Is the Violence of Tag Mehir a State Crime?

Abstract

This article focuses on the violent acts of Tag-Mehir (Price Tag), a group of Israeli citizens that injure, attack, vandalize and violate Palestinian individuals, communities and property. The paper discusses the criminalities of Tag-Mehir by reporting statistics on their crimes and juxtaposing statistical data with voices and analyses of Israeli officials and media coverage. By looking at the interlocking effects of religious, hate and state crime in the context of Israel’s settler colonialism, we argue that the acts of Tag-Mehir constitute aggressive violence aimed at concealing the state’s criminalities against the colonized Palestinian body and space. The state’s failure to effectively prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes demonstrates a tacit approval for the religiously and nationally motivated violence. Tag-Mehir’s state crimes hide within the resulting violent shuttling between nationalistic hate, violence and religious crimes.

Introduction

On 18 June 2015, a group of Israeli-Jews set fire to the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, one of the most famous churches in the Holy Land, causing extensive damage. The church marks the traditional spot of Jesus miracle of the loaves and fish, and is located in the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. The attackers painted Hebrew graffiti on the church’s walls, reading, ‘The false gods will be eliminated’—a quote from the Aleinu prayer. The graffiti calls for the elimination of idol worship. The leniency of the Israeli state in reacting to such criminalities enables their perpetuated occurrence and prompts even more horrific acts: the burning alive of baby Ali Saad Dawabsheh while he slept in July 2015 (British Broadcasting Company [ BBC] 2015 ) and the burning alive of the child Muhammad Abu-Khadir while he walked in his neighbourhood during the month of Ramadan in July 2014 ( Issacharoff 2014 ) are two examples of extremely violent crimes committed by settlers against Palestinians. To offer a criminological analysis of such racially driven, violent actions, we must ask the following questions: What led the attackers to violate the Dawabsheh family while they slept and to burn them and their children? What is the purpose of such crimes? Why are there such strong expressions of hatred towards non-Jewish citizens, the ‘others’, in society, and why are these hateful expressions permissible?

This paper examines violent acts, such as the one inscribed on the 18-month-old body of Ali Dawabsheh. It will study atrocities performed on colonized Palestinian bodies, as well as public, religious, educational and domestic spaces and places by the Jewish-Israeli movement, Tag-Mehir (Price Tag), a nationally and religiously motivated group that attacks Palestinians living in historic Palestine. We argue that these acts violate the colonized body, space and accessibility to life. We further claim that Tag-Mehir’s performative violence over colonized bodies and spaces constitutes violent testimonies that aim at immobilizing or ‘walling in’ the colonized so that ‘the white man is sealed in his whiteness and the black man in his blackness’ ( Fanon 1967 : 9).

It is our contention that, although the actions of Tag-Mehir involve elements of religious hatred and hate crimes, the umbrella of impunity, tolerance of politicians and state lawlessness under which the attackers operate make these actions a state-hate crime. In other words, we believe the violence of Tag-Mehir combines three types of crimes—religious, hate and state crimes. We argue that the actions of Tag-Mehir are ultimately ‘for the benefit of the state’ and, therefore, even though they are not perpetrated by the state, their intent and effect is to support and further entrench the structural violence of the state. Additionally, we submit that state’s negligence in prosecuting members of Tag-Mehir and putting an end to these acts is embedded in the state’s ideology that preserves the Jewish nature of the state ( Raz-Krakotzkin 2011 ; Masalha 2013 ; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014a ).

Defining State Criminality: Religious Violence and Hate Crime

Criminological discussions and analyses tend to distinguish between religious, hate and state violence. Religiously motivated violence is rooted in religious interpretations and attends to religious norms ( Junger and Polder 1993 ; Hamm 2009 ). In contrast, hate crimes are mechanisms of power, with deep-rooted political and social stratifications that aim at maintaining a hierarchy of power through violence and threats ( Perry 2001 ). Hate crimes are part of a pattern of hostilities ‘… directed towards groups of people who generally are not valued by the majority society, who suffer discrimination in other arenas, and who do not have full access to remedy social, political and economic injustice’ ( Wolfe and Copeland 1994 : 201). Thus, they are raced, classed and gendered.

Whereas hate crimes are harmful acts conducted by individuals and/or groups, state violence is motivated, carried out and mobilized by state officials or by those who act on their behalf ( Friedrichs 1998 ): ‘one issue with state-organized crime is the degree to which it is sanctioned by authority figures, or is carried out quite autonomously by state agents’ ( Friedrichs 2000 : 73). State crimes are politically/ideologically motivated acts that serve and adhere, directly or indirectly, to state politics and to the state’s hierarchical and nationalist agenda ( Lasslett 2014 ). They are conducted under a system of state-related tools, such as surveillance, repression and violence, to maintain the legitimate monopoly of the state ( Green and Ward 2004 ). Green and Ward (2000 : 110) argue that state crime is restricted to the area of overlap between violations of human rights and state organizational deviance. Further, they contend that state crime incorporates acts against ‘political entities … which deploy organized force, control substantial territories and levy formal and informal taxes but are not accepted members of the international society of states’ ( Green and Ward 2004 : 3).

While criminologists recognize that racialized, nationalist and religious beliefs can be potential motivators of crimes and can control human behaviours ( Darrell et al. 2010 ; Unnever and Cullen 2010 ), they often ignore the possibility that state crime can hide behind religiously motivated or racially rooted crimes, particularly in settler-colonial contexts.

