"Fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin.” (Deuteronomy 24:16)
Amiram Ben-Uliel was charged this week with the July murder of the Dawabsha family in the West Bank village of Douma. If convicted, Ben-Uliel, 21, who is married and a new father, will likely spend the coming years behind bars. If he is granted furloughs, he will be able to visit his Jerusalem apartment and his parents’ home in the settlement of Karmei Tsur. The Ben-Uliel family’s neighbors needn’t fear that explosives experts will come to their neighborhood or that the force of a blast will crack their walls and shatter their windows. The neighbors of Yosef Haim Ben-David, accused of killing Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July 2014, needn’t worry, either. If Ben-David is convicted, he can expect life imprisonment, but his family home will remain intact. And that’s for the best.
These two vicious terror attacks set off waves of violence that have resulted in the deaths of dozens of Israelis and Palestinians. And we have not seen the end of it.
On Jan. 4, the prime minister declared on the Knesset podium that “Terror is terror is terror.” It stands to reason, then, that the law is the law is the law. And the law says that a punishment shall be a punishment shall be a punishment. But that is not the case in the West Bank's Areas B and C, under Israel’s military control, and in Area A, under Palestinian Authority control. Also, despite Jerusalem being under Israeli law (and not military law), only the families of Palestinian attackers are losing their homes in the eastern part of the city. The families of Jewish perpetrators are not. Last November, the Israel Defense Forces blew up four houses in the Palestinian city of Nablus and in the village of Silwad. They were the residences of the four men charged with the Oct. 1 murder of the Henkins near the settlement of Itamar, and the June 29 murder of Malachi Rosenfeld in the Binyamin region (none of them, just like Ben-Uliel and Ben-David, have been convicted yet). Old people and babies were thrown out of their homes into the rain and cold. The parents paid for the sins of their sons.
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