Tag Meir launches crowd-funding campaign
Tag Meir, an anti-racism organization, has launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for five-year-old Ahmed Dawabsha, whose parents and younger brother were killed in an arson attack in late July. Almost six weeks after the attack, there have been no arrests, although Israeli security officials have labeled it “Jewish terrorism” based on racist slogans in Hebrew spray painted at the site.
Israel is holding two known Jewish extremists in administrative detention and a handful of others have been told to stay out of certain areas. There is widespread Palestinian anger that the Israeli government is not expending more effort to catch the perpetrators.
An anti-racist Israeli group called Tag Meir has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for Ahmed, who is recovering in an Israeli hospital, and his grandfather Hussein, who has barely left his grandson’s bedside. The goal of the campaign is $20,000 and within hours after being posted on Facebook, it had reached almost one-quarter of its goal.
“It’s amazing,” Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of Tag Meir told The Media Line said. “This was a public sin and we all have to take responsibility.”
The initiative comes at a time when Jews prepare to celebrate the holidays of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and repentance.
Gvaryahu was among a group of Israelis who visited the Dawabsha family in the village of Duma after the firebomb attack, and has stayed in touch in ensuing weeks, including during the funeral of Ahmed’s mother Riham Dawabsha, who died on the eve of her 27th birthday.
Now the family is just Ahmed, who this week had a skin graft operation, and his grandfather, Hussein, 51, who has spent decades doing manual labor in Israel, most recently laying tile floors, and who speaks fluent Hebrew.
“I want the Israeli government to find the people who burned my family to death,” Hussein told The Media Line, just a few days after his daughter’s funeral. “I think they should be burnt to death too, but at the least they should go to jail for the rest of their lives.”
Since the attack, Hussein has barely left his grandson’s bedside. They still haven’t told him that his parents and brother were killed, but Hussein says he knows that something is wrong.
“When I came back from Riham’s funeral, he kept asking me if his mother was dead,” Hussein said sadly. “I didn’t know what to say to him.”
Gvaryahu says the Israeli government will pay damages to the Dawabsha family after the perpetrators are caught. But that could take months, and meanwhile Ahmed and Hussein need money to live on.
“Hussein has not been working in almost seven weeks, and he is using a lot of money just to travel back and forth to the hospital,” he said. “They really need the money and we have to provide for Ahmed’s future.”
Tag Meir was formed as a counterpoint to Tag Mechir, which means price tag, referring to efforts to respond to any perceived concessions by the Israeli government with violent attacks. Over the past five years, Price Tag has claimed responsibility for hundreds of attacks on Palestinians and their property, including burning mosques and cutting down thousands of olive trees. Just over a year ago, Jewish extremists burnt a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, to death following the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers.
Donors to the Tag Meir campaign said they believed it was the least they could do.
“Faced with hateful extremism it is important to do acts that show another side of Jewish culture,” Rabbi Yehiel Greniman, a board member of Tag Meir who works for Rabbis for Human Rights told The Media Line. “Compassion is a basic Jewish value and it is desperately needed in this country today.”