May 2011

In early March 2011, five members of a Jewish settler family, the Fogel parents and three of their six ¹ children were brutally killed as they slept in their home in Itamar, a northern West Bank settlement not far from the Palestinian town of Nablus.² Surprisingly, little was heard about the progress of the investigation until about five weeks later, just before the Passover holiday, on April 17, 2011. The Israeli government finally announced that two young Palestinians, Hakim Mazen Awad, 18, and Amjad Mahmad Awad, 19, from the Palestinian village of Awarta, about a kilometer from Itamar, had confessed and had reenacted the murder of Ehud (Udi) and Ruth Fogel, and three of their children, Yoav, 11, Elad, four, and Hadas, three months.

Reports from the Palestinian community, however, cast doubt on Palestinian participation in the attack. For one thing Palestinian sources emphasized the difficulty, near to practical impossibility, of breaching the very tight security at the settlement without raising effective alarm.

A Palestinian blog, KABOBfest, authored by (the otherwise unidentified) Mohammad, explained that Itamar is a heavily fortified settlement, whose security included an electrified wire fence topped with two feet of razor wire, with sensors that could signal intrusion by means of cutting shears, and cameras that covered the entire perimeter. 24-hour security guards in addition to Israeli military forces also protected the settlement. Itamar, according to Mohammad is also surrounded by hundreds of meters of empty buffer land to isolate and identify intruders³

The KABOBfest report continues with its own ironical spin on the official story as it was recounted in the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz. In Mohammad's retelling:

Luckily for the Palestinian youths, Mohammad continues, the settlement's automatic cameras and sensors for some mysterious reason raised no alarms. He continues:

Mohammad explains that in this latest version, a gun and knife now replaces the original version in which the Fogel parents and children were murdered only with a knife.⁴ According to Ha'aretz, the two youths only decided on their operation hours before the Friday night March 11 murders. KABOBfest's Mohammad believes that the difficulty in penetrating settlement security was such that the murders could not have taken place without extensive planning and training, and could not have been the result of an impromptu decision.

In addition, despite an Israeli imposed news blackout, allegations appeared in Palestinian outlets that the Israeli authorities had identified and arrested a Thai worker for the murder and had also arrested all of the other Thai workers who worked in the settlement.

The motive?

If the Palestinians didn't commit the crime-and if they did, their motive would have been taken for granted-what would have possessed a foreign worker to do so? Foreign workers have been imported to Israel in large numbers-currently there are about 250,000 legal and illegal foreign workers in Israel-and are seen as reliable ostensibly because they don't harbor the murderous hatred attributed to Palestinians.

Palestinian sources claimed that no Palestinian group had claimed responsibility. ⁵ The Palestinian news agency Qudsnet offered a motive that seems to have come from a sole Palestinian informant. Qudsnet claimed that it was an Asian man who used to work for the Fogels who was responsible for the killings.

For example, the brief Jerusalem Post report noting that Palestinian news sources cast doubt on Palestinian responsibility for the attacks acknowledged that a foreign worker had been arrested in connection with the attack but gave no other information that would help readers weigh the validity of Palestinian doubts. ¹³ Similarly Wikipedia goes as far as recording some of the questions raised by relatives of the accused, yet shrinks from adding details regarding possible foreign worker responsibility. (Israel Shamir, a Russian-Israeli anti-Zionist journalist and author, has argued that Wikipedia is "infiltrated" if not controlled by Zionists.¹⁴ ) Much of the same unwillingness to expose evidence contrary to the official story seems to be the case for the rest of the Israeli media judging by such mainstream outlets as Ha'aretz and Yedioth Ahronoth.

Under the circumstances it seems that Xymphora may be close to the mark when he argues that besides the reflexive reaction to pin the crime on Palestinians, there was a certain political urgency in official circles anxious to ensure as little news about possible foreign worker responsibility made its way into public consciousness. Xymphora's prediction that the truth of the matter will be buried seems on target.