Crimes in a Settler-Colonial Context

In Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon (1967) asserts that colonialism and its racial violence must be understood in spatial and historical terms, and that violence over the colonial space must be read through analyses of historical and geographical processes. He describes how the colonizer inscribes boundaries upon the colonized to maintain violent spatial relationships. Space and life under colonial rule are embedded in language, physical appearance, distance, gestures and other modes of separating the colonized from the colonizer:

I slip into corners, and my long antennae pick up the catchphrases strewn over the surface of things—nigger underwear smells of nigger—nigger teeth are white—nigger feet are big—the nigger’s barrel chest—I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility. ( Fanon 1967 : 87–88)

Fanon’s analysis reveals how the social exclusion, inequality and spatial segregation of the colonial administration generate severe conflicts between colonizer and colonized. Native spaces are poor, abandoned places; the natives are constantly dispossessed by all means possible; and bureaucracies are imposed in an attempt to remove the threat of the natives:

… this the settler knows very well: when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive: ‘They want to take our place’. It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place. ( Fanon 1963 : 39)

Indeed, the brutality and coerciveness of colonial administration produce anticolonial struggles, from the domestic to the public and back, in an attempt to reappropriate and transform colonial spaces, building a geography of liberation that refuses alienation and everyday racism ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2012 ). The everyday racism inscribed on the colony and the colonized and motivated by settler’s racist beliefs construct, as Rustin (1991) claims, a paranoid worldview that reinforces the attack the racist psyche feels it is under. In discussing the psychoanalytical effect of racism, Rustin explains:

When they are suffused with intense feeling, are akin to psychotic states of mind … the mechanisms of psychotic thought find in racial categorizations an ideal container. These mechanisms include the paranoid splitting of objects into the loved and hated, the suffusion of thinking processes by intense, unrecognized emotion, confusion between self and object due to the splitting of the self and massive projective identification, and hatred of reality and truth. ( Rustin 1991 : 62, cited in Frosh 2013 )

Fanon (1967) explains that the driving force of racist passion portrays white ideology and white people, as pure, while the ‘black’ other as dangerous. Racist persecution of the black other is hence fuelled with hatred and cruel antagonism, evidenced primarily by lynchings throughout history. This paranoid reaction is also apparent in studies in settler-colonial context, where children’s behaviour, homes, dead and birthing bodies are depicted in conspiratory manners ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ). Frosh (2013) explains: ‘The “election” of the racialized other as an object of hate is a way of closing down the thinking that would be necessary in order to deal properly with these unwanted fantasies, to integrate them properly into the subject’s mind and hence make them survivable’ ( Frosh 2013 : 149).

Similarly, Lefebvre (1991a ; 1991b ; 2003 ) suggests that social space is a strategic mediation of radical politics. It links the raciality of everyday dispossession to the larger dimension of social and political order—in our case, settler colonialism. The ‘abstract’ space ( Lefebvre 1991b ; 2003 ) is both homogenizing and fragmenting; it is produced by technocratic rationalism, bureaucratic and commodifying administration, linear time and phallocentric visuality—all immediately shaped by state violence ( Lefebvre 1991a ; Ross 1995 ).

In understanding criminality and violence under settler-colonial regimes, we need to remember Mahmood Mamdani’s statement that ‘settlers are made by conquest, not just by immigration’ (cited in Veracini 2010 : 3). They are ‘ founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them’ ( Veracini 2010 : 3, emphasis in original). Settler-colonial violence—whether in Palestine, Australia, the Americas, Canada or elsewhere—separates families from each other, divides people into small groups and categories, and breaks up territories ( Razack 2002 ; 2012 ).

Wolfe (2006) explains that the colonizer’s violence is inherently embedded in settler-colonial ideology, as it is needed to demolish the history, culture and past existence of the native before the settler-colonial regime can construct new spaces for the colonizer. For settler colonist, the relationship with the colonized is not based on the indispensability of the colonized; the dominant force is the replacement, not exploitation of the colonized. Settler colonialism, a ‘structure and not an event’, is ‘inherently eliminatory’ and depends on a ‘logic of elimination’ ( Wolfe 2006 : 387). The invasion of land aims at destroying the natives’ traces in order to replace them with the settlers’ social structures ( Korn 2000 ; Kedar 2001 ; Fischbach 2003 ). Settler colonizers come to stay, and the use of violence through the invasion of territories reconstructs, reorganizes, renames and uproots the colonized ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ).

Violence in the Jewish state is exercised through the settler-colonial political system of continued dispossession of land, resources and lives. Scholars have pointed to the violence ingrained since the early years of the Israeli state and the racialization of everydayness as the state has developed, reducing the colonized Palestinians to their historical weight and tying them up in spaces and conditions that keep them in their place ( Korn 2000 ; Zureik 2001 ; Zureik et al. 2011 ; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2012 ; Sa’di 2013 ; Puar, forthcoming ). The constant threats of dispossession and instances of settler-colonial violence perpetrated by the state—not only in the early years of statehood ( Zureik et al. 2011 ), but as recently as in the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014—are now normalized, justified and sometimes quickly forgotten.

Comparing settler-colonial regimes in the United States and Palestine, Mikdashi (2013 : 30) states:

Palestinians and Native Americans share a technology of rule to which they have been and continue to be subjected. But Palestinians are not faced with the silent decline of demography; their languages are not forgotten, and their culture has not been reduced and commodified into Halloween costumes, major sports mascots and Walt Disney cartoons. In Palestine, the present is still contested, and the history of Israel-Palestine is an intellectual and political battlefield.

In facing such a contested present and an apparent political battle, the Israeli settler-colonial project must actively engage all parts of society to combat, destroy and replace Palestinian life. Acts aimed at maiming, terrorizing and erasing Palestine permeate the military structure, political structure and even civilian engagement, as seen in Tag-Mehir’s attacks. Tag-Mehir, conversely, can seek out the colonized as they try to ‘slip into corners’, ‘strive for anonymity’, preventing them from achieving an invisible ‘safe zone’ ( Fanon 1967 ). Much as traditional forms of state-sponsored violence, such as armies, have adapted in certain circumstances to realize the advantage of paramilitary groups, so, too, has the Israeli state benefited from Tag-Mehir. Allegedly impossible to uncover, infiltrate and stop, the state—in addition to its police, military and security agents—allows them to operate a clandestine and fine-toothed oppression.

