JERUSALEM (JTA) — An investigation has been opened into a video aired on Israeli television that shows Jewish revelers at a wedding celebrating the murder of three Palestinians in the Duma firebomb attack. The video, released Dec. 23 on Channel 10 and filmed at the Jerusalem wedding of a right-wing couple last week, features friends of the suspected assailants in the July firebomb attack on a home in the Palestinian village of Duma. The Judea and Samaria Police said that an investigation was launched several days ago “into the many serious offenses displayed in the wedding video.”
In the video, party-goers stab a photo of the Dawabshe family and wave knives, rifles, pistols and Molotov cocktails. The crowd chants the words to a song that includes a verse from Judges 16:28, in which Samson says, “Let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.” The crowd substitutes “Palestinians” for Philistines. The youths in the video have been condemned from across Israel’s political spectrum.
The main modern Orthodox rabbinical group in the United States expressed its “outrage” over the video. “The vigilante and lawless calls for revenge and dancing with machine guns and knives are anathema to Jewish morality and religious standards,” Rabbi Shalom Baum, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, said in a statement issued Dec. 24.