We Humans Do Love the Cycle of Violence — Take Israel’s New Rock Thrower as Terrorist Law

23 July 2015

Only a people so angry that they have lost sight of psychological common sense would have passed this statute

From Israel:

The Israeli parliament has approved a law that imposes up to 20 years in prison on people convicted of throwing rocks at moving vehicles, drawing condemnation from Palestinian activists and officials.

Since 2011 three Israelis, including a baby and a girl, have been killed in the occupied West Bank after rocks were thrown at vehicles they were in.

Prosecutors in stone-throwing cases have [previously] usually sought sentences of no more than three months in jail when the offence does not result in serious injury.

Israeli lawmakers voted 69 to 17 to increase the punishments, approving legislation proposed after a wave of Palestinian protests last year in East Jerusalem.

Under the law, stone throwers could face 10 years in prison, and up to 20 years if it is determined that they intended to seriously harm the occupants in a vehicle.

The law would cover territory, including East Jerusalem, but not the occupied West Bank, most of which is under the jurisdiction of the Israeli military.

"Tolerance toward terrorists ends today. A stone-thrower is a terrorist and only a fitting punishment can serve as a deterrent and just punishment," Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked . . . said in a statement.

Minister Shaked’s reasoning is not necessarily off the mark. Rock-filled air makes the pursuit of ordinary activities dangerous and anxiety provoking.

On the other hand . . . .

What about the legal disproportion of this new classification and its penalty?

This, I think, is where common sense should have occurred to more folks than it apparently did:

"This law is not about stone-throwing. It is about repressing any form of Palestinian resistance or protest to Israeli colonisation and occupation," Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website that runs articles and resources on Palestinian struggle, said in an interview on Tuesday.

He said that while, Israel continues to target Palestinians, shooting deaths of Palestinian protesters were committed "with absolutely no consequences whatsover".

Still kicking the already oppressed?

Israel dominates everything Palestinians try to do, legal or not. Zionists regularly steal their land. Meanwhile, in legitimate and sometimes pretended anti-terrorist self-defense, the Israeli military appears to enjoy cooping people into Gaza and the West Bank and playing deadly war games with their trapped selves. A lot more than 3 Palestinians have died in that process.

Thus, in 2015, the disproportion between Palestinian terrorist offensiveness and Israeli’s massively deadly self-defense becomes increasingly morally bothersome. The stone-throwing statute feeds this perception, even though the motivation for the law is understandable. Assholes with rocks are injuriously annoying.

The moral? — We humans are not sane enough to get out of our own deadly ways

A rock-thrower may be a terrorist, but labeling and treating him as such in Israel’s context today is a societal mistake. Kicking already oppressed people fuels a countering rage that will do prospects of Israel’s long term survival little good.

As a matter of “first causes” — if we were to go back to Israel’s founding, while wielding the retrospective eye of psychological common sense — we might ask ourselves whether it was a good idea:

to move the new Jewish nation into a previously unhostile neighborhood,

steal a significant component of its land,

displace the formerly resident people therefrom —

and then, over decades —

accord non-Jews lesser rights, as well as a torrent of kicks to their self-esteem in the process —

all with the Zionist expectation that those it had maltreated would leave the new nation alone in the future.

With such a strategically unfortunate beginning, today’s circumstances were predictable. Desire for an exclusively Jewish state forestalled the hope of treating Palestinians equally enough to ameliorate their antipathy toward the intruders.

Rather than fault Israel and Israelis — given the unthinking and deadly wrath displayed by those around them — it may simply be that territoriality and hatred are like cancer. Wherever the first kernel appears, previously healthy entities around it are coopted into the same destructive stream.

And so we go, becoming unthinking fodder for the corporatist military industrial complex. With the emphasis on unthinking.

PeteFree.com

We Humans Do Love the Cycle of Violence — Take Israel’s New Rock Thrower as Terrorist Law