NOVANEWS
As some of you may know, on Friday Israel murdered three Hamas militants as they were traveling between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. Murdered, because they were on their own land and not engaged in hostilities. Even according to the bastardized norms of international humanitarian law, the murders were illegal. Of course, the occupation englobes even the killings of Palestinians actively engaged in resistance. Non-bastardized norms would reflect that. Since then, injuries and deaths have hit the inhabitants of Gaza in an insistent staccato: today (Tuesday), two injuries and one murder, Muhammad Ziad Shalha, in the process cutting off internet and telephone access to north Gaza. Those hurt and killed were rummaging through rubble for cement. Then later, four more injuries, including two women. One apparently was pregnant.
The purpose of the assassinations is to antagonize Hamas into substantively breaking the ceasefire on its end so that Israel can acquire the diplomatic and ideological maneuvering room to carry out another escalation and destroy the weapons stores Hamas has built up, in a long-standing pattern in which Israel uses targeted murders to break ceasefires. The Hamas leadership called the air strike a “crime,” and a “serious escalation” and said that Israel would “bear all the consequences.”
That retaliation will take the form of calculated, cool, level-headed Hamas rocketry, a frequent target for condemnation. Even amongst circles sympathetic to those enduring the siege, one sees little recognition of the flight of those rockets being over-determined. The rockets may do nothing for the Palestinian resistance, but if Hamas simply sits on its hands, Israel will (1) keep on assassinating its leadership, in the surety that it will weaken both the Hamas government and movement in the process of doing so — decapitating senior Palestinian leadership is a long-standing pattern meant to create “chaos in the Palestinian political system” — or (2) push militants behind the groups further to the right – the Salafiis, Islamic Jihad – that Hamas may or may not be able to control. This is what power does: it makes resistance by the oppressed very hard. In that sense, condemnation of those rockets is an exercise in moralizing. One must recommend viable alternative options. Mass-based Intifada is not a political option. You can’t incant revolution. My friends in Gaza do not like those rockets. Even many Hamas officials probably hate the position they feel that they are in, which is why they insistently prevail on the other armed factions to restore the shaky cease-fires week-in and week-out. The occupation is a steel-hard casing closing in tightly on Palestinian agency.
But constraints operate in unpredictable ways. David Graeber writes: “situations of structural violence invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification,” going on to observe that really what we are talking about in the case of Palestinian reflections on their own violence, for example, is “sympathetic identification,” or the process through which “victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries far more than those beneficiaries care about them. This might well be, after the violence itself, the single most powerful force preserving such relations.” A friend from Gaza, Yousef al-Jammal, asked me after the Itamar murders if I thought a Palestinian had committed them. I thought then probably not. It is not the Palestinian habit to purposefully kill babies. They don’t mirror their tormentors. Just ask them:
I had to do it. I had to know what the Itamar horror actually looked like. I’m the mother of four children – including an infant and a little boy close to the age of the one who was stabbed to death at the West Bank settlement on March 11. When I initially heard the news, like any mother of an infant, I started holding my baby close to me every night, sad for the fate of these little children and their surviving siblings. But when I looked on the My Israel website and saw those little angels lying in blood, I was angry at myself for falling for this temptation, and mad that these pictures were posted. This was political pornography – tasteless and crude – denigrating the memory of these pure little innocent beings in order to score political points in the ongoing conflict. Just the very idea of such a gruesome act is enough to convey the horror. No more was needed.
Indeed, all the Palestinian people I have spoken with here in the West Bank who heard of the murders shake their heads and say how terrible they were (and none saw the pictures). And in the next breath they add, “and I’m sure it wasn’t a Palestinian who did this.” The murders were condemned by Palestinian militant groups, the political leadership and civil society.
And yet the Israeli government has had a field day, accusing the Palestinian collective of incitement to murder and using the incident as a pretext to expand settlements – and to hold hostage the entire village of Awarta (over 5,000 people), adjacent to Itamar, which has been under total lockdown for days. A close Palestinian colleague remarks: “After 45 years of occupying us, and 60-plus years of fighting us, the Israelis still don’t know us – it’s amazing.”
In denying involvement, the military wing of the Fatah party, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, said they “oppose the targeting of civilians and killing of children no matter what the pretext may be.” A leaflet from the Imad Mughniyeh Group, loosely affiliated with Hezbollah and Fatah, added that in the past, it had “abandoned many attacks” due to the presence of children. More than one Palestinian reminds me of the No. 300 bus hijacking in 1984, which was “botched” because the Palestinian hijackers let a pregnant Israeli woman off the bus.
The information she then gave to the Israeli security services enabled them to locate the bus and ultimately kill all the militants.
“We don’t deliberately target women and children,” several Palestinians who served time in Israeli prisons for activities against the occupation tell me unhesitatingly. Is this Palestinian cultural patriarchy at work or is it respect for international law that guides these accused militants? “But you put bombs inside civilian buses years ago. What’s the difference?” I ask.
I am struck by the answer: “This was a stabbing of children inside their homes – that’s not resistance. No bomber boarded a bus to kill children.”
International humanitarian law does not recognize the distinctions that these militants make: Indiscriminate attacks that are likely to kill civilians are plainly illegal. But, by the logic I was hearing, the distinction boils down to a matter of intent. Like the different degrees of murder recognized by the American criminal system.
“You know,” continues one of the former prisoners, “it took years for the resistance to agree to include Israeli settlers as targets. Only when [Rabbi Moshe] Levinger and his bandits grew in numbers and began driving through our streets and shooting at us, did we reach agreement on this.”
I think about this and recall the disturbing fact that when the Camp David agreement was reached in 1979, there were very few Israeli settlers colonizing the West Bank – about 10,000 in all. When the Oslo process began in 1993, the West Bank settler population had exceeded 110,000; today, that number exceeds 320,000.
The word from Palestinian security sources is that it was a foreign worker who murdered the Fogel family for money over a debt. Indeed, the foreign workers in the settlement were reportedly arrested and questioned by Israeli authorities.
Other Palestinians point to the stark similarity to the case of the Oshrenko family, immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, who included a 3-year-old boy and an infant, all of whom were murdered in Rishon Letzion in 2009 (most of them stabbed to death) by another immigrant. But even if it was a Palestinian who was crazed – as was said about Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred Palestinians praying in a Hebron mosque in 1994 – these horrible killings should not be considered a “Palestinian” act, nor should they be demonized and punished collectively for it.
Allegra Pacheco is a lawyer who lives and works in the occupied territories.
(Haaretz; h/t Gabriel; although a quibble: Ahmed Moor bombastically informs me that “Zionists are not fit to produce and disseminate the truth.” I do not know if Allegra Pacheco is a Zionist, although I really don’t care. I do know that Moor better fire up that brain of his and spend some time Wikipedia-ing “epistemology” before clattering out the next proclamation about what “Zionists” are or are not fit to do.)
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