Case Study: The Violence of Tag-Mehir

Tag-Mehir (price tag) is a concept adopted by Israeli citizens, including settlers in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, ¹ and the Israeli media to identify violence, mostly against Palestinians, by Jewish-Israeli settlers. The perpetrators of Tag-Mehir contend that their actions are legitimized by Judaism, particularly the Old Testament. Indeed, the Israeli media, various politicians and activists present this violence as mostly retaliatory, although it is not always clear against whom retaliation is directed and for what reason. In addition, the members of Tag-Mehir assert that the general public and the political echelon support them. But public-opinion polls have shown that the Israeli public, almost across the board, opposes Tag-Mehir actions. For example, the Peace Index of October 2011 indicates that 88 per cent of the Jewish population is against retaliatory Tag-Mehir actions against Palestinians, while 12 per cent (about half a million) support their actions to some degree ( Peace Index 2011 ).

Tag-Mehir actions usually include racist graffiti, often accompanying one or more of the following: burning or uprooting olive trees; torching religious buildings and centres (mosques, churches, monasteries); stone throwing; gunfire; attacks on individuals, homes and vehicles; and theft and destruction of crops. Below are detailed descriptions of some of these acts.

Graffiti

The graffiti—usually written on private property, such as homes or cars, or property with symbolic value, such as mosques, churches, graveyards and other official Palestinian sites—aims at challenging the intimacy or symbolic value of the location. Often containing offensive language, it attacks not only clerics and politicians but basic rights such as the right to life, property and national determination.

The text tends to incorporate a variety of hate expressions, with several distinctive components that carry the group’s messaging. To maintain the omnipresence of the perpetrators, the graffiti includes the name of a settlement and places (Ulpana War, Alei Ayin, Yeshurun, Eli, Migron, Susya, Tapuach, Maon Farm, Ramat Gilad) or person (‘Regards from Ettinger’; ‘Regards from Evyatar’). Some graffiti appears alongside a description or justification for the action: ‘Retaliation against Arabs’, ‘Retaliatory justice’, ‘There will be war over Judea and Samaria’, ‘God is King’, ‘Social justice’, ‘Death to traitors’, ‘Jewish blood is not for the taking’. Sometimes the sole text is ‘Tag-Mehir’, conveying that the perpetrators belong to this group and perform their actions in its name. The graffiti also includes symbols, the most prominent being David’s shield and the fist of Kach—adopted from Etzel, a pre-1948 Zionist paramilitary group—followed by such words as ‘Jesus is dead’, ‘Jesus, son of Mary the whore’ and ‘Muhammad is a pig’. The words seek to paint the Palestinians, their holy prophets and their holy places as profane, violated entities and dead objects.

The text can be characterized as geopolitical, biopolitical or necropolitical in nature. Graffiti that is geopolitical includes messages such as ‘Designated for demolition’, ‘Arabs out’ and ‘Greeks out’, proposing the eviction of non-Jews from the targeted geographical locations. Graffiti invoking notions of life and death sometimes position one group against the other (‘Kahane live, death to Arabs’, ‘The people of Israel live, death to Arabs’); at other times, attack Palestinians separately (‘Brave Arab, in the grave Arab’, ‘Good Arab, dead Arab’, ‘Kahane was right, death to Arabs’, ‘Jews—smile you are a son of a king, Arab—shed a tear you are a son of a bitch’). These messages are inscribed on colonized spaces to remind Palestinians that they are unwanted dead entities, this land is not for them, and the settlers have slated them for disappearance. They echo the message sent to Palestinians by the Israeli government through such acts as house demolitions, stripping of citizenship, and deprivation of employment and education opportunities ( OCHA 2011 ; 2014a ; 2014b ; 2014c ; Breaking the Silence 2015 ). Tag-Mehir’s graffiti is racist in its expression, and the question is, what leads to racist necropolitical graffiti? To borrow from Michael Rustin (1991) , racism carries no biological or anthropological validity, but rather social and political meanings. Racism as Colette Guillaumin explains is, ‘a social category of exclusion and murder’ ( 1995 : 107). Hence, some investigation into the ideological underpinning of Tag-Mehir’s violence requires an understanding of the socio-economic, religious and political context of the act, together with a psychological investigation into the context and inner selves of the perpetrators.

Destruction and torching of olive trees

Olive trees not only constitute a significant symbol of belonging to Palestinians, they also carry high economic value and social meaning. Acts of burning and uprooting such trees are quite common, and indeed took place before the organized acts of the Tag-Mehir movement (Meni Mazuz, former Attorney-General, cited in Weitz 2013 ). The uprooting of trees sends a clear message that invokes power and situates the Palestinian, much like their trees, in a violated zone that is open to trespassers and violent attacks. The deep psychological injury Palestinians experience can be detected in the social reaction during and following the uprooting ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014b ).

Figure 1 shows annual accounts of acts of tree destructions by Tag-Mehir, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Palestinian Territories ( OCHA 2014a ). Between the beginning of 2009 and November 2014, more than 50,000 olive trees belonging to Palestinians were damaged or destroyed. It was not long ago (late 2014) that Israeli security officers caused the death of a Palestinian Member of Parliament, Ziad Abu Ein, while he was planting olive trees ( Hass and Efrati 2014 ). His death reemphasized not only the meaning ascribed to olive trees, as a source of economic sustainability and continuity, a symbol of a legacy of uprooting and resistance but also the political culture and institutions that shapes such crimes. State crimes are politically/ideologically motivated acts that serve and adhere—directly or indirectly—to state politics and to the state’s hierarchical and nationalist agenda ( Lasslett 2014 ). In other words, the intent and effect of Tag-Mehir is to support and further entrench the structural violence of the state.

