Zion Square assault

Zion Square lynching
The attack site
Location	Zion Square, Jerusalem
Date	16-17 August 2012
Injured	3 Palestinian teenagers (1 seriously injured)
Perpetrators	Mass assault by 10-15 Israeli teenagers

The Zion Square lynching was an attack by Israeli youths that took place on the night of 16-17 August 2012 at Zion Square in Jerusalem, in which four Palestinian teenagers were chased by 10-15 teenagers, and one, a 17-year-old boy Jamal Julani, was beaten almost to death and found unconscious in a critical condition. An eyewitness reported that police marked the site as a murder scene. The attack took place on the same day as a firebombing of a Palestinian taxi in which a Palestinian family of 5, and their driver suffered serious burns.

Originally reported by police as a brawl between two groups, it achieved notoriety after an Israeli eyewitness posted an account of the incident on Facebook reporting that scores of Israeli youths had tried to beat to death three Arab youths while others in the vicinity stood around the boy shouting hate slogans at him.

Reports said that during the episode, a policeman was present who observed the assault without intervening. However, a police investigation determined that this referred to an earlier altercation nearby. Prompt intervention by Magen David Adom including C.P.R. managed to revive him. His survival was called by authorities a miracle. Police commissioner Yohanan Danino told the press that “The lynch in Jerusalem was the most severe and contemptible act imaginable in a democratic law-abiding country.”

On 19 April, Israeli police subsequently arrested several Israeli teenagers, the youngest of which was 13 years old. One of the suspects expressed no regret. This, and the taxi fire-bombing were roundly condemned in Israel and throughout the world, and a national debate over anti-Arabism ensued.

Julani was released from hospital a week after the attack.

The attack

Zion square at night

The attack took place on Thursday night 16 August 2012, on the eve of Eid-ul-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. According to interviews with the Palestinian victims, 17 year-old Jamal Julani, a matriculating student from the predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras al-Amud, together with his cousins Muhammad Mujahid, 17, and Nuaman Julani and a fourth boy were attacked and chased by some 50 Israeli youths, shouting "Death to Arabs". The harassment began in Kikar Hahatulot (Cats' Square), when, according to one of the defense lawyers, youths singing racist songs and chanting anti-Arab slogans came across the four Arab teenagers. By Monday, the deputy commander of the Lev Habira police station said investigators believe one girl in the group had incited the rest. A chase ensued which ended 200 hundred yards away in Zion Square, where 10 eventually managed to catch Jamal. Ma'ariv reported later that some 40 minutes before Jamal's near fatal beating, people had called the police over a brawl, and an on-duty policeman arrived, and stood by as the violence unfolded. One Arab employed near the scene who had phoned the police claimed that on arriving a police officer decided not to act when he saw that the brawl involved teenagers. The police department rejected the allegation, and replied that this call referred to the earlier altercation, and affirmed that when, 40 minutes later, further calls arrived reporting violence at Zion Square, additional officers were sent.According to Reuven Rivlin some of the assailants wore shirts with a Betar symbol, denoting both the revisionist Zionist youth movement created by Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1923 and also the name for a Jerusalem soccer team.

According to his cousin Nuaman, one attacker said to Jamal, 'What are you doing, you son of a bitch?', and as Jamal tried to flee he was whacked in the chest and fell. Initial reports said a female teen had told her friends she had been raped by an Arab, and they reacted by beating up an Arab who happened to be passing by. The teenagers continued to kick him after he fell down unconscious, but as more police arrived, according to the Palestinians, the crowd quickly dispersed.

When a Magen David Adom ambulance and emergencg crew arrived on the scene, a paramedic, Amir Edri, found Jamal without pulse, and it was initially thought he was dead.After 10 minutes of intense CPR, and electric shock his pulse returned. The three other Palestinians in the group suffered only minor injuries.

Though one of the arrested suspects spoke of 40 to 50 youths involved in the beating, police concluded that the number of Jewish youngsters directly implicated ranged from 10 to 15, while a few dozen others just stood around and watched. They also concluded that the attack was unprovoked. On the following Monday, a police spokesman, Sergeant Shmuel Shinhav, described the assault as "simply a lynch”. Police later said that the fact Jamal suffered from a heart condition may have contributed to his loss of consciousness. A lawyer for one of the girls who was involved but, according to him, did not participate in the beating, said that the teenagers had intended to beat him to death.

Jamal was taken in a comatose state to the Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Kerem in southwest Jerusalem, where a Palestinian taxi-driver was also undergoing intensive care, after suffering serious burns together with five members of the Abu Jayada family of Nahalin from a Molotov cocktail attack, suspected to be the work of settlers, outside the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin earlier that day. A Jewish settler, resident in Kfar Etzion, Meir "Meron" Yehoshua, on hearing news of the bombing, contacted the families of both the taxi-driver and his passengers and volunteered to drive them across the checkpoints facilitating their visits to the hospital.

