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Every
conflict region in the world seems to generate its
own hierarchy of victims. The lives of some children
are considered more important than others; that when
they are lost there is a need to generate a public
outcry that somehow becomes muted when the lives of
others are extinguished. This week the Irish Times
reported on a Palestinian attack on a kibbutz beside
the border with the West Bank which resulted in five
Israeli civilians being killed. The Al Aqsa Martyrs'
Brigade, a Fatah derivative claimed responsibility
for the attack.The report named four of the victims
and outlined the actions that led to their deaths:
'a single gunman crawled under the fence surrounding
the kibbutz ... he then turned his gun on Yitzhak
Dori ... the gunman then burst into a home and shot
dead Revital Ohayon (34) and her two children - Matan
(5) and Noam (4) - who were in their beds.'
Kibbutz
Metzer is populated in large part by leftists from
Argentina and their offspring. Long opposed to the
right wing repressive regime in their home country
they made their lives in Israel but without ever compromising
their opposition to injustice. They support the establishment
of a Palestinian state. Sam Bahour who features regularly
on this site observed in sorrow that:
This
is the same Kibbutz only a few weeks ago that stood
with Palestinians in defiance of the Wall of Racism
that Sharon is building to separate the two peoples
while confiscating Palestinians lands simultaneously.
It
is only right that the wider public have access to
information pertaining to actions which lead to events
like the slaughter at Kibbutz Metzer, particularly
so when it jars with what we like to hear. And those
of us who support Palestinian freedom must also take
note of the heinous atrocities carried out in its
pursuit by some rather than face the accusation that
we delude ourselves into believing that the Israelis
alone have a monopoly on crimes against humanity.
The Palestinian Authority condemned the shooting,
saying that turning Palestinians and Israelis ‘into
targets of terror attacks is disgraceful.' The father
of the two dead children asked 'How can a man - if
you can call him a man - shoot a boy with two pacifiers
and kill him?'
The
Israeli writer, Sami Michael, who earlier this year
became the new president of the Association for Civil
Rights in Israel (ACRI), believes that the conflict
with the Palestinians is poisoning Israeli democracy.
One wonders if the same may not be said of any developing
secular Palestinian democracy - that attacks of the
type referred to in the Irish Times are poisoning
its progress.
Yet
such reporting is not so much wrong factually as it
is in terms of perspective construction. Its limitations
seriously hamper a more fuller understanding of what
is happening in the occupied territories. At the end
of the Irish Times article the readers were
informed that 'in the Gaza Strip meanwhile, Palestinians
reported that a two-year-old boy was killed by Israeli
army fire in the southern town of Rafah.' No, name,
no circumstance - almost an afterthought. In much
of the Western press Palestinian children don’t
just have that same amount of humanness within their
bodies. And their human rights for that reason are
in less need of defence. Hence too little is said
when F16s bomb Gaza and slaughter 9 Palestinian children
and the psychopath that leads Israel congratulates
the pilot and boasts of a great success.
Much
of this shaping and filtering has been achieved quite
deliberately and systematically through the manufacturing
and mobilisation of bias. The state of Israel has
learned much from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister
for propaganda. As Edward Said has put it:
I
cannot think of any other country on earth that,
in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed
such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire
society and gotten away with it …The monstrous
transformation of an entire people by a formidable
and feared propaganda machine into little more than
militants and terrorists has allowed not just Israel's
military but its fleet of writers and defenders
to efface a terrible history of injustice, suffering
and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence
of the Palestinian people with impunity.
And
when you strip people of humanity is it to be wondered
at if they fail to see you as human and seek to do
to you what you have done to them? There is no justification
ever for murdering children. Stating that won't prevent
it. But to evade stating it allows such murder to
breath all the more easier. Israeli state reasoning
is beyond all ethical appeal. Nevertheless, if Palestinian
resistance is not to mirror the brutality of Israeli
oppression justice rather revenge should be its guiding
light.
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