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An IDF soldier killed a civilian who shot at terrorists, raising hard questions about vigilante culture in Israel
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When he spoke with a news anchor on Thursday night, Israeli reservist Aviad Frija was hailed by right-wing politicians and commentators as a hero for his role in responding to a terror attack at a Jerusalem bus stop earlier that day.
By Monday, Frija was arrested by the IDF and under investigation. The man he had shot was not a suspected terrorist but an Israeli civilian who had himself played a role in halting the attack.
According to video from the scene, Frija had shot the man, a 38-year-old lawyer named Yuval Doron Castleman, after Castleman had gotten on his knees, dropped his gun and put his hands in the air to show that he was not a threat. Castleman, a former police officer turned lawyer, was initially left bleeding on the ground and later died of his wounds, a day shy of his 38th birthday.
Castleman “did everything he needed to do so they could identify him. He went down on his knees, opened his jacket to show he didn’t have any explosives on him, yelled at them, ‘Don’t shoot, I’m Jewish, I’m Israeli,’ and they continued to shoot him,” his father, Moshe Castleman, said on Israeli Army Radio.
Castleman’s death has drawn scrutiny to the ways in which Israel’s right-wing government has encouraged everyday Israelis to own guns and fight terror themselves — a gambit to boost security that, critics say, has instead led to the spilling of more Israeli blood. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who already faces widespread public disapproval over his handling of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel — has come in for more criticism in recent days over what some say was a flippant response to Castleman’s death.
“This has allowed a jungle in terms of everything related to distributing weapons, using weapons,” Eran Etzion, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, said on Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. “This is a terrible thing that will have far-reaching consequences… an atmosphere where everyone will take a weapon, and use it.”
The family of Israeli Yuval Castleman mourns at his house in Kiryat Tivyon, in northern Israel, on Dec. 3, 2023. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)
Castleman’s family is also castigating officials for their response. His father and sister Shaked have called his death an “execution,” while his sister Noga said the family did not hear from the police until several hours after the incident and did not get the chance to comfort Castleman in his final hours of life.
“We carried on with our lives as he was fighting for his life,” Noga said, according to Kan. “We weren’t there to caress him, to call to him. I wouldn’t wish upon anyone that they hear what happened to a loved one in such an unclear way.”
After his death, said Shaked, “instead of mourning, we find ourselves in a war for justice.”
For more than a year, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, has encouraged private citizens to own guns and has made Israel’s historically strict gun-control requirements more lenient. He has also pushed to loosen open-fire regulations for police officers, whom he oversees. Earlier this year, he praised an Israeli settler who killed a Palestinian in an altercation. (Frija is a member of the Hilltop Youth, a group of young extremist settlers, as well as a reservist in the IDF.)
Since Oct. 7, Ben-Gvir said in a recent government hearing, more than 260,000 people have applied for gun licenses. “When the war started, we knew that we were right when we said that every place that has a weapon can save a life,” he said at a recent meeting of his party, Otzma Yehudit or Jewish Power.
But Ben-Gvir’s policies have faced backlash. In recent weeks, Israeli media reported that U.S. officials were threatening to stop supplying guns to Israel if they continued to wind up in the hands of civilians. (The Department of State declined to comment, with an official telling JTA the department does not comment as a matter of policy on “the status of licensed direct commercial defense sales activities.”) On Monday, the head of Israel’s Firearm Licensing Department resigned in protest of the loosened gun ownership requirements.
And critics of Netanyahu’s government have drawn a link between Ben-Gvir’s policies and Frija’s shooting of Castleman, even though Frija was in uniform at the time.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, attends the scene of a terror shooting attack at the entrance to Jerusalem, Nov 30, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Moshe Yaalon, a former Netanyahu ally and defense minister, posted online that Ben Gvir’s “populist calls” to loosen open-fire regulations “contributed to the tragic result.” Yaalon and others also linked the shooting to a 2016 incident in which IDF soldier Elor Azaria shot dead a disarmed Palestinian terrorist who was lying on the ground. Azaria was tried and convicted but also became a hero to some on the right.
Netayahu’s critics have also chided him for his initial response to the incident, in which he defended Ben-Gvir’s policy though he acknowledged that it posed potential dangers.
“We know that in the waves of terror in the last decade and earlier, the presence of armed civilians often saves the situation and has prevented a huge disaster,” he said. “I think that in the present situation we need to continue this policy. I fully support that. It may be that we will pay a price for this, and that’s life.”
The “that’s life” comment particularly irked critics, and on Sunday, Netanyahu offered a more sympathetic message in a video shared to his social media in which he said he had spoken to Castleman’s father.
“Yuval Doron Castleman is a hero of Israel. In a supreme act of bravery, Yuval saved many lives,” Netanyahu said. “However, unfortunately, a terrible tragedy occurred there – and the man who had saved others was killed. There must be a thorough inquiry.”