Jamal lay in a coma for two days, and on emerging from it said he had no memory of the attack and no fear of returning to downtown Jerusalem. No official state or municipal representatives visited him for several days, but Thursday 23, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin paid Jamal a visit to apologise on behalf of the state, and told him the assault was evidently not an 'isolated incident of racism towards Arabs, but a worrying phenomenon in Israeli society' and that was 'a micro cosmos of a national problem that could endanger Israeli democracy.' The police in the following days arrested eight teens, two of them girls, ranging in ages from 13 to 19. A brother of one of the suspects who was also present asserted that the four Arab boys had provoked passersby and “made passes at Jewish girls,” adding that "(Arabs) shouldn't be here, it's our area. For what other reason would they come here if not to make passes at Jewish girls?" Another eyewitness said the Israeli group appeared to be hunting for Arabs.

Jamal's mother called the youths terrorists and added that they themselves were had no political ideas and that,"We brought our children up to study, to be good and to love their homeland.” was at a loss to understand why the youths did this, but called his son luck for having survived.

Fear spread throughout Israeli Arab communities in the wake of the two incidents, particularly in Jaffa, Safed and Haifa.

Facebook report

A volunteer for the Elem NGO, which aids Israeli and Palestinian youths in distress, and who happened to be present at the scene, wrote up and posted her eyewitness account on Facebook that night. She opened her account with the remark:

"Its late at night, and I can't sleep. My eyes are full of tears for a good few hours now and my stomach is turning inside out with the question of the loss of humanity, the image of God in mankind, a loss that I am not willing to accept."

According to report, loud shouts of 'A Jew is a good soul, an Arab is a son of a ---,' could be heard and dozens of youths ran and gathered to beat, nearly to death, three Arab youths strolling peacefully along Ben Yehuda Street. When volunteers tried to resuscitate Jamal, she added, a mass of bystanders reportedly asked resentfully why they were reviving an Arab. Later, as Jamal's cousin gave testimony to the police two youths queried why he should be handed a bottle of water, and one of them commented:'He is an Arab, and they don’t need to walk around in the center of the city, and they deserve it, because this way they will finally be afraid.' She complained that

“Children aged 15-18 are killing a child their own age with their own hands. Really with their own hands. Children whose hearts were unmoved when they beat to death a boy their age who lay writhing on the floor,”

Statements by the alleged assailants

• “For my part he can die, he’s an Arab. If it was up to me, I’d have murdered him.” One 15-year-old suspect to court reporters on Monday 20 August.
• “He insulted my mom. So I caught him and beat him. I hit him and I hope he gets it again. I hope he dies. You can't go by Damascus Gate without getting stabbed. So why do they come here? I beat him, and I’d beat him again. I’m not sorry for what I did.'

Arrests of the perpetrators

Acting Jerusalem police chief, General Menachem Yitzhaki established a special team to conduct investigations.

The Israeli police initially called the episode a "brawl" and only 3 days later, on Sunday, did they change their tune and call it a "lynching" and admitted that that the attack on a Palestinian teen took place before a crowd, according to one police account to the magistrates' court, numbering in the hundreds, part of which egged the attackers on, in the heart of Jerusalem.

According to one report, the whole incident was recorded on official surveillance cameras and the police said other arrests were to be expected. Sources in the Jerusalem Municipality now claim the city's security cameras were being upgraded at the time the attack took place and not working in the area, and that the police would be reviewing, instead, footage recorded on cameras operated by local businesses.

From Sunday to Tuesday, police rounded up 8 youths, ranging in age from 13 to 19, including three girls, on suspicion of being involved in the assault, and they were brought before magistrates for a remand hearing. One of the girls, still under detention a week later, came from an ultra-Orthodox family and had until recently studied at the Beit Yaakov seminary..</ref> Tamar Rotem, examining the backgrounds of some of the youths, identifies them as hailing from low-income Haredi neighbourhoods suffering from neglect, and as drop-outs from religious seminaries.

Aftermath

A week after the incident, Tamar Rotem reported, life at Zion Square has resumed its normal tranquil rhythms. Interviewing youths from the Bnei Akiva National Religious Party's youth movement, she found they knew nothing of the incident, and, when informed of the circumstances, were quick to come to the defense of the suspected perpetrators. One said: "It's very good that they (the Jewish assailants) hit them. . . It's just too bad they didn't kill them." Another boasted, "Had I been there, I would have killed them." Arabs are, they said, "terrorists who carry out attacks and want to murder all of us." The director of Masorti, rabbi Andrew Sacks, while noting that the attack elicited condemnation over the entire spectrum of the Jewish world, also drew attention to a certain diffidence, in the fact that Lehava had begun circulating a flyer in Jerusalem soon afterwards that was warning Arab males against flirting with or talking to Jewish girls. The pamphlet reads in part: “We don’t want you to get hurt, respect our girls’ honor because they are dear to our hearts.” In response to a claim by two east Jerusalem Arab teens claiming both that they were assaulted by three men at Tel Aviv beach after asking for directions and had great difficulty in obtaining redress from the police when they tried to file a complaint, Knesset representative Ta'al party member Ahmad Tibi put the blame on Israeli police for failing in their duties, declared that a 'hunting season for Arabs is at its height with support from a rightist government and racist Knesset'.

