Hate Thy Neighbor: How Israel teaches its citizens all the wrong lessons.

Across Israel, anger at Arabs is building. In the wake of a horrific Palestinian terrorist attack on a Jerusalem synagogue—and concurrent with violent protests by Palestinians—several assaults by Jews against Arabs have been reported. Arab workers are reporting a rise in job discrimination. In a poll published Thursday, 58 percent of Jews endorsed a decision by the mayor of Ashkelon, a major city, to bar Arab citizens of Israel from working near young schoolchildren.



Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says these discriminatory outbursts and policies are wrong. “We must not generalize about an entire public due to a small and violent minority,” he asserts. But Netanyahu teaches this kind of prejudice every day, by demolishing the homes of the families of suspected terrorists.

Israel has employed this policy, off and on, for decades. It’s rooted in old military laws and based on the idea that it deters prospective terrorists. The government doesn’t have to show that the family members who live in the house—grandparents, children, cousins—are guilty or even suspected of any crime. And the policy applies only to Arabs, not to Jews.

The first lesson this policy teaches Israelis is that it’s legitimate to inflict suffering on innocent people in order to discourage terrorism. “You need a means of deterrence against the next suicide attacker,” Netanyahu explained this week as he announced demolitions in response to the synagogue attack. “When he knows that his house, the house in which his family lives, will be demolished, this will have an impact.” Shaul Shay, a former member of the Israeli national security council, agrees: “A terrorist may be willing to sacrifice his own life, but maybe he will think twice if he knows the homes of his relatives will be destroyed. If the family pays the price, it’s different.”



The second lesson the policy teaches is that it’s OK to treat Arab families this way, because Arabs in general are prone to violence. Three months ago, when lawyers challenged the policy because it wasn’t applied to Jews who murdered Arabs, Israel’s highest court rejected the complaint. Writing for the court, a judge explained:

It’s impossible to deny that acts of incitement and violence against Arabs have multiplied in Jewish society; this is regrettable, and it’s necessary to act forcefully against such occurrences. But the comparison is out of place, because house demolitions in the territories aren’t used in cases of incitement and violence, but in especially severe cases of murder. I’m not overlooking the shocking case of the murder of the teenage boy Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a case that shocked the country and sparked wall-to-wall condemnations, but this was the rarest of rare occurrences. Therefore, it seems to me there’s no place for the artificial symmetry claimed by the petitioners to support their claim of discriminatory enforcement.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/11/israel_s_demolition_of_palestinian_homes_benjamin_netanyahu_s_government.html