by Ali Abunimah The Electronic Intifada
This video shows a group of Israelis from the Kiryat Arba settlement “playing hate songs through a loud speaker to residents of the Hebron neighborhood of Jabal Johar,” according to Israel’s B’Tselem human rights group, which published it last month.
The song heard in the video, filmed by Mai Dana on 11 October, includes the repeated refrain “Muhammad is dead” – disparaging the prophet. Its lyrics say:
He is no prophet
Just another Arab
He has a moustache with fleas
And he eats goat cheese
He is a construction laborer
Even when he’s fasting on Ramadan
And he has an orange ID card
Muhammad is gay and the son of a prostitute.
The video shows many settlers, including young children, laughing, singing and pumping their fists as the music blasts.
The song refers to the Israeli-issued ID – which used to come in an orange-colored case – carried by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank which restricts their movements, in contrast to settlers who can go where they please.
In other words, the settler song celebrates apartheid.
At least one of the young men repeatedly shouts “whore” in Arabic in the direction of the camera.
“These antics continued in the presence of a soldier and police officers who took no action to stop them,” B’Tselem adds. “During the incident, settlers threw rocks at the neighborhood.”
The “Muhammad is dead” song is regularly chanted by Israelis during frequent “Death to the Arabs” marches.
Another video filmed by Dana on 17 November shows a settler shouting “whores” and other vulgarities at Palestinian women, and lobbing stones at them as Israeli soldiers look on and do nothing.
Hebron: Settler humiliates and throws rocks at Palestinian women in the presence of Israeli soldiers
These videos illustrate the levels of open incitement and harassment against Palestinians by Israeli settlers, with the full collusion of the army of occupation.
This is especially so in Hebron, whose Palestinian population is bearing the brunt of Israel’s violent crackdown in the occupied West Bank.
At least one of the two Israeli youths arrested in the burning alive of the Dawabsha family last summer is from a Hebron-area settlement.
Kiryat Arba is also the settlement which hosts the gravesite marker honoring Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn settler who massacred 29 Palestinian men and boys during Ramadan prayers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque in 1994.
The video also brings to mind the words of Tommy Lapid, the late former chair of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial. He likened the routine harassment of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in Hebron to the anti-Semitism Jews experienced in pre-World War II Europe.
“It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us,” he said in 2007, “but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn.”
Dena Shunra provided translation.