Haaretz
Tishrei 16, 5765
"Kill a Turk and rest" - a popular Israeli saying
meaning "don't rush" - is not only a statement of doubtful political
correctness. It is also the middle of a Jewish joke. But only the middle.
In Israel it has a separate existence, which distorts the spirit of the
original Jewish anecdote.
And here is the story, which was passed
on by a Yiddishist father from the old country to his Israeli-born
daughter: A Jewish mother says farewell to her son, who has been drafted
into the Czar's army and goes to fight against Turkey in 1877. She is of
course very worried about her son's welfare. While she is packing his
knapsack, she says to him: "Listen, when you get to the front, kill a
Turk, and rest. Kill a Turk, and rest."
"But Mother," replies the
son, "what happens if while I'm resting, the Turk kills me?"
"Good
God," says the mother, horrified, "what does the Turk have against
you?"
A contemporary echo to the view of that same Jewish mother
can be found in the reports in the Israeli media last weekend. They
unquestioningly adopted the label "terrorists" applied by IDF commanders
and spokesmen to the three young Palestinians who last Thursday killed
three Israeli soldiers of their own age at the Morag outpost in the Gaza
Strip.
"Terrorists" is a negative label, which testifies to a lack
of legitimacy. Therefore, in the language of mass-circulation daily
Yedioth Ahronoth, the three were not simply killed in battle, but were
"exterminated," as befits an inferior species.
The linguistic
inability of the Israeli media to distinguish between Palestinian fighters
and those who have gone out to blow themselves up among civilians in a
restaurant reveals a common Israeli viewpoint: They all act against us,
not because we give them a reason, but because their murderous behavior is
ingrained. Their cruelty is a part of their essence, their character,
their culture.
The Jewish mother, in her Israeli incarnation,
parrots the explanations of Israeli commanders that the terrorists
"cynically use the civilian population," hiding and operating from within
it. Therefore the IDF is routinely permitted to launch missiles into the
heart of civilian neighborhoods and to shell them, in order to kill wanted
men, even at the price of harming children, the elderly and
women.
These explanations forget that the armed Palestinians live
among their families in the same way as Israeli commanders - those who
gave orders to bomb homes and to destroy hundreds of houses and to uproot
tens of thousands of olive trees and to expropriate thousands of dunams -
return to a home in a civilian neighborhood. The explainers forget that
the army camps and the outposts are located near or inside settlements -
indubitably civilian neighborhoods.
Hundreds of Palestinian
civilians in Khan Younis, Rafah, Dir al Balah, El Bireh, and Hebron have
been killed by the fire of soldiers who were deployed inside
concentrations of the civilian population of Gush Katif, Netzarim, Kfar
Darom, Psagot, old Hebron. Just a week ago, on September 22, a 10-year-old
girl from Khan Younis died from injuries sustained by the firing of our
forces in Gush Katif on September 7, while sitting at her classroom
desk.
The female descendants of the Jewish mother will rightfully
say: After all, were it not for the army, the Palestinians would murder
settlers every day. What has escaped their attention is that from the
beginning, the settlement enterprise has been explained as a security
activity. In other words, as part of Israeli security-military thinking,
whose political goal - whether disguised or not - is an expansion of our
borders.
Gradually, some of the reasons for the settlements have
taken root among the civilian population, and have been cloaked in
sanctity or enveloped in real-estate logic. But the essence remains: The
settlements are an inseparable part of a military occupation regime that
is dispossessing the Palestinian people from its land.
The firing
of Qassam rockets on the town of Sderot, and murderous suicide attacks in
Haifa and Be'er Sheva, seem only to prove the thesis that we have come to
accept: The Palestinians are against us without any relation to the
settlements. It's a fact that the number of Israeli civilians and those
who were killed in suicide attacks within the Green Line is higher than
the number of soldiers and civilians killed in the territories by
Palestinian fire. But what is forgotten here is that before the suicide
attacks and the Qassams, thousands of Israeli bullets and shells sowed
death and destruction among the civilian Palestinian population.
In
the week following September 28, 2000, the beginning of the present
intifada, the IDF and the police were quick to use lethal firearms against
demonstrators and stone-throwers, including Israeli Arab citizens. Thus
they fanned the flames instead of extinguishing them.
The mention
of these facts is not meant to justify the Palestinian methods of
struggle. Nor is it meant to compare our situation to that between Russia
and Turkey. After all, as opposed to the war between two empires, there is
no symmetry in the relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Harming
a civilian population is an integral part of every occupation army. And
the Israeli side is the one that has been crossing the Green Line for the
past 37 years, with every possible type of violence and cruelty.