Yuval Castleman, 37, died after an IDF soldier shot him as he responded to a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, Nov. 30, 2023. (Courtesy)
In the days following the incident, the IDF has released several statements indicating that its rules of engagement forbid firing upon suspects with their hands raised, and announced on Monday that Frija is being detained and questioned in what is called a “preliminary arrest.” Since his initial interview, Frija has subsequently claimed that he was acting out of fear for his own life.
Critics of the shooting on the left do not see it as an isolated incident, but as the result of a culture that has been nurtured for years on the Israeli right. Avner Gvaryahu, director of the Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation group focused on the experiences of combat veterans, described a “years-long campaign led by the right-wing politicians, organizations, spokespeople, and journalists to ‘not tie the hands of our soldiers’” when they face a threat — though he noted that it was impossible to know what Frija was thinking in the moment.
Gvaryahu, whose organization leads tours in the West Bank, said he sees that culture taking hold there as well. He said, from what he’s witnessed, rules of engagement for soldiers are “becoming more flexible, basically, making it easier to shoot.”
In the face of the criticism, Ben Gvir and others on the right have portrayed the incident as a horrible accident. In an online post, right-wing journalist Yotam Zimri called the shooting a “terrible tragedy” and implied that it was wrong to place blame on Frija.
“There are no bad guys in this story except for the two Arab murderers,” he said, referring to the two Hamas-affiliated terrorists who perpetrated Thursday’s attack. “If you’re looking for other bad guys, there’s something wrong with you.”
But during a visit with Castleman’s family on Monday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog acknowledged that the state bore some responsibility for his death.
“I have come here not as a private citizen but as the president of the state of Israel, to ask forgiveness and express great appreciation for a hero of Israel who did something great and courageous,” Herzog said, adding that Castleman “paid with his life in what I see as the worst and most outrageous way possible.”
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The post An IDF soldier killed a civilian who shot at terrorists, raising hard questions about vigilante culture in Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Right to Exist
Peter Beinart. Photo: Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – Liberal and left-wing adversaries of Israel indulge in an abiding fantasy that one day the Jewish state, which they falsely regard as an ethnostate built upon an ideology of Jewish supremacy, will be replaced by a single state of Palestine. They fancifully believe that it will be a multiethnic democracy granting equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of religion or national origin.
As fantasies go, this one has enjoyed a good deal of mileage, surfacing every few years at times of tension in the Middle East and gripping the attention of a handful of intellectuals. More than 20 years ago, as the Second Intifada raged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the late historian Tony Judt caused waves with a New York Review of Books essay titled, “Israel: The Alternative,” which depicted the Israeli polity as a nationalist anachronism that needed to be dismantled. This week, Peter Beinart, one of the more cloying Jewish adversaries of the Jewish state, did much the same with a New York Times piece titled “States don’t have a right to exist. People do,” treading on similar ground.
As depressing as it is to admit, it’s important to push back against these arguments—not because they hold any intrinsic worth but because they provide, at least on the surface, a framework for anti-Zionist arguments to be articulated by those who are too embarrassed to scream “Go Back to Poland!” at Jews waving Israeli flags, yet who essentially sympathize with that sentiment.
Beinart, who excels at presenting commonplace ideas as his own unique insights, argues that states have no innate worth, but that the people who live under their rule certainly do. The origins of this idea of the state lie with the thinkers of the classical liberal tradition—from Immanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, who countered the emphasis on human beings as servile to the state found in the writings of thinkers like the 17th-century English philosopher Hobbes and the 19th- century German philosopher Hegel.
While the goal of a minimal, legally accountable state is a laudable one, like most ideas, it can evolve in bizarre directions unanticipated by its formative thinkers; in this case, that out of more than 200 states in the international system, the existence of only one of them—the State of Israel—is up for debate.
Beinart is vexed by the consensus among US politicians that the right of the State of Israel to exist needs to be unashamedly upheld. He cites China and Iran as examples of states whose forms of government—Communist and Islamist—are regularly attacked by Americans. If it’s legitimate to advocate for the dismantling of these regimes, then why doesn’t the same principle apply to a state run by a regime that stresses Jewishness over everything else?
The comparison is a false one.
There is a key distinction between the concept of a “state” and that of a “nation,” but the two are often conflated because the independent, sovereign state has been the most enduring aim of advocates of national self-determination. The Soviet Union disappeared, but its constituent nations did not (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to crush Ukraine notwithstanding), while much-welcome regime change in China and Iran would not result in the elimination of those nations either. It also implies a knuckleheaded moral symmetry between a country like China, which incarcerates its Muslim Uyghur minority in concentration camps, forcing them to eat pork and drink alcohol, and Israel, where core human and civil rights are guaranteed under the law for all citizens, Jewish or not.
In the formula that Beinart recommends, however, there is no guarantee that the Jews of Israel would survive as a national group once the name “Israel,” which for Beinart and other anti-Zionists is the ultimate symbol of Jewish supremacy, was wiped from the map. Indeed, it’s far more likely that Israeli Jews would confront mass expulsion and genocide at the hands of Hamas and its allied factions than be welcome participants in a multinational “Palestine.”
