NOVANEWS
I meant to write about this earlier but forgot. Several days ago, to conscience-shattering silence, the Israeli Defense Forces carried out a “targeted assassination” in downtown Gaza City, blowing up a car belonging to Mohammed Jamal al-Nimnim, a senior member of the Army of Islam. The little black crosses, xananas (drones) that buzz above Gaza constantly apparently hit the car with a missile, “pre-empting” several “terrorist attacks” against “American and Israeli” targets al-Nimnim was planning in the Sinai.
IDF spokeswoman Lt.-Col. Avital Leibovitz said that “Earlier today, the Israeli army targeted a ticking bomb,” and since army spokeswomen are incapable of emitting truth, we know how to take that assertion (Someone tell me what “American” targets are sitting in the Sinai—sun-burnt tourists in Sharm al-Sheikh?) Enjoy also the color the racist Jerusalem Post added to the story: “Hamas said he was a senior aide to Mumtaz Dughmush, commander of the Army of Islam.
Dughmush is a former Hamas activist and heads the violent Dughmush clan in Gaza City,” a bizarre Orientalist way to describe the Dughmush family, as though they’re sitting around a campfire in the Gazan dunes with their scimitars plotting the next Jew-killing.
Tilde de Wandel
Anyway. A “targeted assassination” is illegal. I have trouble seeing a real difference between a “targeted assassination” of a member of Islamic Jihad, PFLP, or Hamas, and a bomb falling on a woman’s head in al-Shatti camp except that some people choose to get exercised about one and not the other, because of weird prevailing thoughts about the morality of killing women versus men, resistance fighters versus innocents. An otherwise psychotic paper from the philosophy department of the University of Haifa [incidentally adding a nugget of proof to the notion that Israeli universities should be targeted for an academic boycott] makes this point very well: “a combatant’s moral innocence or guilt is determined, in part, by whether or not he is fighting in a just war. If his war is unjust and if he is not forced to take part in it, he cannot claim a moral right to kill enemy soldiers on the basis of self-defense.
This conclusion…makes a lot of moral sense.” (The paper also adds that “targeted killing is the preferable method … because, on a utilitarian calculation, it saves lives,” against the unthinkable idea that Israel could just end the occupation). I see both the PFLP fighter and his wife as having an absolute right to live which the occupation impinges on. Since the occupation is illegal, actions carried out to enforce it are illegal.
Since “targeted” murders are illegal, one would expect outcry. One would expect it, but it never comes. Again, compare “targeted assassinations” of the resistance when they are simply going about their business in their own land versus “targeted assassinations” of illegal settlers in the West Bank undoubtedly carrying out war crimes. Or, actually compare the response, especially on the liberal left: hand-wringing about the barbarity of one set of killings, quietude about another (and the silence amidst the killing of shepherds in northern Gaza, too).
Look at the ziggurat of racist institutions, practices, and mindsets that contribute to erasing one death while blaring about the other on White House lawns, op-ed pages, and even the progressive press, and wonder: what is the point of contributing to that cacophony, while remaining noticeably mute when Israel takes out the people struggling in whatever benighted, ineffectual, palsied way they can for Palestinian freedom?
[For more photos, see Tilde de Wandel’s blog]
Technorati Tags: Gaza, Hamas, international law, Islamic Jihad, Palestine, PFLP, resistance, resistance movements, Tilde de Wandel, Zionism
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