Torching of religious centres

According to the head of Tag Meir (‘Spreading the Light Tag’, a wordplay on Tag-Mehir)—a forum established to combat the acts of Tag-Mehir—between 2006 and 20 August 2013, 24 mosques, monasteries and churches had been burned by people who left in their wake inscriptions identifying them as members of Tag-Mehir ( Tag Meir Conference 2013 ). More recent findings based on OCHA’s database indicate that 37 mosques and churches had been desecrated or torched by persons who left in their wake inscriptions identifying them as members of Tag-Mehir ( Figure 2 ). According to Avi Ashkenazi (2015) , an Israeli news reporter, in just the last five years 44 mosques, convents and churches were attacked by Tag-Mehir.

Attacks and property damage

While there are no direct references to Tag-Mehir, the OCHA report, ‘Israeli Settler Violence in the West Bank’ ( OCHA 2011 ), indicates a 165 per cent increase between 2009 and 2011 in the number of weekly settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties, Palestinian property damage and the harming of Palestinians’ livelihood. OCHA (2014a ; 2014b ; 2014c ) reported 1 Palestinian was killed and approximately 329 injured in 2014 alone, ³ by Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces intervening during such attacks (see data for 2011–2014 in Figure 3 ).

Even Israeli police reports mention the violence of Tag-Mehir, although they tend to play it down. For example:

The rightist camp —Tag-Mehir: The heads of the movement ‘youth for Eretz Yisrael’ initiated political action, named Tag-Mehir. Tag-Mehir means the price that will be paid if security forces take any action to evacuate an outpost [settlement]. The framework and actions performed include: blocking intersections, stone throwing at Palestinian and security force vehicles, actions/violence against local residents, violation of holy sites and actions against the security forces. In the course of 2009, there was a decrease in the scope of the phenomenon. ( Israeli Police Annual Report 2009 : 179)

Furthermore, published statistics do not cover unreported events, verbal and physical abuse, or more recent attacks. These involve such incidents as harassing Palestinian children, yelling at women and girls and calling them ‘whores’, harassing activists that support the local community and attacking shepherds and their sheep ( Yesh Din 2006 ; B’Tselem 2012 ; 2014 ; Konrad 2015 ). Palestinian mothers reported that the children of settlers attack their own children en route to school or in the neighbourhood when there brothers, friends and leaders spray hate graffiti on walls ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ). In March 2015, a group of masked Israeli settlers from the settlement of Ma’on, south of Hebron, threw stones at Palestinians in Hebron, injuring a six-year-old child ( Ma’an News 2015 ).

When interviewed ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ) about their refusal to report incidents, Palestinians explained that this was aimed at protecting themselves and their loved ones from further attacks by Tag-Mehir members, as well as to guard them from the police, who might start picking on the families of those who file complaints. The non-reporting also reveals how Tag-Mehir’s violence is intertwined with historical dispossessions, embedded in oppressive relationships between the colonized and the colonizer, and bound in what Ward explains, ‘… as cycles of under-regulated racial violence, and rationalized in part by the criminalization of race’ ( Ward 2014 : 2). Palestinian responses to such racial violence revealed their perceptions to the governing principles in the settler colony. As Aida, a Palestinian women living in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem explained, ‘If, in the past the Israeli state expelled us from our home in Haifa, now, it is those religious settlers, with their graffiti’s on our walls, and their defecations in our home spaces that aims at expelling us’. Aida’s analyses of the acts of Tag-Mehir on her home space, as well as the narratives of other Palestinian interviewees’ suggest that Tag-Mehir racial violence implicate state actors and institutions. Ties between government, and racist terror groups were also found in the United States (e.g. the Ku Klux Klan) ( Patterson et al. 1951 ). These ties appear to have long-lasting imprints in racial consciousness and conflicts, public memory, political culture and crime control practices ( Ward 2014 ).

Analysis of Reactions to Tag-Mehir Acts

Lack of prosecution

Lowenheim and Heimann (2008) argue that the motivation for retaliation increases when the chances the perpetrator will be punished are minimal. At the end of 2014, the Israeli court announced that two settlers who had set fire to vehicles of Palestinians in the West Bank would serve 30 months in prison ( Cohen-Friedman 2014 ). This case stands out as a highly irregular anomaly in a systemic lack of prosecution of Tag-Mehir members, as settlers are rarely held accountable for their violence and the Israeli army is often complicit in these attacks ( Ma’an News 2015 ; see also B’Tselem 2010 ).

In October 2010, Israeli Channel 2 TV reported that, according to the police, there had been 97 Tag-Mehir actions over the previous five years and nobody had been prosecuted for involvement in any of them. While settler violence against Palestinians decreased slightly in 2011, OCHA (2011) found that less than 10 per cent of the monitored complaints of settler violence filed by Palestinians with the Israeli police since 2006 had led to an indictment. Similarly, a 2013 report of Human Rights organization Yesh Din indicated that only 10 per cent of police files opened in the West Bank had resulted in indictment ( Yesh Din 2013 ). Yesh Din’s (2014) most recent findings show that out of 1,045 investigations opened between 2005 and 2014 by the Samaria and Judea District Police Department, which covers the West Bank, a final decision was reached by the investigating and prosecuting authorities for 970 of the cases. Of these, 72 cases (7.4 per cent) resulted in indictments, 887 (91.4 per cent) were closed and 11 were lost by the police and never investigated ( Yesh Din 2014 ).

