In a December 23, 2021 interview with Haaretz, former Israeli jurist and Supreme Court Justice Menny Mazuz criticised the court’s role as a rubber stamp in approving demolition of the homes of Palestinians whose family members were accused of involvement in terror attacks.
Mazuz explained, “I considered demolishing homes to be immoral, contrary to the law and of dubious effectiveness. My feeling was that it was done to placate public opinion, and that the leadership, too, is aware that this is not what will prevent the next act of terror.”
He added, “It’s hard not to see home demolitions as collective punishment. Innocent family members are harmed, even when there is no indication that they were involved or knew about [the crime]. And it’s a house in which very often the whole hamula [clan] lives. I don’t know of any other sphere in which punishment is inflicted not on those who perpetrated the offence. I see this as an extreme action. The demolitions cause us daily international damage.”
Following his frequent minority opinions and occasional successes in preventing demolitions, Justice Mazuz was subsequently excluded from panels reviewing petitions related to Palestinian home demolitions. Is this fine? have just changed due to to following
What Mazuz did not foresee is how the logic of the punitive house demolitions would legitimise the chain of pogroms in the Palestinian villages in the West Bank, which began in Hawara and continues to this day. On the evening of February 26, 2023, hundreds of far-right activists raided the village of Hawara, setting fire to dozens of houses, apartments, chicken coops and shops and hundreds of cars, injuring about 100 people and causing the residents to flee their homes to avoid being burned to death.
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Later, among other things, on June 20, 2023, a group of far-right activists set fire to fields and damaged Palestinian warehouses and cars in the village of Luban al-Sharqiya.
On June 21, 2023, about 200 extreme right-wing activists, some of them armed, set fire to agricultural lands, houses and cars in the village of Turmus Ayya. On April 13, 2024, far -right activists entered the villages of Duma and Al-Mughayyir and burned houses and other property. And on August 15, 2024, the last pogrom took place in the village of Jit, masked far-right activists raided the village, set cars and houses on fire, threw stones and Molotov cocktails, attacked the residents and shot one of them to death.
Each time, the far-right activists justify the pogrom as a “natural response” to the terror attack due to their “boiling blood”, or as intended to “teach a lesson” to the Palestinian residents and “deter” them from carrying out the next terror attack. Thus, shortly after the pogrom began in Hawara, Knesset member from the Kahanists party Otzma Yehudit, Limor Son Har-Melech, posted on X that she came to Hawara “to support the just cry of the hundreds of residents of Samaria who came out to protest”.
M.K. Zvika Fogel, also from Otzma Yehudit said in an interview, “Hawara closed and burned, that’s what I want to see… I want to restore security to the residents of the State of Israel. How do you do it? Stop with the word ‘proportionality’. Stop with the reluctance to collective punishment because it is not suitable for all kinds of courts. I’m taking off my gloves.”
Similarly, the head of the ‘Nachla’ movement, Daniella Weiss said in an interview, “That I will direct people to leave Hawara? I will call people to stop? stop what? We are protecting Jewish lives.”
Some members of the far-right support collective punishment but add in a “footnote” that they prefer the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to carry it out. For example, minister Bezalel Smotrich said at the ‘TheMarker’ conference that he “thinks that the village of Hawara should be wiped out, I think that the State of Israel should do it, God forbid, not private individuals.”
In an article on Israel’s leading news site for the religious Zionist public, Srugim, after the pogrom in Jit, Uri Kirshenbaum, part of Honenu, an Israeli Zionist legal aid organisation wrote that “the only effective solution against the murderous Palestinian terrorism is a painful and extreme deterrence of its supporting population. Eliminating terrorists when it comes alone is almost meaningless. If those who raise the terrorists and call squares after them do not feel the might of the Jews — they will very quickly raise the replacements of the terrorists we eliminated yesterday in some successful intelligence operation,” but added that he prefers “that the one who takes care of our security needs will be the army. No resident of Gilad farm or Yitzhar should be concerned about what he must do to keep the workers safe.”
Recently, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned in a letter he sent to the prime minister that Jewish terrorism endangers the existence of the State of Israel, and explained that “it is possible that there is a sense of hidden support” for these acts that is increasing significantly and is reflected in the “significant expansion of the scope of participants in the phenomenon”. But as described above, there is nothing “hidden” — it seems that the pogroms in Hawara and Jit, the IDF, the general attorney, the judges of the Supreme Court, Minister Smotrich, Knesset members Son Har-Melech and Fogel, Weiss and Kirshenbaum, all agree that collective punishment is legal, moral and vital in some circumstances. It seems that the dispute between them is focused on the question of who should carry it out — “official” or “unofficial” Israel, and from a practical point of view, whether the demolition of the Palestinian family’s house will be carried out by means of arson or a bulldozer.
If this is the guiding logic in “official” Israel, it is no wonder that when the far-right perpetrators have senior representatives in the government and the coalition in the Knesset, and also carry guns they received from the IDF — village after village in the West Bank burns.
The Shin Bet is responsible for the escalation to pogroms with mass participation not only due to its failure to prevent them, to identify the perpetrators and to enforce the law against them, but also because throughout the years it submitted secret opinions to the judges of the Supreme Court supporting the punitive demolitions.
In order to stop the burning in the West Bank, it is not enough to enforce the law against those far-right activists who take the law into their own hands – “official” Israel must stop taking international law into its own hands and stop the punitive demolitions and any other practice of collective punishment.
Eitay Mack is an Israeli human rights lawyer and activist who represents Palestinian victims of terror.
