Israeli demolition of attackers' family homes provokes Palestinian backlash

JERUSALEM — On Oct. 13, Alaa Abu Jamal rammed his car into a crowded Jerusalem bus stop and used a meat cleaver to hack to death a 59-year-old Israeli man. In response, Israel ordered the military to raze three homes in his family’s apartment building in an impoverished area of East Jerusalem.

The home demolition is a tactic that the Israeli government has revived to punish families of alleged Palestinian terrorists and deter future attacks. It also is highly controversial. Some Israelis question its effectiveness as a deterrent, and Palestinians say such inflammatory moves only encourage retaliation.

That appeared to be the case Monday, when Palestinian demonstrators clashed with Israeli forces in a West Bank refugee camp after the soldiers arrived to demolish the home of a Palestinian in prison who the army said fatally shot an Israeli hiker in the West Bank this past summer.

Palestinians threw firebombs and rocks as the Israeli forces demolished the home, and troops fired rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters, the military said. Palestinian Health Ministry spokesman Mohammed Awawdeh said two Palestinians were killed. The army said Palestinians opened fire and Israeli forces returned fire.

Shafiq Rabaya, head of the Jabel el Mukabber local council, said that in demolishing homes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "playing with fire, turning this into a religious war."

Ruth Edwards of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said such drastic steps ensure that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank "is a permanent presence in people’s daily lives, that there’s always a sense of instability, of insecurity.”

Israel frequently demolished homes during a Palestinian uprising in 2000 to 2005, but it disavowed the practice as violence waned and a 2005 military commission concluded that punitive demolitions were unsuccessful in achieving deterrence.

Netanyahu revived the tactic last year after the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. That crime prompted a revenge murder of a Palestinian teenager in East Jerusalem and helped spawn a war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that governs the Gaza Strip.

The resumption of home demolitions was backed by a 2010 report by professors from Northwestern University and Hebrew University that found they can “cause an immediate, significant decrease in the number of suicide attacks.”

However, the report said demolitions are only a limited deterrent and the main ways to end terror campaigns "belong to the political rather than the military realm.”

Now amid increased attacks by Palestinians, Netanyahu seems determined to employ whatever tools he can find to address the situation. “Nobody will have immunity, anywhere,” he told an emergency Cabinet meeting last month in addressing two months of violence that has led to the deaths of 17 Israelis and 82 Palestinians, 52 of them alleged by Israel to be attackers, according to an Associated Press tally.

Relatives of Abu Jamal, the meat cleaver assailant, say Israeli measures such as home demolitions only have a boomerang impact by underscoring what many see as a long history of Israeli oppression and fomenting a desire to retaliate.

On Oct. 6, a week before Jamal's rampage, Israeli forces flattened the home of a cousin who last year attacked a Jerusalem synagogue with a pistol and a meat cleaver, killing four worshipers and a Druze policeman.

“We had already forgotten about the attack but when they came to destroy ... the home, boom! Israel brought it back to us,” said Rabaya, the local council head.

As the home was being demolished, Abu Jamal confronted Israeli security officers, who beat him and sent him to hospital for injuries on the arm and shoulders, according to a cousin, Muawiyah Abu Jamal.

“It certainly hurt his sense of pride to be beaten in front of his children, who saw him as a hero,” Muawiyah said. He said his home also was destroyed on the night of Oct. 6, despite court instructions that forbade soldiers from demolishing any houses other than those listed on an official order.

Then on Oct. 9, four days before his meat cleaver attack, Israeli soldiers denied Abu Jamal entry to the holy al-Aqsa mosque for his weekly Friday prayers citing growing Palestinian unrest.

“Al-Aqsa was a red line for him,” cousin Muawiyah said.