The real racism against the Palestinians

This is a story about two people going to jail and the countries sending them there. Both are Palestinians and were sentenced on Monday in courts separated by an hour’s drive. Jamil Tamimi was sent down for 18 years at Jerusalem district court, in Israel, for the murder of British student Hannah Bladon. Bladon, a religious studies undergraduate at Birmingham university, was in Israel on an exchange programme. On Good Friday 2017, she was riding the Jerusalem light rail to church when Tamimi stabbed her seven times with a seven-inch knife. The frenzied assault stopped only when the other passengers managed to overpower him. Hannah was taken to hospital but died soon after arrival. She was 21 years old.

The murder bore all the markers of a terrorist attack. In fact, Tamimi had just been released from a psychiatric hospital and is thought to have been attempting ‘suicide-by-cop’ — slaying the student in the hopes a responding police officer would shoot him dead.