Source of dubious ‘beheaded babies’ claim is Israeli settler leader who incited riots to ‘wipe out’ Palestinian village

GRAYZONE UK





Source of dubious ‘beheaded babies’ claim is Israeli settler leader who incited riots to ‘wipe out’ Palestinian village

MAX BLUMENTHAL AND 

ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN·OCTOBER, 2023


After an Israeli reserve soldier named David Ben Zion told a reporter Palestinian militants “cut [off] heads of babies,” Biden, Netanyahu, and the international media amplified the dubious claim.

The Grayzone has identified Ben Zion as a fanatical settler leader who incited riots by demanding a Palestinian town be “wiped out.”

An international outcry erupted when Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced that Palestinian militants from the besieged Gaza Strip had killed 40 “babies,” and beheaded several of them during an incursion into Kfar Aza, a kibbutz on the Gaza border. President Joseph Biden repeated the inflammatory claim during an October 10 White House Rose Garden address, while networks across the West carried the story without a shred of critical scrutiny.

According to CNN correspondent Nic Robertson, apparently citing Israeli military sources, Palestinian militants carried out, “ISIS-style executions,” in which they were “cutting the heads off of people,” including babies and pets.

The Grayzone has now identified a key source of the claim that Palestinian militants beheaded Israeli babies. He is David Ben Zion, a Deputy Commander of Unit 71 of the Israeli army who also happens to be an extremist settler leader who incited violent riots against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank earlier this year.

In an October 10 interview with reporter Nicole Zedek of the Israeli state-sponsored i24 network, Ben Zion stated, “We walked door to door, we killed a lot of terrorists. They are very bad. They cut heads of children, they cut heads of women. But we are stronger than them.”

He added, “We know that they are animals,” referring to Palestinians, “but we found that they don’t have any heart.”

Hours after his interview with i24, still in the village of Kfar Aza, a uniformed Ben Zion could be seen repeatedly grinning ear-to-ear in a video posted to his Facebook – an odd disposition for a supposed witness to the methodical butchering of babies.

Earlier that day, i24’s Zedek declared during a live report from Kfar Aza, “About 40 babies were taken out on gurneys… Cribs overturned, strollers left behind, doors left wide open.’” Zedek’s report has been viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter and promoted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry – which underwrites her network.

Hours later, she qualified her statement, stating, “Soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”

Yet the unverified tale quickly made its way to the highest levels of leadership, as if by design. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman stated unequivocally that babies and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated,” while President Joe Biden himself vaguely gestured towards “stomach-churning reports of babies being killed.”

Likewise, cable news has flown into a frenzy, breathlessly reporting the story despite the IDF walking back its initial confirmation.

Meanwhile, some reporters who initially carried the official Israeli allegations about beheaded babies began issuing qualifications of their own.

Oren Ziv, an Israeli reporter who joined the military’s official tour of Kfar Aza, commented on Twitter, “I’m getting a lot of question about the reports of ‘Hamas beheaded babies’ that were published after the media tour in the village. During the tour we didn’t see any evidence of this, and the army spokesperson or commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.”

So who is the source behind the explosive claim?

David Ben Zion in a video from a settlement construction site (left) and hours after he told i24 the IDF had found babies beheaded by Hamas (right)

Calls for Palestinians to be “wiped out,” “no room for mercy”

David Ben Zion, is a leader of the Shomron Regional Council of 35 illegal West Bank settlements who called this year for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out.”

“Enough talk about building and strengthening the settlements,” Ben David said in a Twitter post on February 26, 2023. The deterrence that was lost must return now, there’s no room for mercy.”

Ben David was quoted in Israeli media proclaiming soon after, “The village of Huwara should be wiped out, this place is a nest of terror and the punishment should be for everyone,” a clear call for the collective punishment of Palestinians.

Ben David’s tweet was ‘liked’ on Twitter by Israel’s-then Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a move which prompted 22 legal scholars to call on the Attorney General to open an investigation into the official for “inducing war crimes.” When Smotrich later echoed Ben David, calling to “wipe out” Huwara the following month, the US Department of State condemned his rhetoric as “dangerous.”

The village of Huwara was at the time the target of violent rioting by settlers operating under Ben David’s watch. Following the settler assault on the town, which resulted in the torching of scores of homes and vehicles, as well as injuries to locals, Hamas characterized the attack as a “declaration of war.”

But Ben David’s call for collective punishment in Huwara was far from his only genocidal imprecation against Palestinians. Indeed, he has used his social media accounts to repeatedly call for war crimes as well as the “deportation of the [Palestinian] masses.”

“The Palestinian people… [are] an enemy,” Ben David wrote in 2016. “We can’t change their barbaric DNA.”

During his failed campaign for the Israeli Knesset in 2021 with the pro-settler Jewish Home party, Ben David described his mission as follows: ”I am committed to the task of restoring the political home of religious Zionism.”

Lead member of Israel’s apocalyptic Temple movement

Ben David appears to have been at the forefront of settler extremism for years. He was photographed in 2015 (below) holding a microphone for the fanatical settler ideologue Noam Livnat, a self-described “radical right-wing messianist.”



According to the book, “Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin,” Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, “especially admires” Livnat. In 2005, Livnat led a mutiny of 10,000 IDF soldiers and reservists who vowed to refuse then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s order to remove illegal settlements from Gaza.