Beinart fails to grasp that the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom by Hamas, which he writes about in a creepily dissociative manner, remarking merely that “Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 240 others,” is regarded by the vast majority of Israelis as a sign of what the terrorists have in store for all of them. The recent scenes in Gaza, where baying, hysterical Palestinian mobs have surrounded women hostages being released from Hamas captivity under the current ceasefire deal are a testament to that.
Beinart argues that the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is irrelevant. It is more appropriate to ask, “Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?” Actually, the more pertinent question is this: Can Palestinians, nurtured on a diet of dehumanizing antisemitic hatred that expressed itself with perfect horror on Oct. 7, agree to a living arrangement with Israelis—one state, two states, a federation, some other model of governance—that is secure and sustainable? Or is some kind of deprogramming, akin to the denazification of Germany after World War II, a necessary first step?
It’s instructive that as Beinart’s essay was being published, Donald Trump raised the idea of resettling Gaza residents in other countries, a solution that right now is more palatable to Israelis than trading more land for a non-existent peace. There are, of course, an equal mix of advantages and problems associated with such a radical move, but if the Palestinians want to remove it from the table, then they need to focus on subjecting their own society to fundamental reform. Because that’s another aspect that Beinart is unable to grasp; patience is at an end, despair is rising, and measures previously beyond the pale now look feasible and, dare I say so, desirable on many levels.
As the philosopher Karl Popper—another advocate of the minimal state bound by the rule of law—put it: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. We must therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate intolerance.”
The post The Right to Exist first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Slams Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico & China
Then-Republican presidential nominee and current US-President-elect Donald Trump looks on during a rally at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in Uniondale, New York, US, Sept. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
i24 News – US President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Saturday for tariffs to be placed on all imports from Mexico, Canada, and China, risking a trade war.
Naming the influx of illegal aliens into the US, as well as the rising fentanyl crisis, as reasons for the 25 percent tariffs on the neighboring countries, he also raised existing tariffs on China by 10 percent.
In addition to the economic costs of illegal workers coming in, the order said “gang members, smugglers, human traffickers, and illegal drugs and narcotics of all kinds are pouring across our borders and into our communities.”
More than 21,000 pounds of fentanyl was seized last year at US borders, which is estimated to represent “a fraction” of what enters.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed Americans after imposing sanctions in kind against US imports: “Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities. They will raise costs for you including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump. They will impede your access to an affordable supply of vital goods crucial for US security such as nickel, potash, uranium, steel and aluminum.”
The tariffs “violate the free trade agreement that the president and I along with our Mexican partner negotiated and signed a few years ago,” Trudeau said.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also announced a similar moves, although it was not yet detailed how exactly Mexico will respond. “When we negotiate with other nations, when we talk with other nations,” she said, it was “always with our heads held high, never bowing our heads.”
She rejected the suggestion that her government was in any way allied with criminal organizations, hitting back that US armories have sold weapons to these gangs.
China’s foreign ministry said it would file a complaint with the World Trade Organization and “take corresponding countermeasures. On the issue of fentanyl, it said it “provides support to the US on the issue of fentanyl,” but that is was ultimately a US problem.
The post Trump Slams Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico & China first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Freed Palestinian Prisoner Criticizes October 7: ‘The Price is Too High’
The logo of the Palestinian Fatah movement includes the territory that is now Israel. Image: Palestinian Media Watch.
i24 News – In an interview given last week to the Emirati Al Mashhad Media, Mohammed a-Tus, a former Fatah militant from Bethlehem, criticized the October 7 attack and called for the prioritization of the diplomatic route over armed actions against Israel.
A-Tus, who spent four decades in Israeli prisons for his participation in several attacks in the 1980s, spoke on Tuesday from Egypt, where he was deported after his release as part of the hostage exchange agreement.
“I tell my grandchildren not to carry out military actions against Israel,” he said. “At this stage, we must focus on diplomatic actions rather than military ones.”
Referring to the Hamas attack of October 7 that indirectly led to his release, a-Tus was particularly critical, even though the interviewer attributed armed violence as what ultimately got him released.
“The price is very high, we will not accept that the price of our liberation is a drop of a Palestinian child’s blood,” he said.
The former prisoner also shared his experience of the October 7 attack from his cell: “We turned on the television and saw alerts asking Israelis to go to shelters. We understood that something major was happening.”
“The next day, the attitude towards us changed 180 degrees,” he continued. “They removed the televisions and radios, informing us that we were in a state of war. Those with experience understood that the response would be harsh.”
While maintaining a certain distance from Hamas, a-Tus highlighted the ties that unite the various Palestinian factions. “Hamas members are brothers of the homeland, of the shared path and of the future,” he said.
That being said, he warned against continued armed resistance. “Any leader who contemplates undertaking a major action must know the price to pay for what he wants to achieve and if the goal justifies the sacrifices,” he concluded.
The post Freed Palestinian Prisoner Criticizes October 7: ‘The Price is Too High’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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