it. Nor did I personally feel responsible for
contributing to the social climate that made possible such a horrific attack. Unlike the
head of the World Bnei Akiva movement, Rabbi Noam Perel, I did not demand revenge
for the murder of the three Jewish youths, nor claimed that “the Master of the house has
gone crazy at the sight of the corpses of his sons.”

I came because it was my duty as a human being, a Jew, and an Israeli. Muhammad’s
killers did not simply take his life. They first tortured him and then tried to obliterate all
evidence of his humanity and existence by burning him alive. Publicly acknowledging
Muhammad’s life and death by extending my sympathies to his family was a way of
reaffirming his humanity. It was also an effort to bridge the rift that the murderers tried to
create between Jews and Palestinians. Ultimately, though, I came because it is my moral
and civic duty to publicly denounce the racism of fear and the ensuing violence wherever
it appears, affirming instead the equal moral worth of all human beings, regardless of
religion and ethnicity.

Muhammad’s atrocious murder did not occur in a normative vacuum. Racist anti-Arab
sentiment is growing in Israel, fueled by an unholy marriage of religion and right-wing
nationalism. Irresponsible statements by religious and political leaders contribute to the
illusion of Jewish moral superiority, while promoting fear of the other.
This creates an evil environment where it is more likely that those individuals with the
psychological makeup to torture and murder another human being would feel justified in
acting out their violent fantasies in the name of some perceived "greater good," be it
justice, the Jewish people, or the land of Israel.

To ensure that such voices do not dominate Israel’s public sphere, everyone who rejects
the racism of fear must speak out and act against its manifestations.

A year ago, in the midst of a wave of hate crimes against Israeli Arabs, an academic
colleague told me with a straight face that the attacks were “a moral badge of honor” for
Israeli Jews. The reason, he said, was that despite all the justified fear and hatred, the
Jewish attackers restricted their activities to spraying graffiti and vandalizing Palestinian
property. Well, we’re not just spraying graffiti anymore.

It is easy to be horrified when an innocent 16-year-old is burned alive. But it is the more
mundane forms of racism that must be combated if we are to prevent the next sadistic
murder. In every nation there are individuals who can and do commit such acts. It is our
responsibility to make sure that they do not find legitimacy for their barbarism in the
public sphere. It is our responsibility to choose courage and faith and respect for the
human dignity of every individual if we are to successfully combat the racism of fear and
hatred.