Baby killed by racist Israeli settlers is relative of USPCN leader

Ali Saad Dawabsha, the 18-month-old baby boy burned alive when Israeli settlers tossed flammable liquids and Molotov cocktails inside his and another home in the village of Douma (near Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank), was buried yesterday while his mother Reham, father Saad, and four-year-old brother Ahmad are still in critical condition in an Israeli hospital that treats fire victims. They all have third-degree burns covering most of their bodies.

The baby and his family are relatives and neighbors of Milwaukee-based USPCN National Coordinating Committee member, Haitham Salawdeh, who was devastated by the news. “I have never felt as much anger as I am experiencing right now,” he said after family members called him to report on the killing. “We hold the Israeli government responsible for this vicious, racist murder, because it has allowed illegal settler-colonialists all across Palestine terrorize our people for decades.”

USPCN condemns this brutality, as well as the disgusting hypocrisy of Israeli and even Palestinian politicians. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted, “I am shocked by the murder of Ali Dawabshe. This is a reprehensible and horrific act of terrorism in every respect.” But he is responsible for assembling the most rabid right-wing coalition government in Israel’s history, even appointing as Minister of “Justice” Ayelet Shaked, who last year posted on Facebook that Palestinian mothers should be killed for giving birth to “little snakes.” A day after that post, Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir was beaten and burned alive by Israeli settlers.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas says that the Israeli government is “fully responsible for the brutal assassination” of the baby, and threatens to file a complaint with the International Criminal Court, but continues to allow “security coordination” between the PA and Israel—to suppress Palestinian resistance.

The UN reports that there have been at least 120 attacks by Israeli settlers since the beginning of 2015, and a recent report by an Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din, stated that over 92.6% of Palestinian complaints to the Israeli police go without charges being filed. The word “revenge” in Hebrew was graffitied along with the Star of David on a wall of one of the homes that was firebombed when Baby Ali was killed, clearly a “price tag” attack—vandalism or arson by Israeli settlers as retribution for actions taken by the Israeli government against settlements, or for acts of resistance by Palestinians.

Israeli settlers commit crimes with impunity, and the Israeli government does the same, as evidenced by the #51DaysInGaza attack last year that killed 2,143 Palestinians. But the issue is not with individual racist settlers, individual racist lawmakers, or individual racist soldiers. The issue is a culture of violence against Palestinians that is a direct result of Zionism and the white supremacist belief that European Jewish colonizers have the right to the land of historical Palestine.

They don’t have that right. The only inalienable rights in Palestine are return and self-determination, and the right to live free of occupation and colonization. Just like the continued racist police and white supremacist attacks on Black people in this country are galvanizing a new civil rights movement that is challenging everything that the United States represents, the whole world is beginning to recognize that Israel represents nothing but murder, exploitation, land theft, and devastation.

Israel is living on borrowed time. Its existence as a racist, apartheid state is almost over. And when Palestine is liberated, we will sing the name of Baby Ali, another of our beautiful martyrs.

USPCN, August 1st, 2015