On Thursday, July 10, I entered the Hebrew word for "Arabs", ARAVIM, into Twitter and searched for uses of the word over the previous few hours.
What I found was young Israelis proclaiming their desire for all Arabs to die and in some cases be tortured to death.
Some of these calls for genocide were from young men, but a majority of them seemed to be authored by young women. I began to tweet out translations into English of their words, including their Twitter profile pictures and links to their original tweets.
I also noticed that many of the Israeli youth who were cursing Arabs on Twitter were also expressing resentment at having been woken up to the whine of sirens, which sounded in response to rockets launched at Israeli cities from Gaza.
When I made this observation, one of the young Israelis I had quoted making anti-Arab comments responded to my tweet, assuring me that her hate of Palestinians was unrelated to having been stirred from her slumber that morning, but that it in fact was a constant in her life.
Since I included references to their Twitter handles, the teens were soon alerted to my activity and responded with great anger. Several of the teens and their friends with Twitter accounts proceeded to tweet at me with insults and threats of physical violence.
Adir Machluf declared that to punish me for tweeting translations of his friends' calls for ethnic cleansing, he would rape my mother. Another Twitter user, Shoval Aharonov, responded: "Dude, you rock, I agree with you, but it's spelled "rape".
Having read my fill of racist incitement for the day, I turned to my news feed, and saw that
Ha'aretz had just reported that Israelis were
calling for the assassination of a government minister who had made a condolence call to the family of a Palestinian teen lynched last week by Israelis.
While these statements appear to have been made by Israeli teenagers, it should be noted that in just a few years most of them will likely be serving in the Israeli army, armed with fully automatic rifles and in a position to put their genocidal views into practice.
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