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”.
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.