Covering the anti-gay shootings and killings in Tel Aviv, NPR’s hourly news bulletin this Sunday morning stated the following: (Dave Pignanelli): “Officials say they believe it is the worst hate crime in in Israel in decades.”
(Linda Gradstein): “The shooting has shocked many in Israel where hate crimes are almost unknown.”
Worst hate crime in decades? Hate crimes almost unknown? Ignoring the bitter irony of “hate crimes almost unknown” in a state that has a general policy of state run hate crimes against non-citizens in territory it controls – can one find evidence of deadly attacks by individual Israelis against people based solely on race, religion, etc?
Here are a few I found in about 5 minutes of Googling on the Internets:
May of 1990 a lone Israeli gunman killed 7 and wounded 10 Palestinian workers not far from Tel Aviv in Israel.
November of 1992 a grenade attack on an Arab market in Jerusalem killed 1 and wounded 11. Palestinians.
August 5, 2005 an Israelis gunman killed four Israeli Arabs and wounding 13 others on a bus in Israel.
August 17, 2005 – though not in Israel proper, an Israeli citizen killed 3 and wounded 2 random Palestinians near a settlement in the West Bank.
These incidents are clearly recognizable as standard hate crimes, but if your news coverage is almost always pro-Israeli government/military, it’s hard not to adopt the same (widespread and very much alive) racist ideology that fuels Israeli expansionism and militarism and degrades the humanity of Arabs to the point where they have simply been erased.
