Israel's justice minister denounced an Israeli Facebook campaign on Wednesday that called for soldiers to take 'revenge' on the Palestinian community as tensions spiked in Jerusalem, where an Arab teenager was kidnapped and killed hours after the funerals for three Jewish teenagers abducted last month in the West Bank.
Tzipi Livni, the minister of justice, said that the killers of the Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, 16, must be brought to justice, and told reporters that she was also considering legal action against Israeli soldiers who had submitted images of themselves or their weapons to the Facebook group The People of Israel Demand Revenge.
'We must begin to deal with the incitement going on in social media,' Ms. Livni told Army Radio. 'This can be done through education, but with all due respect, I can't wait around for a generation to grow up and be educated on values that denounce violence and murder. When something like this influences soldiers to take their photo with their weapons, or teens stand with texts calling for the death of Arabs, then this is terrible, and they need to pay a price for it.'
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also demanded the swift prosecution of those responsible for the 'reprehensible murder' of the Palestinian teenager and called on all sides to resist the temptation to take the law into their own hands.
The PM calls on all sides not to take the law into their own hands - Israel is a nation of laws and everyone must act according to the law.
- PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) July 1, 2014
The Arab-American blog Kabobfest noted on Twitter, however, that the prime minister had used the word ' vengeance' in a statement on Monday night, after the bodies of the Israeli youths were discovered. Mr. Netanyahu had quoted a verse from Haim Nahman Bialik's poem 'On the Slaughter,' written in 1903 after he met survivors of a deadly pogrom in the czarist Russian city of Kishinev.
way home to their parents who will not see them anymore. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay. May the memories of the 3 boys be blessed.
- PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) June 29, 2014
Before it was removed on Wednesday, the Facebook page had attracted more than 35,000 fans since the bodies of the Israeli teenagers - Eyal Yifrach, 19, Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16 - were discovered on Monday. In a blog post deploring the campaign, an Israeli rights activist, Elizabeth Tsurkov, published copies of 22 of the images uploaded by soldiers and police officers.
Another Israeli blogger, Ami Kaufman, tweeted a photograph submitted to the Facebook group by two smiling girls who held a sign that read, 'Hating Arabs isn't racism, it's values!'
Picture from racist FB page https://t.co/QBLpVcUoOC 'Hating Arabs isn't racism, its values! #IsraelDemandsRevenge' http://ift.tt/1iXK8uO
- Ami Kaufman (@AmiKaufman) July 1, 2014
After the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers last month, Israelis were outraged by messages posted on social media by Palestinians celebrating the abduction of 'three Shalits,' a reference to Sgt. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was held captive for five years by Hamas militants in Gaza and who was released in 2011 in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. On Wednesday, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media translated a raft of comments celebrating the death of the Palestinian teenager posted on an Israeli news site's Facebook page.
The justice minister also said in a post on her own Facebook page that if the killing of the Palestinian boy was an act of revenge by Israelis, it should be treated as terrorism.
.@Tzipi_Livni: Revenge killing ['if it is revenge'] is an act of terrorism; Israel must be a state governed by law; http://t.co/8XiefQ76L8
- Ron Skolnik (@Ron_Skolnik) July 1, 2014
The killing of the Palestinian teenager came just hours after hundreds of Israelis rallied in Jerusalem to demand that the government avenge the deaths of the three Jewish boys and tried to attack Arab passers-by. Video posted on YouTube and images shared on Twitter showed small crowds of extremists chanting 'Death to Arabs' and wearing stickers that praised Rabbi Meir Kahane, the virulently anti-Arab founder of the Jewish Defense League who was assassinated in 1990.
When the police stopped the marchers, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, the demonstrators broke into smaller groups and ran through the center of the city looking for Arabs. 'While running,' the newspaper noted, 'some of them were asking dark-skinned people 'What's the time?' in Hebrew, in order to check for an Arab accent in the reply.'
More of those 'sexy Israeli soldiers' you hear about, wearing stickers advocating ethnic cleansing on their uniforms http://ift.tt/1iXK7XF
- David Sheen (@davidsheen) June 30, 2014
Late Wednesday, the Israeli-Iranian blogger Meir Javedanfar reported that he was relieved to see hundreds of his compatriots at a rally against racism in Jerusalem organized by Israel's Interreligious Coordinating Council.
@ anti-racism rally in Jerusalem. Great 2b here esp after i had to walk past a racist gathering where 15 idiots were chanting death to arabs
- Meir Javedanfar (@MeirJa) July 1, 2014
So great to be among #israel compatriots who less than a day after a suspected hate crime are here to say 'NO TO RACISM'.
- Meir Javedanfar (@MeirJa) July 1, 2014
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