Haaretz: Death Penalty For ‘Price Tag’ Graffiti Suspects

Tel Aviv, May 23 – A day after police detained several teenagers for slashing tires and spraying hateful graffiti in a Galilee town last month, the editorial board at Haaretz spared no punches in detailing how they expected the State to treat the vandals: an editorial statement in today’s edition calls for the three sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to face the hangman.

Calling the use of spray paint on walls, and knives to cut rubber, “unvarnished terrorism,” the paper demanded that the authorities stamp out the “plague of violent nationalism once and for all” by demonstrating that anyone who threatens lives or promotes hate will be dealt with in the most severe fashion, because such a policy has been proved effective over several generations of conflict in the region; whenever Israel takes a hard line against those who threaten its citizens, nobody ever bothers them again.

“Just as the IDF uses often-lethal force in protecting soldiers and settlers, we expect the State to show its displeasure with these radicals to the same extent,” the editorial read, noting that radicalism per se is not the issue: the problem is that these “hardened criminals” are precisely the wrong kind of radical, the kind that endorses Jewish sovereignty in the historic Jewish homeland, an unforgivable notion.

“The public hardly needs reminding that these are settlers, and therefore not worthy of the protections of civil rights,” continued the editorial, noting that making people scared is the moral equivalent of breaking into their homes and slaughtering them.

In fact the publication of the editorial was not a foregone conclusion, says Managing Editor Rosa Luxemburg. “We had a spirited debate over whether to react to the arrests at all, or even to direct a reporter to write about them,” she explained. “Several of us preferred to suppress the story because it contradicts our narrative that the government refuses or fails to act against perpetrators of violence against Arabs. But after other new outlets reported it, we couldn’t very well ignore it.”