Israel: Killing protesters in the Golan Heights

Israeli snipers cannot deter the Syrian people, said Syria’s Tishreen in an editorial. Israeli troops killed at least 20 people this week when they opened fire on hundreds of unarmed protesters who crossed into the Golan Heights, Syrian territory unlawfully seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Yet our people remain unafraid. The demonstration on the 44th anniversary of the war was “just a preamble to a greater flow of limitless crowds on the way to liberation and return.” More than half a million Palestinian and Syrian refugees are ready to reclaim their lands under Israeli occupation. “It doesn’t matter which measures Israel takes to kill, terrorize, and frighten.”

The Syrian regime obviously engineered this incursion to distract attention from its massacres of its own people, said Aner Shalev in Israel’s Ha’aretz. “The troubling question is: Why did Israel cooperate with this Syrian equation so obediently, so unimaginatively?” Killing more than a dozen people and wounding hundreds is bad PR, to say the least. This was hardly a spontaneous event that took the military by surprise. We knew the Palestinians were planning demonstrations on what they call Naksa Day, marking the 1967 “setback”—after all, they did the same thing last month on Nakba Day, the anniversary of Israel’s 1948 creation, which they call the “catastrophe.” The failure to repel demonstrators with nonlethal force “raises questions about the judgment of our political and military leadership.”

Israel could scarcely have done differently, said The Jerusalem Post. The Israeli Defense Forces followed clear and fair rules of engagement. First, with megaphones, they warned the infiltrators away from the border in Arabic, then used nonlethal means like tear gas, then fired warning shots. Only after protesters reached the border fence did soldiers fire live rounds at them, and then only at their legs. The death toll was almost certainly lower than 20—the Syrian government, remember, is hardly a reliable source of information—and some of those were killed when their own Molotov cocktails hit a minefield. The truth is, “there is precious little Israel can do to prevent a toll of fatalities should its borders come under relentless mass onslaught—short of giving up its right to sovereignty and the right to defend itself.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That’s why we need to build another wall, said Yosef Argaman in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth. The much-derided border fence along the West Bank, which drew international and even domestic condemnation when it was first erected in 2003, has been a resounding success. It has “stopped terror from the territories—despite being only partly completed.” Now we are facing a new threat: a “mass wave of Palestinian ‘martyrs’ determined to commit suicide.” Only a wall can prevent “images of massacres that Israel cannot withstand.”