Who's afraid of Israeli hate crimes?
http://972mag.com/whos-afraid-of-israeli-hate-crimes/108233/
From time to time, this country is shaken by a particularly severe wave of nationalistically-motivated hate crimes against Palestinians, often in the form of arson or desecration of a religious site. After each such incident, we are faced with the usual ritual: senior government or police officials stare into the cameras with a determined gaze; they call the acts unconscionable; they say they take the incident with a full measure of responsibility and severity; they claim that this is not how a Jewish state acts; they promise that zero tolerance will be shown. These rituals usually appear against a backdrop of fear that this time the cup will finally runneth over, shattering the sacred “quiet” in the West Bank. After a short while, however, everything is back to normal.
We can see just how seriously the government takes hate crimes from the following case. On July 26, 2010, a large group of Israeli marauders, whom eyewitnesses said came from the direction of the settlements of Yitzhar and Har Bracha, allegedly made their way to land belonging to the nearby Palestinian village of Burin. According to witnesses, the marauders burned hundreds of olive trees, some of them older than a century. They then attacked the villagers with stones and, in a few cases, with clubs, after which they stoned the houses of the village. On that same day, some of the victims lodged a complaint with the Israeli police.
In August 2011—more than a year after the incident—the police informed Yesh Din that the case was turned over to the attention of a prosecutor; that is the last the organization heard of the story for two years. In August 2013, the Shomron Prosecution Unit bothered to update Yesh Din that they had closed the case back in December 2012. Three months later, we received the investigation material of a three-year-old incident, and attempted to see whether there is any point in appealing the decision to close the case.
To the utter surprise of Yesh Din’s attorneys, who were under the impression that the police closed the case for lack of evidence, the files contained quite a bit of evidence. At the same time and place of the incident, three Border Policemen detained two Israeli civilians–A. and M.–after police officers testified that they saw them throwing stones at Palestinians.
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