Monday 30 January 2023

Collective punishment

 A boy takes a gun, seriously wounds a man and the man's son. He is shot and wounded at the site, treated, but under guard of the police. The authorities go further. They arrest his family and seek to break up the community in which they live to find refuge goodness knows where. This could have been a story from Stalinist USSR, but in fact it is from Israel today. It is collective punishment and a breach of human rights.

Further, while mouthing platitudes about citizens' not taking the law into their own hands, the prime minister and his minister of the interior move to relax gun licensing restrictions and encourage those settlers already licensed to take their guns out on to the street.

Meanwhile, thousands of ordinary Israelis continue to protest against the government's threat to the nation's Supreme Court.


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