Uri Avnery starts his article about the lynching of a young Palestinian boy by Gaza settlers with these words: “All the world saw the horror on TV…” But the fact is that despite the pro-settler claims that the world media is “biased” against Israel, the only place I could find this story (even after a Google search) was in the Israeli press.
When a Palestinian mob lynched two Israelis reservist soldiers who got lost in Ramallah in October, 2000, a few weeks into the start of this Intifada, the Israelis seized on it as an example of the moral inferiority of the Palestinians. But here you have all the elements of moral turpitude that the occupation’s defenders catalog against the Palestinians: that innocent civilians, particularly children are the victims, that young children are involved as attackers in these murderous actions, that the attackers are a bloodthirsty mob, that the only “crime” of the victim is his ethnic origin, and on and on. I have for a long time pointed out the moral equivalence of the militants on both sides, but this is a stark example.
No doubt, some of the occupation’s defenders will point out that in the end, the life of the Palestinian boy was saved by Israeli soldiers, unlike the Israeli lynching victims, whom the Palestinian police could or would not protect. The difference is that the Israelis, (unlike the handful of Palestinian police who were on the scene at Ramallah), have a masssive and well armed presence in Gaza, particularly now. Had the Israeli soldiers been doing a proper job, the boy would never have been injured or attacked in the first place. It is only because of the kid-glove treatment of the settlers that the violence went as far as it did. The Israeli army therefore bears direct responsibility for this crime. In fact, the Israeli army falls into the category of an immoral militant organization in re: my comment above, given the directives of its leadership both at the command and political level.
I would also like to stress one very important point here. I sometimes get letters from pro-settler types, and one of the main criticisms they broach against the Palestinians is how they use children as part of the armed resistance. One needn’t go back to the pre-1948 period to see identical behavior on the part of Jews (one might note that children played a role in the Jewish resistance against the British, particularly in the terrorist militant groups). To this day, Israeli children are actively involved in militant actions.
In my reserve days in Hebron I was always struck by how the settlers used their children for their political aims. Most strikingly, in their current resistance against the withdrawal, settler children play a huge role. I have yet to hear a cogent explanation from the pro-settler types, how this behavior is different from the Palestinians’.
The main thrust of Avnery’s piece is a continuation of the argument I made in the previous posting: that settler violence is something Arik wants to show how “difficult” even this relatively minor withdrawel is.
Tags: Moral Equivalence, Settlers, War Crimes