In one case in October 2012, the commander of what Israel refers to as ‘the Samaria and Judea District Police’ stated they had the DNA of a perpetrator of Tag-Mehir acts, but he could not be indicted; the commander did not explain why ( Bryner 2012 ). Referring to Tag-Mehir members operating in occupied East Jerusalem, a news item reported that they were becoming younger and younger, and therefore arresting, interrogating and prosecuting them was becoming more complicated ( Doron 2013 ).

One of the main issues apparent in the media coverage and in reports of human right organizations is the police’s lack of seriousness in addressing the violations performed by Tag-Mehir. One recent report argued that the police are failing ‘to investigate and prosecute suspected offenders in cases involving harm to Palestinians and Palestinian property’ ( Yesh Din 2014 ). The superficial treatment of the problem by police and the pressure of human rights organization and calls to criminalized Tag-Mehir acts resulted in the establishment of a national crime unit in the West Bank in 2013, staffed by 80 police officers and specifically aimed at controlling the violence of Tag-Mehir. However, this special unit has been ineffective. The 2014 Yesh Din report indicates that the serious deficiencies outlined in previous reports had still not been addressed and continue to affect the investigative work of the SJ District Police to this day.

In short, there is corroborated evidence of systemically delayed and, often, denied justice to such acts of racial terror. The fact that security forces are not doing enough to arrest these perpetrators, the absence of statistics on the attacks (according to the police, each incident is investigated separately; see Levinson 2011 ), the paucity of convictions and the ability of Tag-Mehir members to operate a well-organized and highly compartmentalized cells sends a message that these illegal actions are tacitly approved. This kind of protracted racial violence goes often unnoticed, but, as sociologist and criminologist Geoff Ward (2014 : 6) rightly framed it as killing life chances slowly. Ward explains, ‘State organized race crime typically manifests as slow violence—“a violence occur[ing] gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction … dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”’ (Nixon 2011: 2, cited in Ward 2014 : 6).

State support of Tag-Mehir

In light of the systemic neglect of Tag-Mehir’s crimes against Palestinians, it proves fruitful to look at justifications for the lack of response or prosecution of Tag-Mehir. Following strong criticism of Tag-Mehir actions by some Israeli officials and security personnel, the Israeli government allowed the Minister of Defence to recognize the movement as an unlawful association, but came short of classifying it as a terrorist organization ( Bryner and Tibon 2013 ). Yet, a report published by the Israel Security Agency (Shabak) contended that Tag-Mehir behaves and acts like a terrorist group ( Ravid 2012 ). Meni Mazuz, former Attorney-General, further defined the actions of Tag-Mehir as terrorist acts:

We have Tag-Mehir , the entire political system uses it, there is a price for ‘washing’ [e.g., pink washing or white washing]. And when we use the concept ‘ Tag-Mehir ’ instead of the concept of ‘terror’, it gives a kind of legitimation to deal with this phenomenon in a less clear and determined manner. (cited in Weitz 2013 )

The tactics employed by Tag-Mehir demonstrate that it is a secret organization operating in a violent manner. According to Shabak reports leaked to Ha’aretz newspaper ( Levinson 2011 ), Tag-Mehir activists work in small cells and groups that are well organized, secret and impenetrable by intelligence agencies. The report states that these groups monitor Palestinian villages and communities, as well as Israeli peace activists, collecting information in preparation for operations against them. They are effectively coordinating personalized attacks against individuals and communities the state is unable to reach.

Many reports also suggest that soldiers serving in the West Bank, who are ostensibly ‘preventing’ the violence of Tag-Mehir, are reluctant to respond to Palestinians’ calls for help; when they do show up, they either stand by the settlers or barely intervene ( Yesh Din 2006 ; 2013 ; 2014 ; OCHA 2011 ; 2014b ; B’Tselem 2012 ; 2014 ). Indeed, in 2014, B’Tselem published a video of soldiers protecting stone-throwing settlers ( B’Tselem 2014 ). According to these reports, the military does nothing or, at most, try to separate the two groups by declaring the area a closed military zone. This forces Palestinians to go back to their villages and imposes a curfew on them, but such orders do not apply to Israeli settlers, who continue to walk freely around the fields. When Palestinians have refused to go back and clashes erupted, Israeli soldiers threw tear gas at them and arrested some of them, while settlers watched and even danced and laughed ( Konrad 2015 ).

Meni Mazuz claimed that, in dealing with Tag-Mehir acts,

[T]oo much politics is involved in the applicability of the law, and law enforcement is weary of dealing with such a sensitive issue. Some law enforcement personnel are afraid of being hurt…and there are those who identify with the settlers …. There is always a sense that the political system speaks with a forked tongue. … Generally speaking, this is an issue the political system has dealt with it, at best, as an issue that should not be handled too much. (cited in Weitz 2013 )

Mazuz maintained that law enforcement personnel are not ordered to respect the law, even with regard to such a sensitive issue with severe security ramifications. These comments point to a significant power imbalance. What does the ‘fear’ of the police to prosecute the settlers indicate? Are the settlers more powerful than the police?

Contrary to law enforcement inside Israel, where tools, power and control lie in the hands of the professional law enforcement system, headed by the attorney-general, in the occupied Palestinian Territories, the assistance of the political echelon—the Prime Minister and the defence establishment—is needed. In practice, the political echelon and defence establishment have shown no desire to address the matter and in some instances have opposed taking action. At the Tag Meir Conference on 16 September 2013, at Tel Aviv University, several speakers spoke of the lack of desire of Israeli politicians to deal with this issue and the inability of enforcement officials to prosecute perpetrators without political support.

The concept of Tag-Mehir

Part of the rationalization of the violent actions of Tag-Mehir seems to be rooted in the concept of Tag-Mehir , the ‘price tag’ for safeguarding Israel, a metaphor that is pervasive in Israeli discourse. For example, a statement by an Israeli Defense Force spokesperson, in regard to the demolition of the homes of kidnappers who murdered three Israeli teenagers in the summer of 2014, explained that ‘there is a price to pay if they choose to continue their terrorist activities and attacks on innocent people’ (cited in Arutz-Sheva 2014 ).

