All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Noam Shizoff.
Noam Shizoff is an independent journalist and editor.
He's worked for the Tel Aviv local paper, Ha'ir, for Ynet, and as deputy editor for Mariv Daily News.
His work is published in Haaretz, Yedioth, Arenoth, The Nation, and other publications.
He currently publishes the Promised Land blog at 927mag.com.
Welcome to the show, Noam.
How are you doing?
Great.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So you have a really good piece here at the 927 blog.
Again, that's 927mag.com.
972.
Geez, I don't know what happened to me.
I'm all dyslexic this morning.
International number for the international code for Israel and the Palestinian territory.
Oh, I know what it was.
I was looking at my notes where I wrote it down wrong.
My apologies.
I'm not that dyslexic.
It's written down wrong, and I was reading that correctly.
Okay, good.
Sorry about that.
It's 972mag.com.
You ought to get the other one and make sure it forwards.
No, okay.
Anyway.
All right.
So the article is Settlers Murder Investigation Turns into Collective Punishment.
And this is a pretty in-depth article with a pretty detailed explanation of the situation here.
So I guess if I could do like Joe Friday, we can start with just the facts, and you can give us the background of this story, the murder of the Fogel family, and the Israeli government's reaction and their attempts to solve the crime.
Yeah.
So the story began a month ago when five members of the Fogel family of the settlement of Itamar, that's a Jewish settlement next to the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, five members of this family were killed, were attacked while they were sleeping at their home.
And they all died, leaving behind two small children.
One of the victims of the terrible murder was a baby, and the two parents and two older kids.
And the Israeli government immediately vowed to do everything to find the killers.
Now, but what it did during the investigation, that it took some measures that were certainly unprecedented in such cases, and also appeared to be directed against the entire Palestinian population of the area, and not just as an attempt to solve this crime.
So in order to understand the situation, you need to realize that all the Palestinians in the West Bank are under military law, and while the Israeli settlers are under civilian law.
That means that the Palestinians don't get all these rights we know for defendants during the criminal investigation, such as having the right to access to an attorney or bail or any sort of thing, hibiscus, corpus, all those things we discuss when we talk about defenders' rights.
What the army did, it invaded this small town, small community called Awarta, right next to the settlement of Itamar, and it detained hundreds of people and conducted house-to-house searches in hundreds of homes, leaving after, you know, broken furniture, breaking into homes.
And one morning they arrested 100 women from the village.
All were questioned and interrogated.
And we know for a fact that all the young males in the village were forced to give DNA samples.
So altogether, it was really an unorthodox murder investigation that, from the side, looked like a form of collective punishment against this village.
Now, a couple of days ago, there was a development, and Israel did announce that it was able to locate the people, the two people responsible for the crime, and to have them under arrest.
So, basically, that's about it.
And I use this case in my article to point to the fact that there are two sets of legal systems applied by Israel in the West Bank, one for Arabs and one for Jews.
And you would have never seen this form of interrogation, arresting hundreds of people, if the victim of the murder had been a Palestinian and the alleged perpetrator had been a Jew.
It's only possible the other way.
All right.
Now, quite a few things to review there.
First of all, can you tell us what you know about those arrested now and what's known about them?
Was this a robbery or a personal vendetta or it was political or anything like that?
It was probably a politically motivated attack.
According to the information released to the Israeli media, one of the killers was there with an aim to hurt settlers.
The other probably joined because he said, that's at least what he said in his interrogation, that he wanted to steal the firearms that were in the house and sell them.
So from his perspective, it might have been a robbery that got wrong.
But they are treated as suspects who were motivated politically.
And the main suspect, the older guy, they're both very young, 18 and 19.
The older guy, he's not denying that it was a politically motivated murder.
They weren't a member of any known organization, political organization.
So it was probably a local initiative by them.
So best I can tell here from your description, this is a local police murder detective case, right?
There's no particular reason to believe that what they did in order to so called investigate this crime was necessary at all.
It doesn't sound like it sounds like just another murder case, really, right?
Well, you might say that more or less, you might say that they had better chance to catch the killers, which they say they did.
And with these measures that they used.
But the important thing is that if the same thing would have happened in my neighborhood or in your neighborhood, the police would have never thought of getting everyone in the street or in the next street, you know, hundreds of people and detaining every one of them and questioning every one of them and violating their rights and breaking into their homes, even if it would have improved the chances of having every murder case in our city solved.
So there is a question of means.
And there is also a question of the rule of law in the in the in the West Bank.
Well, I'm kind of trying to get to the motivation for the thing, as you said, it begins to look and maybe, you know, there's some more substance to this you could refer to.
But it appears that this is really collective punishment.
This is just making everybody miserable as revenge for this thing happening in the name of Oh, yeah, we're looking really hard at just trying to turn up a credible suspect here.
Well, the army obviously denied it.
But from what you read in the Israeli media, there was certainly no effort to to treat the people of our time.
We're talking about a town of 6000 people as innocent, or they were looked upon the entire town as part of a conspiracy to commit this murder.
And let me just give you an example.
Right after the murder occurred, some of the village land was captured by settlers.
And instead of evacuating them, the army is now guarding them when they sit on the village land.
So and the army is not even denied denying it.
So they're using this investigation to annex more of this village.
I think, well, I don't know if the goal behind the investigation is to take the village land.
But obviously, once the settlers decided to do it, the army didn't act.
So what I think is that, you know, none of us support this murder, and none of us and we all want to find the killers and the people behind it, whatever their motives are.
But even Palestinians have rights.
And even people you're in conflict with have rights.
You cannot have hundreds of people be taken from their homes, forced to give DNA samples.
You cannot have house to house searches without a shred of evidence.
