Palestinian film director and Academy Award-winner Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked by what his colleague described as a “lynch mob” of Israeli settlers on Monday night in the Palestinian village of Susya, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
Ballal’s whereabouts are now unknown after Israeli soldiers then seized him from the ambulance that arrived to treat him, his co-director and fellow Oscar winner of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham, said on X.
Abraham, a journalist for +972 magazine, said in a separate post featuring a shaky cell phone video that masked settlers “attacked Hamdan’s village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones”.
The problem is this case is that ‘a lynching’ implies that the mob is going against the authorities, which is absolutely not the case when it comes to settler violence. The Israeli soldiers are there to protect and facilitate the settlers in their attacks against Palestinians. Under no circumstances does the IDF deserve the benefit of the doubt and the article makes it clear that they are the ones who abducted Hamdan anyway.
I give you: every lynching ever under Jim Crow in the American South.
The lynching narrative presupposes that the perpetrators are a mob of otherwise normal people driven to take justice into their own hands by extreme ignorance and prejudice that can eventually be overcome by education in tolerance. Is that how you feel about the Israeli settlers? The way I feel about them is that they are not normal yet severely ignorant people. They are invaders who know exactly what they are doing. There is no pretense of justice for them to take into their own hands. They cannot be taught to coexist with the Palestinians they are trying to ethnically cleanse from the West Bank. They need to be driven at gun point back to Long Island or at least Israel 1948. Calling it lynching minimizes the settlers’ culpability.
Ask yourself whether it was normal for cops to be at lynchings, then re-read my previous comment.
Part of what makes a lynching a lynching is subversion of the criminal justice process and yes that probably often involved cops joining the lynch mob. However, these Israeli settlers aren’t subverting anything. They are not vigilantes. They are attacking and terrorizing Palestinians without any pretext of justice.
If you think just a bit harder about what it means for cops to be in on lynchings you will realize that you are drawing attention to an ahistorical and false semantics debate rather than keeping focus on the injustice posted. Just like these Reddit liberals trying to split hairs.
You should consider how using the wrong words for things might be playing into the hands of Zionists. Maybe you are.
You are wrong both semantically and in emphasis. I have had to say this 3 times already. I pointed out that it’s wrong to put so much emphasis on the former, it is distracting from the injustice, and your response was to be contrarian while ignoring what I’ve argued.
Do some self-criticism.