Balad MKs: Security Measures Discriminate Against Suicide Bombers

“I can’t tell you how many of my friends have been stopped on the way to kill Jews,” said Zoabi.

Jerusalem, August 18 – Legislators from the Arab-Israeli political party Balad voiced objections today to various security methods employed by the armed forces and police, among others, saying that singling out those who aim to inflict mass casualties in terrorist attacks smacks of discrimination.

Basel Ghattas, Haneen Zoabi, and Jamal Zakhalka, the three members of the party currently holding Knesset seats, blasted the IDF, the Border Guards, the Israel Police, and myriad private security contractors for taking steps to interdict would-be suicide bombers, mass shooters, stabbers, and other attackers, because those steps manifest blatant prejudice against the target group.

“The violations that this country’s institutions permit themselves to commit in the name of ‘security’ and ‘defense’ must end,” declared Zakhalka, the party chairman. “A society that boasts of its liberal ethos and values in a sea of illiberal regimes engages in hypocrisy when it then turns around and treats only one group differently from everyone else.”

“It’s an outrage,” added Zoabi. “I can’t tell you how many of my friends have been stopped on the way to kill Jews and whoever else might be in the vicinity – stopped by police, soldiers, or security guards specifically trained to focus on this one group of people to the exclusion of everyone else. If that’s not discrimination, I don’t know what is. It has to stop.”

Zoabi said that he discrimination against terrorists had become so intense that she had personally tries to escort a number of them and their sympathizers on a boat in 2011, but that Israel’s discriminatory policies were so forcefully implemented that naval commandos stormed the ship and arrested everyone aboard.

Also aboard that ship was Ghattas, who voiced frustration that unlike earlier civil rights struggles such as that of blacks in the US during the 1960’s, the population at large does not easily side with the victims of this discrimination. “We haven’t had a Rosa Parks moment, and I fear it may be a long time in coming,” lamented Ghattas. “Over the course of the US civil rights campaign, violence against blacks served to garner sympathy from the larger society, but for some reason, we have been unable to duplicate the success of that campaign led by the non-violent Dr. Martin Luther King. I try to imagine what Dr. King would advise us to do differently, but can’t think of anything.”

“It must be that Israeli prejudice is so strong that it overcomes even the obvious virtue of people suffering discrimination,” he concluded.