When, why and by whom the concept of Tag-Mehir was first used, or who named the group Tag-Mehir, is still debated. Gavriely-Nuri (2008) argues that business-oriented metaphors were used in government announcements and media discourses to transform the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon into a ‘rational transaction’, blurring and erasing its moral aspects. Examples include former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s expression, ‘Can the air force deliver the goods?’ and the naming of that war as Mivtza Sachar Holem (‘Operation Fair Recompense’), cynically equating the intensity of the attack with the price Hezbollah has to pay or ‘deserves’. In fact, the term Tag-Mehir was used in just such a sense in that very war ‘in two contexts: the “price” of suffering Hezbollah’s rocket barrage on Israel’s interior and the “price” of returning the kidnapped soldiers, the proclaimed casus belli’ ( Gavriely-Nuri 2008 : 14). The concept was adopted by the Tag-Mehir movement some two years later. Settler leader Itai Zar was the first to publically define violence as the ‘price’ the settlers will exact from the state if it acts against them and their settlements ( Weiss 2008 ). The use of economic vocabulary, such as Tag-Mehir , points to power politics and the management of power relations.

The concept can also be traced to historical statements of Zionist leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion. In an interview in Ma’ariv in 1953, Ben-Gurion spoke about retaliatory actions and exacting a price:

Look at these Jews. … They come from countries where their blood was free for the taking, where it was permitted to abuse them, to torture them, to beat them, and to treat them cruelly. We have already become accustomed to them being the helpless victims of the gentiles. Here we must prove to them that our blood is no longer free for the taking; that there is a state and there is an army for the Jewish people, which will not permit to execute judgment any longer; that there is a price for their lives and property. (cited in Bar-Zohar 1980 : 400–401)

Indeed, the 1948 war, in which the state carried out the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians, was justified morally and ethically ‘to make the Arabs pay a price’ and ‘to retaliate against the Arabs for their acts’, as occurred in the massacre in Deir Yassin, Tantura and elsewhere ( Morris 1996 ; Pappe 1993 ). Such actions have been carried out in various forms since 1948, like the massacre in Lydd (Lyddia) in July 1948 during Operation Dani ( Morris 1986 ).

State Violence: Historicizing Tag-Mehir

It is our contention that the nature of violence used by Tag-Mehir is very similar, if not identical, to the nature of violence used by the Zionist movement when conquering Palestinian land, and that there are similarities and logical connections between the acts of Tag-Mehir and the acts and politics of the Israeli state. Institutionalized retaliation has existed throughout the history of the State of Israel, beginning with the declaration of ‘independence’ in 1948—and even earlier—and extending to the present day. Such acts of violence and violations of Palestinians rights to physical safety and security in their homes, streets, villages, cities and lands have influenced, formed the basis for, and informed military and security thinking and actions.

A major tool of Zionism has been house demolitions and expulsion of Arab inhabitants. The Nakba in 1948 stands out in this regard, but both prior to the Nakba and in the years since the state’s security operations have been largely based on these actions. Most ‘infiltrators’ were trying to return to their homes, from which they had been expelled, or came to harvest crops from their fields and were classified as ‘thieves’ and ‘squatters’ on their own land. Retaliatory actions have been taken against those who have tried to return, in accordance with the same philosophy that underlies the violent, disproportionate retaliation of Tag-Mehir. In Fanon’s (1967) definition, colonialism and its racial violence must be understood in spatial and historical terms, and that violence over the colonial space must be read through analyses of historical and geographical processes.

According to a recent report by B’Tselem (2013) , the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces between the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 and August 2013—6,776 Palestinians—was greater than those murdered by civilians. Of these, 1,376 were under the age of 18. Between 2008 (about six months after Tag-Mehir actions began) and August 2013, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces was 1,924, compared with six Palestinians murdered by Israeli civilians ( B’Tselem 2013 ).

Furthermore, according to the statistics of Yesh Din (2014) , based on data from the Israel Defense Force spokesperson, between 2000 and 2013 the Military Police Investigation Unit opened more than 179 cases of suspected killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military (for some years, the spokesperson did not provide figures). Of these, only 16 investigations resulted in the filing of an indictment, against 21 soldiers for offenses related to the death of 18 Palestinians and one foreign resident. To date, seven soldiers have been convicted of causing the death of six civilians (five Palestinians and one British citizen) and two others have been convicted of obstruction of justice. All offenders were given light sentences of a few months in jail (1–7 months), with the exception Taysir Hayb, a Bedouin Israeli soldier who murdered a British demonstrator. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years of imprisonment.

Anat Rimon-Or (2004) claims that those who cry out ‘Death to Arabs’ (a slogan often used by the Tag-Mehir group) are not the ones who kill the Palestinian-Arabs. Rather, she explains, the killers are those who do so under the protection of Israeli politicians, clergy, law and state’s institutions.

We often think that state racial violence should be always dramatic, exceptional incidents—such as bombing entire areas, demolishing homes or targeted assassinations—but, in the settler colony, state racial violence, are embedded in state’s eliminatory logic and maintained through state’s technologies of violence. Along these same lines, we argue that the killing of, and attacks against, Palestinians are conducted not only by ‘religious fundamentalist’ groups such as Tag-Mehir but also by ‘leftist’ groups and are tolerated, if not condoned, by Israeli officials, official bodies and the government. ⁴

Settler Colonialism, Criminality and Tag-Mehir

Tag-Mehir’s actions are blessed by religious leaders, tolerated by politicians, legalized by the state (as they are not outlawed or punished) and tacitly endorsed by the security system (which did not react strongly to Tag-Mehir until the latter started harming military and security personnel). This treatment allows Tag-Mehir perpetrators to enjoy impunity. To analyse how this daily violation of Palestinians’ lives is allowed, we turn to settler-colonial theorizations.

