When we walk down an Israeli street, within an hour we will likely run into dozens of completely ordinary Israelis who were and are actively involved in the killing of both armed and unarmed Palestinians, in shooting and wounding them, in their dispossession, in the destruction of their homes, in the interrogation of Palestinian detainees using torture, in abusing them and their brothers and sisters at checkpoints, on a Jerusalem street or in their homes during a nighttime raid.
Ordinary Israelis shot and shoot, tortured and torture, brutalized and brutalize, sometimes directly, or they gave and give commands and sign orders and pay salaries. They approved the evictions of families from their homes, as well as the generous supply of water to Israelis at the expense of providing water to Palestinians. They planned convenient roads that cut off Palestinian communities from each other. Their deeds aren't written on their foreheads. They do not see themselves as criminals, murderers, thieves.
The deeds of those hundreds of thousands of Israelis are known, but they are not linked personally to their perpetrators: The soldiers and petty officials are protected by the comfortable anonymity the state grants them. Only in exceptional cases are their names published in the context of specific acts of violence. The names of the commanders responsible are public knowledge, but in Israel it is not customary to attach to them the titles criminal, murderer, thief, dispossess or extortionist.
The same goes for lawmakers who propose apartheid laws, or military chiefs of staff and heads of the Shin Bet. It would defy social and linguistic conventions to append these terrible epithets to the name of a well-known official; it would never get past the editors at any media outlet.
The junior ranks – including the idolized fighter pilots – are protected by institutional secrecy, deeply rooted in the country's laws and customs. The well-known senior officials are protected because they did what they did on behalf of and in service to the state.
Thus, former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and former Israel Air Force Commander Amir Eshel were confident that a Dutch civil court would reject a civil suit against them, demanding damages for the killing of six family members in the al-Bureij refugee camp in 2014.
The case was brought by Ismail Ziada, a Dutch citizen, over the bombing of his family's home and the subsequent deaths of his 70-year-old mother, Muftiah; three of his siblings, brothers Jamil, Yousef, and Omar; Jamil's wife, Bayan, and their 12-year-old son Shaban. The Dutch Supreme Court upheld rulings by two lower courts that Gantz and Eshel – the people who directly or indirectly gave the order to bomb and kill a family inside its home – have "functional immunity" that protects them from civil proceedings in the Netherlands because they were carrying out Israeli government policies.
An IDF inquiry into the incident found that "the extent of the harm expected to result to civilians as a result of the attack" – that is, the killing of a grandmother, her daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter – "would not be excessive in relation to the significant anticipated military benefit": that is, damage to what the IDF lawyers claimed was a military command center, and the killing of supposed military operatives who were in the building.
At the time, it was considered permissible to kill three civilians in order to kill four supposed military operatives. Today, as we know from the huge number of civilian deaths in every airstrike in Gaza and the estimated 15,000 children who have been killed there so far, as well as from Yuval Avraham's shocking investigations for +972 Magazine, the kill ratio the IDF's jurists and the state permit today for the pilots and drone operators is 20, 30, 40 and even an entire neighborhood of civilians – for one Hamas militant.
States have received license from history and from jurists to use violence against their own citizens and against other states. It is the states that grant license and immunity to their citizens in the police, the military, and the security agencies to use violence for what is defined as the defense of the homeland and the people. Sometimes that is the case. But very often it is the defense of the privileges of the upper classes, of a dictatorship, of institutionalized theft and of the oppression and organized abuse of minorities.
The states and their jurists have also determined that all those who use violence against them and their elites – that is, all those who violently resist the state's violence in any way – are criminals, murderers, unlawful combatants. We are talking about members of minority groups, indigenous peoples who became minorities through systematic killing and mass migration, laborers, migrants, conquered and disinherited peoples.
Every Palestinian is born into this inherent injustice: The bureaucratic, military and police violence against them that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions over the years is legal, and therefore is not violence but rather self-defense and sublime, lofty heroism. In contrast, Palestinians' actions – from a poster, a post on social media, a demonstration or throwing rocks to a suicide attack – are defined a priori as a criminal offense.
What's more, an Israeli who takes the lives of many Palestinians is a revered hero, while a Palestinian who directly or indirectly takes the life of an Israeli is punished even after his death.
This is the completely asymmetric reality into which Walid Daqqa was born and within which he died. The until-the-end-of-time vindictiveness of the state and many of its citizens kept him in prison, where he developed his deep humanist philosophy. The same vindictiveness sends every Palestinian the message that Israeli violence is incurable, even if jurists do not consider it a crime.