As my colleague Isabel Kershner reports [2], several Israeli teenagers who appeared in court on Monday following their arrest for beating a young Palestinian unconscious expressed little remorse for the attack after a hearing.
According to the Jerusalem Post, their attitude inside the courtroom was similar. The newspaper reported [3] that a 15-year-old boy admitted beating the 17-year-old victim, Jamal Julani, claiming that it was in response to a perceived slight on his mother. “He insulted my mom,” the boy told a magistrate. “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.”
A witness to the attack, who described it in an emotional account on her Facebook page [4], referred to it as “a lynch,” using the English loan word that is common in Hebrew. Mairav Zonszein, an Israeli-American writer and translator, included a translation of the witness account in a post [5] on the Israeli news blog +972.
It’s 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. But today I saw a lynch with my own eyes, in Zion Square, the center of the city of Jerusalem.
The witness added that she watched in shock as dozens of young Israelis “started to really beat to death three Arab youths who were walking quietly.”
When one of the Palestinian youths fell to the floor, the youths continued to hit him in the head, he lost consciousness, his eyes rolled, his head at an angle started to twitch, and then those who were kicking him fled and the rest gathered in a circle around, with some still shouting with hate in their eyes…
When two of our volunteers went into the circle, they tried to perform CPR the mass of youths standing around started to say resentfully that we are resuscitating an Arab, and when they passed near us and saw that the rest of the volunteers were shocked, they asked why we were so in shock, he is an Arab.
When we returned to the area after some time had passed, and the site was marked as a murder scene, and police were there with the cousin of the victim who tried to re-enact what happened, two youths stood there who did not understand why we wanted to give a bottle of water to the cousin of the victim who was transferred to hospital in critical condition, he is an Arab, and they need don’t need to walk around in the center of the city, and they deserve it, because this way they will finally be afraid.
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