Wolfe (2006) refers to the structure of oppression embedded in the settler-colonial system, claiming that settlers come to stay and that their invasion is a structure, not an event. Similarly, Veracini argues that the settler’s polity is foregrounded by a process embedded in their indigenization, ‘driven by the crucial need to transform an historical tie (“we came here”) into a natural one (“the land made us”)’ ( 2010 : 21). Similarly, members of Tag-Mehir paint their ‘belonging’ to the land on walls, ‘pushing out’ Palestinians, in order to naturalize the settler-colonial claim. Their violence carves its power over Palestinian spaces and properties to discipline, terrify and push the natives out. By violating homes, trees, mosques and graveyards, the settlers try to naturalize their belonging in order to settle the land, while the state naturalizes these invaders in a place that was not originally theirs.

We argue that Tag-Mehir’s violent performativity is situated historically in the racial violence of the Zionist movement and embedded in the settler-colonial orchestrated structure of the Jewish state. It is a continuation of a theologized Zionist ideology, justified by religious ‘rights’ and nationalist claims, that aims at disciplining, humiliating and incapacitating the colonized to dictate who should stay and who must disappear (‘Arabs get out’) or die (‘Death to Arabs’). Feminist native scholar Andrea Smith (2010 : 2) identifies the ‘logic of genocide’ as central to colonialism: ‘This logic holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable non-indigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land’. Thus, Tag-Mehir’s tactic of writings on walls is just another form of violent Zionist ‘public speaking’ and violent political actions and claims ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ). They metastasize through the social and political body, mobilized through a psychology of fear, forming a multiplicity of criminal paths, of which Tag-Mehir is but one.

Criminologist have largely ignored state race crimes, mainly in settler-colonial contexts such as Israel, United States, Canada, Hawaii and Australia while preferring to use ‘hate crimes’ or ‘religious crimes’ instead. In spite of this paucity of criminological research, a growing number of critical scholars from various disciplines including sociology, anthropology, political science and media studies are examining the legacy of state-racialized violence historically in the contemporary period ( Thobani 2007 ; Kauanui 2008 ; Razack 2012 ; Pugliese 2013 ; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ). Criminological fixation on ‘hot spots’ of criminality fails to historicize, politicize and humanly analyse the settler-colonial machinery of oppression ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2012 ; 2015 b ). The settler-colonial regime uses racialized ideologies that constructs the sacred and the profane in a manner that maintains the colonized as the feared other. Capitalizing on this fear, and basing our analyses not only on critical race theory but also on psycho-social theorization of state race crime (see Fanon 1963 ; 1967 ; Rustin 1991 ; Frosh 2013 ), we wish to argue that in the settler colony, racism is politically and socially constructed and is perpetuated by the psychological distortions and pseudo thinking that further produce fear and paranoia. Such paranoia can be used and accentuated by political manoeuvring and racist ideologies of the settlers. In this sense, the profanity projected onto the Palestinians by virtue of religious interpretations and settler-colonial Zionist ideologies became suitable to support the criminality of groups such as Tag-Mehir.

We further argue that Tag-Mehir’s crimes embody the colonized subject’s position as a quarantined otherized group. Whether operated within and through the body of the Zionist regime, or through secret paths connected to the regime, Tag-Mehir aims at producing the Palestinians and their homeland as captive bodies and territories, reduced to unwanted, dirty, dead others. The colonized, their hands tied, embody sheer powerlessness. Acts conducted on walls, on sleeping, disoriented, unwanted bodies, incapacitate the colonized and mark Palestinian living spaces as suspended, haunted and haunting spaces ( Fanon 1967 : 77). Further, the violated can only appeal to the Zionist regime and its personnel, which in itself inflicts upon them yet another level of violence. This violence captivates the colonized within the Zionist political economy of biblical claims. The conversion of the space and entity of the colonized into captive objects, living under the mercy of a silently supportive regime populated with Tag-Mehir members, liquidates relations of power—to further exercise a settler-colonial regime of control.

A third point we wish to make is that the continuous Palestinian witnessing of and living through Israeli state’s crimes of the past and present makes their suffering invisible. Such criminalities are enabled by the state’s ideology and laws, even while condemned by public declarations of Israeli high ranking officials, such as the Minister of Defence ( Bryner and Tibon 2013 ), former Attorney-General Meni Mazuz ( Weitz 2013 ) or the Israel Security Agency ( Ravid 2012 ). Borrowing from Michael Rustin’s (1991) analyses of how racism becomes an immensely powerful marker and boundary maker in human society, we realize that state racism gives rise to powerful, oppressive and disastrous social effects. By connecting Rustin with Fanon’s analyses in his book Black Skin White Mask (1967), we realize the destructive effect of such structural racism on the individual victim.

Unpacking the layers of immorality that upholds the theological, national indifference of the Zionist settler-colonial project, while focusing on the role of Tag-Mehir, confirms the crucial role of such violence in enabling and maintaining a monopoly over the native other. Conquering through writings on walls, burnings of mosques and churches, and the vandalizing of trees underscores how claims of biblical rights as national legitimacy render settler violence lawless. The impunity, the continuation of their violence and its mundane effect on Palestinians suggests that the settlers are ‘doing their part’ to support Israel’s settler-colonial ideology. Their spatial ‘advantage’ of living ‘among’ or near Palestinians in the settlements, their relative impunity and the ability to attribute their actions to individuals lets them operate in ways the state cannot.

The violence of the settler-colonial state exists to sacralize and idealize a Jewish-only right. Tag-Mehir is thus but a graphic representation of the state’s eliminatory violence. Tag-Mehir offers tangible evidence of how the Zionist regime enables and even coaches groups to exercise violence in a rationalist mode while disavowing the devastating effects of this violence against the targeted subjects and their community.

