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Davidson writes: "On Friday, about two hours before the sun came up over the village of Duma, in the West Bank, a man named Saad Dawabsheh tried to find his family in his burning house."

Family photos sit atop the remains of the Dawabsheh home, in the West Bank, which was set ablaze by Israeli settlers, killing the family's eighteen-month-old son. (photo: Oren Ziv/Getty)
Family photos sit atop the remains of the Dawabsheh home, in the West Bank, which was set ablaze by Israeli settlers, killing the family's eighteen-month-old son. (photo: Oren Ziv/Getty)


A Toddler Dies in the West Bank

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

01 August 15

 

n Friday, about two hours before the sun came up over the village of Duma, in the West Bank, a man named Saad Dawabsheh tried to find his family in his burning house. He pulled out his wife, Reham, and their four-year-old son, Ahmed Sa’ed, was rescued, but he couldn’t see the eighteen-month-old, Ali, “due to the lack of electricity,” according to a report in Haaretz. It was too dark, and Ali was too small. He died in the fire. Reham and her surviving child are in the hospital—they have already been moved from one in Nablus to a specialized burn unit at the Sheba Medical Center, in Tel Hashomer, Israel—in critical condition.

The house had been set on fire by men who, according to reports citing the Israeli Defense Forces, are believed to be Jewish settlers. They threw firebombs through the windows of the Dawabsheh home and one next door (no one was home there), and left graffiti written in Hebrew—“Revenge” and “Long live the Messiah King.” There were also drawings of a Star of David and of a crown.  Eyewitnesses saw four men, who fled to the settlement of Ma’ale Efraim.  The I.D.F. called it a “barbaric act of terrorism,” and Prime Minister Netanyahu used the word, too—“We decry it as a terrorist crime. Terrorism is terrorism”—after visiting the Dawabshehs in the hospital. “I just came from the bedside of four-year old Ahmed Sa’ed,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “Sixty percent of his body is burned. We’re doing everything we can to save this young boy, give him a life.” He added, “It is hard when you stand beside the bed of such a young child, and you know that his infant brother, who was a year-and-a-half-old, was murdered here and you ask for what was this awful act,” according to the Times. NBC reported that Netanyahu called Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority—not something Netanyahu does every day. He told him that Israel would find the killers.

All of Israel, Netanyahu said, was “shocked.” And it was, in terms of glimpses of extremism, a shocking twenty-four hours in Israel. (On Thursday, an ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed several participants in a gay-pride march in Jerusalem. He had previously been in jail for doing the same thing, in 2005.) It is shocking when a child so young dies; everyone rushes to say that no one meant for that to happen, and one surely hopes no one does. But simply saying so cannot be the end of the discussion. That is true for both sides in this conflict.

Saad Dawabsheh is a construction worker. He makes a living building houses for settlers, a reminder of the bitter intimacy of the occupied territories. Reham is a math teacher. According to press reports, they lived quietly. Their jobs meant that they were able to have a home that was, by local standards, nice—it had an air conditioner and a microwave. Reporters who visited the burned-out house noticed milk bottles, of the kind that toddlers drink from, among the ashes. A thousand people came to Ali’s funeral, and there was turbulence on the streets. How the reaction continues to play out will likely depend, in large measure, on how the Israeli justice system deals with the killers. There were already questions, from the Palestinian side, about whether the settlers’ relatives, like those of some Arabs suspected in terror attacks, would have their family homes destroyed by the Israeli government. (The best use of this moment, on the Israeli side, would be to question the utility and the moral sense of that policy, rather than its egalitarian application.) And there were already expressions of unhappiness, according to the Times, from Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s spokesman, about immediate Palestinian statements saying that the Israeli government had some culpability in this case. (Abbas had called it a “war crime,” which he will refer to the International Criminal Court, and the Palestine Liberation Organization said that Israel was “fully responsible for the brutal assassination” of Ali.) Regev said that Israeli law enforcement did a better job, in such cases, than the Palestinian police did. The moment when self-examination might be embraced, rather than fended off with wounded expressions of horror, could too quickly slip away.

If you drew a chart of violence in the area, in the country, in the region, you could come up with all sorts of lines and arrows pointing to one incident or another. (A settler was killed near Duma a month ago.) Some Israeli press reports put Ali’s murder in the category of what are known, among settlers and their supporters, as “price tag” attacks: the phrase is meant to convey an effort to make Palestinian violence against Jewish Israelis cost those communities something. But what currency is it reckoned in? Neither the slogans painted on the Dawabsheh family’s wall nor such degraded equations would have been intelligible to a toddler like Ali, and neither can encompass his loss.

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