“Extrajudicial killings as policy.”
Murder codified in ‘law.’
1 DECEMBER—Video documentation raced like wildfire through the West Bank last Thursday, showing Israel security forces shooting two unarmed Palestinians in the city of Jenin. Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37 were shot at close range after having surrendered and while lying on their stomachs.
The crime, unusually shocking even by Zionist standards, was widely reported in Arab and Western media. Outrage was duly expressed. Lost in the noise and, so far as I can tell, overlooked entirely by all those reporting on it, was a series of recent events leading up to these murders. Taken together, these suggest that extrajudicial murder is now official Israeli policy.
Let us not view these killings in isolation, and certainly not as aberrations. This is Israeli policy now. The emergence of an explicit policy of summary execution, the imminent codification of this strategy by the Knesset within Israeli law, and the discharge of that policy already under way by Zionist security forces: This is what I address here. And what has not been addressed elsewhere.
Were Abdallah and Asaasah actually resistance fighters—and we may never know whether or not they were—they should have been treated as prisoners of war and afforded all the legal protection demanded by international law. Instead they were identified as “terrorists,” and the Zionists now deem this designation as sufficient grounds for murder.
It’s precisely this term and designation that is repeatedly used to legitimize Zionist brutality and incessant violations of international law. To fully understand the uses, abuses, and dangers of of the word “terrorism,” it’s worth revisiting an essay written more than two decades ago by John Whitbeck, the international lawyer, and republished by The Floutist here.
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Texts and video, sent by my friend Adnan, arrived on WhatsApp midafternoon as I arrived at friends for Thanksgiving dinner. I watched before getting out of the car. And watched again, nearly unable to believe what I was seeing. The sadistic audacity of Jewish Israelis should forever make the word chutzpah an obscenity.
In the video a backhoe is seen breaking open a large overhead door to a concrete building. Abdallah and Asaasah emerge crawling on their knees, hands held high. Both men lift their shirts to show they’re unarmed. They’re are searched, kicked, ordered back into the building and summarily shot. The backhoe operator then brings the metal door down onto their bodies.
What I witnessed then and you witness here are extrajudicial killings. The videos are out there now. My intention is to put these murders in the larger context missing from most press reports.
As per usual, and as reported by Haaretz, security forces claimed the two men were terrorists:
According to the police and the IDF, the two Palestinians, who belonged to a terror organization in the city, had thrown explosive devices and fired at Israeli forces in the past.
End of story, we are invited to conclude. Two terrorists killed in the West Bank. What could be more reasonable or justified? National Security Minister and Zionist freak Itamar Ben-Gvir expressed enthusiastic support for the killings. “The fighters acted exactly as expected of them,” he said, “terrorists must die.”
One day after the murders, Ben-Gvir rewarded with a promotion the commander of the Border Guard Unit responsible for the killings.
One more time: “Terrorists must die.”
Haven’t we heard this before? Let us give these events their proper history.
The same justification was given two weeks ago to explain the murder of 17-year old Hassan Sharkasi, shot while sitting with friends in Askar refugee camp near Nablus, and reported here in West Bank Alerts.
Westerners are so used to thinking of Arabs as terrorists and terrorists as deserving of death—thanks to decades of racist indoctrination and our own decades-long war on terror—that Israel’s policies vis-à-vis Palestine have long seemed reasonable—until the obviously unreasonable excesses of the Gaza genocide—too visible, too sadistic, altogether too much to ignore.
The Zionist state is on a roll as it moves to realize its project of Greater Israel and steal what land remains. Three weeks ago, on 10 November, the Knesset voted by a margin of 39 to 16 to carry forward a bill legalizing the execution of Palestinians accused of “terrorist” activity. The Floutist reported on this vote here.
While the Knesset has yet to finalize its indecent and inhumane legislation, it is on the way to becoming de facto policy among the security forces. We must understand the murders of Abdallah and Asaasah in this context. We can expect the murder of Palestinians in the West Bank to accelerate. Arrests will be increasingly unnecessary as the number of field executions increase. Having perverted all meaning of law, the lawless state will advance its agenda unhindered by legal, to say nothing of moral, concerns.
On Wednesday, 26 November, the day before Asaasah and Abdallah were murdered, the Israel Occupation Forces launched a “broad counterterrorism” operation in the West Bank as reported by Haaretz.
Forces entered villages, waterlines were cut, military helicopters fired at people. Leaflets asserting that the area had become a “haven for terrorists” were distributed in the area. All of this to prevent a potential flare-up of violence in the West Bank, according to Defense Minister Israel Katz. One could almost laugh at the way Katz turns reality upside down.
The Palestinian right to armed resistance was long ago recast as terrorism. Any village or refugee camp can at anytime be accused of being a haven for terrorists. Anyone can at anytime be accused of terrorism—of throwing an explosive device, no evidence necessary—and shot.
The murders of Asaasah and Abdallah sparked outrage as local Palestinians made videos available. But outrage won’t stop the Zionist chutzpah state. And this crime, hardly unusual, was outrageous only in having been caught on film.
At writing, we are once again invited to accept as credible that the Israeli military is investigating the Israeli military. And the Western press, most notably the Zionist-controlled New York Times, encourages this.
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We must understand—we who live in the West—that our future and fate are tied to Palestine. Our rights to free speech and protest are rapidly being criminalized by Zionist forces within our own countries. We, too, are increasingly being labeled “terrorists.” Palestine, as others have pointed out, is the laboratory experiment wherein the limits of power will be determined—if there are any, and increasingly it seems there may be none.
Palestine is our future. Its fate will be ours.
This is an updated version of reportage earlier published in West Bank Alerts.
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