Is Tag-Mehir State Violence?

On 31 July 2015, while completing the final edits of this article, a group of Israeli-Jewish settlers set fire to the house of a Palestinian family in Duma, West Bank, burning to death an 18-month-old child and his parents, and seriously injuring two other family members in a Tag-Mehir attack. The attackers painted graffiti on the walls, reading in Hebrew, ‘Revenge’ and ‘Long live the Messiah’ accompanied by the Star of David.

The burning alive of baby Ali Saad Dawabsheh ( BBC 2015 ), as with the burning alive of 15-year-old Muhammad Abu-Khadir in Jerusalem on July 2014 ( Issacharoff 2014 ), is constitutive of settler colonialism’s structural violence and the impunity with which such criminalities are committed ensures their continuation. We argue that, by allowing the violent criminality of Tag-Mehir to persist, and the hate discourse and acts to go unpunished, the Israeli state is offering its tacit approval of such criminalities. Merely ‘holding an inquiry’ on state criminalities has become a technique of reproducing Jewish supremacy ( Hage 2015 ). The crimes of Tag-Mehir are rooted in the logic of superiority and elimination embedded in the states settler-colonial regime.

Moreover, Tag-Mehir is but one of the programmes that aids the settler-colonial regime and enhances its capacity to control population life and economy as a marker of its sovereignty. Settler-colonial programmes work in various modes, but have similar characteristics: they take place over geographical spaces, aimed at conquering space, people and body politics; they emphasize and classify identities while exercising racial exclusion to reproduce the colonized other; and they establish a new language or discourse that carries disavowal of the indigenous presence. As Figure 4 exemplifies, the state system uses the religious structure and its institutions to support its actions and claims on the land. It uses hate language based on religious interpretations and racialized ‘security’-oriented interpretations of high ranking officials—the military prosecutor’s statement that every Palestinian child is a potential terrorist ( Hass 2012 ); the Defence Minister’s statement that Arabs should be evicted ( Bendet 2014 ); and the Prime Minister’s recent call to Israelis to vote, lest the Palestinian citizens take over the country ( Bendet et al. 2015 ). This language, invoking nationalism, hate and fear, encourages acts like the burning of baby Ali Saad Dawabsheh, and the child Muhammad Abu-Khadir. It is needed to further the state’s logic of elimination through legislation, such as the Citizenship Law that denies Palestinians their right to remain in their homeland, or the Nakba Law that punishes those who commemorate the Nakba ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a ).

The everydayness of unpredictable Tag-Mehir attacks and racism, added to state-sponsored acts (of omission or commission) of price tagging Palestinians, creates spatial and social relations of alienation. The violated social relations maintain and reappropriate colonized geographies and transform spatialities, with the aim of inserting the settler-colonial regime into everyday life in the colony. State violence expressed in the acts of Tag-Mehir is rooted in everyday violent modalities, embedded in historical, legal, geopolitical, economic and cultural colonial dispossessions.

As state crimes, Tag-Mehir’s actions can be powerfully analysed through Fanon’s (1967) ‘banality of racism’ embedded in the legacies of state’s structural violence haunted by a history of dispossession and the continued resistance of the disposed. To demolish this presence, the state creates spatio-economic and sociolegal traps that assert state dominance over the biopolitical and geopolitical continuity of the colonized. In other words, the everyday racism embedded in settler-colonial state crime must be understood in both spatial and historical terms.

The settler state’s racism and terror spans multiple levels of analyses and disciplines, and requires a sophisticated criminological investigation. Political explanations focus on the ideology behind the settler-colonial machinery of oppression ( Wolfe 2006 ; Veracini 2010 ), sociological and anthropological explanations focus on the structures, processes, ideologies, actions and inactions ( Thobani 2007 ; Razack 2012 ; Simpson 2014 ). Psycho-social theories of racism focus on the study of prejudice, internal dynamics and other psychological mechanisms that facilitate attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that perpetuate racial discrimination and stigmatization to sustain racism ( Fanon 1967 ; Rustin 1991 ). Criminologists should engage with a multi-disciplinary approach to improve the theoretical understanding of how state-raced crime can be camouflaged under ‘religious’ or ‘hate’ crimes to allow us to understand how state’s terrorism is generated, maintained, perpetuated and operated. For criminologists to capture the complexity of state’s hidden terrorism, specifically state-based racism, as in the studied case of the settler-colonial state, they should be attentive to a complex web of theories, including the psychic roots of racialized hatred, and the damage they cause to their victims. Critical criminological explanations require a closer examination to asymmetries of power, and the structures of discrimination and elimination, in addition to deepening criminological understanding of the intensity of hatred and the industry of fear that could be explosive.

Connecting settler-colonial theorization to our case study, Tag-Mehir’s crimes can be defined as yet another form of settler-colonial state-race criminality, one that violates bodies and lands and writes the narrative of the regime of power over Palestinian bodies and domestic, religious, public and intimate spaces. Orchestrated by the three-dimensional connection between hate/race, religious and state crimes, this criminality reflects the structure of the colonizing population’s economies and the colonizer’s understanding of sovereignty; it suggests psychic states that distinguish the sacred from the profane; and it uses hate and religiously oriented acts as narrative camouflaging the racism behind state settler-colonial violence.

A cknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful revisions. A special thank you goes to OCHA-opt team, mainly Ray Dolphin, Sofia Hasan, Ezekiel Lein and May Yassin, for their willingness to assist us in conducting additional statistical analyses and provide us with updated data. We also would like to thank Helen Hogari and Mia Lattanzi for their editorial work. A special thank you goes to Mada al-Carmel and the Luce foundation for funding this project.

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