Two days ago, J.J. Goldberg published a particularly incendiary piece in the Forward. This is what I take to be the central claim:
Once the boys’ disappearance was known, troops began a massive, 18-day search-and-rescue operation, entering thousands of homes, arresting and interrogating hundreds of individuals, racing against the clock. Only on July 1, after the boys’ bodies were found, did the truth come out: The government had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.
The initial evidence was the recording of victim Gilad Shaer’s desperate cellphone call to Moked 100, Israel’s 911. When the tape reached the security services the next morning — neglected for hours by Moked 100 staff — the teen was heard whispering “They’ve kidnapped me” (“hatfu oti”) followed by shouts of “Heads down,” then gunfire, two groans, more shots, then singing in Arabic. That evening searchers found the kidnappers’ abandoned, torched Hyundai, with eight bullet holes and the boys’ DNA. There was no doubt.
Goldberg doesn’t cite his sources, unfortunately, nor does he link to anything. And the conclusion he draws is presented as uncontrovertible fact when it’s actually just putting two and two together and assuming you get four.
That said, I’m inclined to agree with his assessment. Here’s why:
This story, from the Times of Israel on June 30, makes clear that “Army Radio reported Tuesday that the three were shot during the phone call. It said blood and bullet cases were found in the car, as well as some of the killers’ effects.” That’s the first car, which was found burnt outside of Hebron on June 13, the day after the kidnapping.
But we learn in this piece that “Bat-Galim Sha’ar [the mother of one of the murdered boys] heard the tape [on June 13] the day after the call was made, and noticed the gunshots too – and was told by police, she said, that they were ‘blanks,’ and that her son was probably still alive.“ She also says, in this piece in Hebrew, "The told us that they shot out the windows which is why they found bullets inside the vehicle. We had real hope that they were alive.”
That’s Issue #1. Issue #2 is, of course, the gag order that Israel placed on the phone call, on “all the details of the investigation” and “all detail that might identify the suspect.” The gag order fueled all sorts of speculation and allowed the government to proceed in actions against targets in the West Bank for reasons that either might have been or might not have been related to the abduction while also prohibiting any discussion or reporting of whatever the government knew about the boys’ abduction and murder.
All of which leads to Issue #3:
Also from the Times of Israel piece: “Israeli security forces pinpointed Amer Abu Aysha and Marwan Kawasme [or Qawasmeh] as prime suspects on June 13, and began a series of searches of the family homes and the questioning and arrests of relatives and other suspects.” But that information wasn’t released to the public until June 26. All the while, the government continued to suggest that the people responsible for the kidnapping could be anywhere in the West Bank and were almost certainly acting at the behest of the leadership of Hamas.
But, according to Shlomi Eldar, the Qawasmeh clan is well-known a rogue group that operates without the instructions or the backing of Hamas leadership and often at direct cross-purposes: “Each time Hamas had reached an understanding with Israel about a cease-fire or tahadiyeh (period of calm), at least one member of the family has been responsible for planning or initiating a suicide attack, and any understandings with Israel, achieved after considerable effort, were suddenly laid waste. If there is a single family throughout the PA territories whose actions can be blamed for Israel’s assassination of the political leadership of Hamas, it is the Qawasmeh family of Hebron.“
Marwan Qawasmeh, in a New York Times piece from July 2, was described by his uncle as being opposed to the new Palestininan unity government and the Oslo Accords; in the same NYT piece, an unnamed senior Israeli official said the following: “We are still trying to understand if they worked alone or had connections abroad or in Gaza…. But the agenda of kidnapping is central to Hamas.” And then, again in the same NYT piece, we get the following: “Almost from the start, Israel sought to pin the abduction on Hamas, whose reconciliation deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization it vigorously opposes. During the 18-day operation in the West Bank, according to a military statement, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians — 335 of them affiliated with Hamas — searched 2,218 locations and confiscated about $350,000. They also killed six Palestinians who confronted them.”
None of this amounts to the slam dunk that Goldberg suggests he’s got in his Forward piece. But I can certainly see how he gets to his conclusion and I think the burden is on the Israeli government to explain why Goldberg is wrong.