Just, you know, knocking knocking on doors, smashing furniture, looking for stuff in order to find your killers, even if you think it's the only way to do it.
You know, people, people have rights, even if there's there are Palestinians.
So well, I wonder what's the role?
Is there any such thing as the PLA local police squad there?
And do they have any role whatsoever in this?
Or are there you know, we all under the impression that the Palestinians are independent under you always hear about the Palestinian Authority, right?
But at the end of the day, if Israel wants to conduct such a search in a certain place, it can always do so because the ultimate authority in the West Bank is still the Israeli occupation.
In this particular village, the PA doesn't even have this kind of power where it has, you know, in the big cities, Ramallah or Nablus, or Hebron, where it can actually conduct it.
So it has its own police force and everything over in a place like a war, the place we're talking about, which has 6000 people in it.
Security is still in the security process to have full authority.
There's basically no one to defend these people's rights, you know, and it's been the situation on the ground for 40 something years.
And it's just getting worse.
And this example for my work is one of the worst example of recent use of the total disrespect for the rule of law in this occupation and the undemocratic way which Palestinians are handled under the occupation in the West Bank.
And this is the stuff that bothered us and led me to writing this piece, because no one questions the need to find the killers, the people who did this murder, and no one supports the murder.
But still, people have rights, even the murder defendants and suspects have rights and certainly an entire town have rights.
Well, gosh, it shouldn't be too hard to, you know, for Americans to put themselves in that situation.
If we lived under permanent martial law for decades, where the army could come in and force everyone in, you know, a certain part of a town or a certain town to go out in the street and give up DNA, the other three did something terrible, then everyone in your town, we're talking 6000 people will be under this kind, you know, there were five days of curfew, full curfew on this town.
So and and people can break into your homes and you have no Miranda and you can't call an attorney and you're forced to give DNA DNA samples without even being able to consult everyone.
And it's been done to hundreds of people.
You know, even if you end up finding the people who did it, is it is this the way you want your society to function?
Is this a democracy?
That's the question we're asking?
Well, you mentioned the use of dogs by the police going into people's homes.
I wonder those German shepherds?
I don't know, because the part of the thing that for a long time, the media wasn't allowed into the village.
So we only know from reports of residents that on the use of dog, which they gave testimonies to human rights organization who were able to access this, the village of Fawarta after those searches and after the days of curfew.
So we don't know which dog they used.
And you say that a lot of the Palestinians are at least a few, several is your word here, claim that they were just simply robbed by the Israeli army.
Some of them, they were missing, missing stuff when, when the soldiers left.
Now, it's not surprising, you know, you send thousands of soldiers, people have no legal defense.
And, and, and I guess if people would send the entire police force of a town and you can't call your attorney and, and you don't need a warrant to, to, to, to enter someone's home and to conduct the search.
So you, you, in every city, when you do something, you end up with a few cases of fluting and of stealing.
So I guess this was the case there as well.
This is the problem when people don't have rights.
And when you don't aggressively defend those rights, because you, you think that you should do anything because some crime occurred and someone is a suspect, when you don't defend those rights, you end up with looting, with robbing, with damage to property, with hurting people who have nothing to do with the crime.
So, and this is, this is the case under, under this occupation, under military law for 44 years.
That's how the Palestinians live.
Now, you know, what I wonder is how can the Americans, how can the population of Israel continue this way?
I mean, I know that there are, you know, right-wing nationalists and, and right-wing religious people who are hell-bent on settling, you know, taking over the West Bank ultimately and that kind of thing.
But what about everybody else?
This is madness.
Martial law for four decades.
I know, I know, I know from American history that it takes a lot of time to convince a population about the stuff that, that its own army does or about the stuff that is done in the name of this country.
You know, it can take a really long time for people to make up their mind.
And, and, and in Israel, Israel is in a tough spot right now.
The public is very scared from a security threat.
And people would rather just not know, I guess.
So, it's, it's the sad banality of life that people would rather not know what is done in their name.
Well, you know, I saw a poll a long time ago that said, this is when Sharon was still running things.
In fact, you know what, this may have been back when Netanyahu was the prime minister the first time.
And, and it was a poll of Israelis that said that they would be totally for the land for peace and a Palestinian state and a permanent deal, peace treaty and, and normalized relations with all the neighbors and whatever.
But unless the United States is willing to put the pressure on the Israeli government to force that to happen, they, you know, instead go ahead and prefer somebody like Netanyahu or Ariel Sharon, who at least is going to protect them.
As long as they're picking a fight, they want good security.
I think, I think you're, you're on the money there.
You're touching the heart of the matter.
Israelis will be willing to, to end the occupation, but right now they have no incentive to do that.
They got a policy which is supported in a way by the United States, because the United States doesn't do anything to end the occupation, because the United States actually supports, with military support, this occupation.
So my feeling is that if Israelis would face a real choice, but I'm talking about a real choice, they will decide to end the occupation.
That's what, that's the feeling I get, and that's the sense I get from the people around me, and from polls, as you mentioned.
But I don't think that anybody really, especially not Washington, had, had made Israel face this choice.
Not, not until now.
Yeah, well, and it's even worse in Gaza.
I guess they don't have the military occupation.
They just have bombs falling out of the sky all the time.
Yeah, that's, that's a different issue, yeah, but, but you're right.
The question is what would happen even after a sort of a limited withdrawal, and we work to stabilize the situation.
But with the West Bank, and with people like the village of Hawartha, we're not even there yet, because nobody's trying to, to force Israel out of these places.
All right, well, I'm sorry, we're over time, and we have to leave it there, but I really appreciate your time on the show.
Thank you for having me.
All right, everybody, that is Noam Shazaf, 972MAG.com.