The public debate in Israel

• Nimrod Aloni, the head of the Institute for Educational Thought at Kibbutzim College of Education, Tel Aviv, in an interview on Channel 1, linked the youths' attitude directly to national fundamentalism, and argued it was identical to the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, Taliban and Ku Klux Klan, adding that:'This comes from an entire culture that has been escalating toward an open and blunt language based on us being the chosen people who are allowed to do whatever we like.”
• Gavriel Salomon, a professor of educational psychology at Haifa University, speaking to Israel Radio atttributed the attacks to increasing racism and violence in Israeli society, and an atmosphere of “legitimacy,” declaring,"Suddenly it’s not so terrible to burn Arabs inside a taxi.”
• Zohar Eitan, a Tel Aviv University lecturer in musicology, on visiting Jamal to show solidarity as “an ordinary citizen”, called the attack “very sad but unfortunately not shocking. It is the result of the indoctrination that these kids get.”
• Local police say the attack 'reflected profound hatred among Jewish youths in Jerusalem for local Arabs.'
• Yehudit Oppenheimer, executive director of Ir Amim, blamed the attack on rampant discrimination, a policy he argues excluded Palestinians from the public sphere in Jerusalem, turning their neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem into islands of poverty and neglect, and "a climate that permits public displays of hatred towards foreigners."
• Blogger Mairav Zonszein, who initially translated the eyewitness testimony on Facebook and published it in an accessible English version, argued that despite the widespread condemnation of the two attacks as examples of a "hate crime" and "terror attack", such assaults are not an "aberration from the norm" but are on the rise, with a 39% increase in acts of settler violence from 2010 to 2011 when 2.6 incidents a day were registered. She argued that similar acts of violence are treated differently in law. An Israeli man who, assisted by accomplices and bystanders, used a razor-blade to kill a Palestinian East Jerusalemite encountered in the Zion Square area in February 2011 received an 8-year sentence for manslaughter, while a 29-year sentence was handed down to Palestinian minors for killing an israeli, Aryeh Karp, on a Tel Aviv beach in 2009. Two different justice systems operate, and public condemnations by politicians were little more than lip-service.

Foreign commentary

• Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for The Atlantic, argued that such violence is not common, and that Jerusalem's Arabs and Jews have achieved "in the city's public spaces, a kind of side-by-side integration." It's in the nature of things, he continued, that Jewish violence draws more coverage than Arab violence against Jews at times, but Goldberg commended the arrests and said the acid test would take place in a future trial:"Will they be given sentences that match the gravity of the crime, or will they get off easy? It would be appalling, but unsurprising, if this is ultimately not treated as an attempted murder".
• Jill Jacobs, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America wrote that indictments will probably led to a 'few bad apples' verdict, but the incident posed an issue for the global Jewish community. It differs, she argues, from price tag incidents which may be dismissed as the handiwork of a few radical settlers. Recently, again in the heart of Jerusalem, a group of mostly teenage Beitar soccer fans had stormed the Malha Mall to attack Arab workers and shoppers and hurl racist abuse. Just as American Jews, mindful of the lynching of Leo Frank, once had to confront directly the issue of anti-Semitism and the broader and deeper undercurrents of racism and bigotry, they must take a hard look at the way Palestinians are being portrayed. Terms which, if applied to Jews, would be deemed virulently anti-Semitic, are often used of Palestinians, and some children get the impression hatred of Arabs is acceptable. 'real teshuvah, repentance,' she concludes,'will come only when we ensure that our everyday language does not teach our children to hate.'

Official reactions

Israel:

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the taxi firebombing, and spoke out about the attack in Zion square, saying,"In the State of Israel we aren’t willing to tolerate racism and we aren’t willing to tolerate the combination of racism and violence."
• Mark Regev,his spokesman, said:"“We unequivocally condemn racist violence and urge the police and law enforcement community to act expeditiously to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
• Moshe Ya'alon, the Vice Prime Minister called this incident and a separate attack on a cab driver “hate crimes” and “heinous acts.”.
• Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat strongly condemned the incident, and called for "continuyed coexistence" but cautioned against jumping to premature conclusions about the motivation behind it.. One critic has replied that Barkat himself presides over both institutional segregation and the proliferation of hostile Jewish settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

• Education Minister Gideon Saar, who called in incident "violent" and "racist" instructed Israeli schools to discuss the incident in classes when the school term recommences. His declaration was attacked as "lip-service" by Mairav Zonszein who pointed out that it was Saar who initiated field trips for Israeli schoolchildren to Hebron where acts of brutality against Palestinians are not uncommon and have not been condemned by the Minister.

Official Foreign reactions

• U.S. Department of State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. administration "condemns in the strongest possible terms attack on a Palestinian taxi."
• The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement expressing it horror at the two violent attacks against Palestinians.

See also

• Anti-Arabism
• Racism in Israel