Ben David appears to share Livnat’s messianic obsessions. In 2018, he took his nephew to the base of the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, which Jewish extremists have sought to replace with a Third Temple. “Why do Muslims still walk proud on this mountain?” he wrote, adding “there is a lot of work ahead of us.”

“Israel should build a Shul (synagogue) on the Temple Mount, followed by a 3rd Temple. We don’t need anyone’s permission,” a Facebook user wrote in response to the photo, which Ben David liked.

In another post from the holy site, Ben David wrote that “The Temple Mount is not only the past of the Jewish people but also the future.” He then urged his followers to donate to Beyadenu, an organization whose members attempt to slaughter lambs for sacrifice there.

Ben David on the outskirts of Gaza before the Israeli invasion of July 2014


Ben David also appears to also share Noam Livnat’ obsession with the destruction of Gaza. Days after Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, the 50-day bombardment against Gaza that left nearly 1,500 Palestinian civilians dead, Ben David posted a photograph on Facebook of himself and fellow IDF soldiers posing in front of artillery positioned to spell out “The people of Israel live” in Hebrew. “The nation of Israel is with you until the end (of Gaza) Amen,” one Facebook user replied, which, again, Ben David ‘liked.’

As Netanyahu deploys the dubious allegation of beheaded babies to draw his US sponsors deeper into his war, Ben David’s apocalyptic fantasies draw closer to their fulfillment.

***

kt comments:

As I penned in an earlier post:

kt comments: The ultra Jewish Right is dreaming of building a Third Temple on the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque. Through the preceding years they have even bred a "red heifer", sacred for the sembileh-ing for their ceremony as well as drawn up plans for the 3rd Temple.

Sadly, as per history, when the 3rd Temple is built BUT eventually destroyed, the Israelis will be expelled as per their predecessors on their 3rd and Final Diaspora, as Diaspora occurred following the destructions of the 1st and 2nd Temples

~~~

"When the Lord, your God, brings you into the land that you are entering to possess, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you. And when the Lord, your God, delivers them before you and you defeat them, destroy them utterly. Make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them" (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).

~~~

The Temple is part of what makes Jerusalem sacred to the Jews. According to The Illustrated Dictionary & Concordance of the Bible, the name Jerusalem, made up of western Semitic (Canaanite) words, 'yeru' and 'shalem', was first mentioned in the Egyptian Execration (curse) Texts in 19th BCE, four thousand years ago.

'Yeru' means ‘to establish, raise up’ while 'Shalem' was the name of a Canaanite god. So the holiest city of the Israelis ironically carries the meaning of ‘the raising up of a Canaanite god, Shalem'.

Jerusalem first came under Hebraic hands when King David conquered the city, which at that time belonged to the Jebusites, an ethnic group related to the Hittites.

The city of Jerusalem has changed hands many times over the last 4,000 years, from Canaanites to Jebusites to Israelites. 

According to the Bible, Pharaoh Shishak then laid seige to the city and was placated only by heavy tributes from the treasures fo the Temple, comprising virtually all the wealth that David and Solomon accrued. Another such tribute was paid to King Ben-Hadad of Syria to persuade him not to support King Basha of Israel who threatened the Judean capital during the war between the two Israelite kingdoms.

Then the Assyrians under Sennacherib overwhelmed the city, making the Jewish king Hezekiah his vassal. Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonians were next. They wiped out the last of the Davidic kings, and destroyed the Temple. After the Babylonians the more benign Persians came along, but permitted the Jews to return and rebuild their state, as a vassal nation.

Then there was a bloke by the name of Alexander who spread Hellenism throughout the region as his army marched towards Egypt and through Persia to India. Jerusalem fell to his forces.

The descendants of his general Seleucus reigned over Palestine including Jerusalem. The Romans invaded next, and under them Jerusalem was ruled by their vassal Syrian and Idumean kings. The Romans destroyed the Temple of Solomon a second time in 70 CE.

A series of conquerors swept over Jerusalem. The Byzantine Empire, Arabs (under Caliph Umar), Seljuk Turks, Fatimid rulers of Egypt, European Crusaders (who actually forbade the Jews to live in Jerusalem), Saladin and his Turk-Kurds, Mamelukes, Ottoman Turks (the Muslim Sultan invited Jews running from the Spanish Inquisition to settle in Palestine), French under Napoleon for a very brief period and then back to the Ottomans, British, Arabs and after the 1967 War, the Israelis, all ruled over Jerusalem.

Each time the Temple of the Judean God was destroyed, the Israelites were expelled into a Diaspora - the first time by the Babylonians and the Second by the Romans.

Today the Israelis (descendants of the Israelites) are stealing land in Jerusalem from the Palestinians, for the rumoured purpose of building the Third temple. But as many predicted, the Third Temple will once again be destroyed and as the historical pattern showed, the Israelis will like their forefathers be expelled into a Third Diaspora, perhaps for the last time for teh Jews.

Notwithstanding the Jewish God's ferocious sermon in Deuteronomy 7:1-2 on Canaan and Jerusalem, will Jerusalem's original mention in the Egyptian Execration Text cursed it forevermore, to be once again destroyed?

The curse of the Egyptian Execration Text seems to leave its mark on the city for 4,000 years. In ancient Egypt, execration texts were used to curse Egypt’s enemies. Importantly for the history of the city, the execration texts demonstrate that in the Middle Bronze Age, the city of Jerusalem was significant enough to be deserving of a curse in both Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt.

How long can the Israelis hold on against such an old Egyptian curse of 4,000 years?