Israel Toughens Laws Against Anti-Palestinian Vandals
Attacks: Palestinians from the village of Jabaa, east of Ramallah, look through broken glass inside a mosque which settlers tried to burn last summer. Image by Getty Images
Israel approved new measures on Sunday against Jewish ultranationalists who vandalise Palestinian property in a drive to mire security forces in sectarian violence in the occupied West Bank.
Saying they sought to avenge attacks on Jewish settlers, the vandals have torched and spray-painted Palestinian mosques and cars and chopped olive trees in so-called “Price Tag” raids. Churches and Arab property inside Israel have also been hit.
With their potential for upending the West Bank’s relative quiet should Palestinians strike back, and for discouraging any future Israeli evacuation of unapproved settlements, the incidents worry Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government. But arrests and prosecutions have been rare.
Netanyahu’s security cabinet said in a statement it had empowered the Defence Ministry to designate “Price Tag” vandals as members of “illicit organisations”, which would in turn “significantly expand the investigative and prosecutorial tools available to the security forces and law-enforcement”.
The statement did not elaborate. An official told Reuters the decision would could effectively bring Israel’s handling of Price Tag suspects into line with its crackdowns on Palestinian militants, entailing longer detentions and jail sentences as well as more intrusive surveillance and interrogations.
The Justice Ministry was separately seeking parliamentary ratification defining Price Tag attacks as “terrorism”, alongside Palestinian and other politically motivated attacks on Israelis, the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
