- Excerpt -
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- A recent exhibit titled "Breaking the Silence,"
organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who
served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious
belligerence towards defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers'
graffiti that included:
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- "Arabs to the gas chambers"
- "Arabs = an inferior race"
- "Spill Arab blood"
- and, of course, the ever-so-popular "Death to the
Arabs"
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- (that IDF) soldiers used a myriad of methods to make
the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a
bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of
such abuse: "Religious penitence provides strength to expel the
Arabs."
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- The exhibit's main curator described a particularly
shocking
policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods,
like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours
on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house
in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.
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- Roadblock Concerto At
Gunpoint
- 'The Pianist' Of Palestine
- By Oma Barghouti
- jenna@palnet.com
- Counterpunch.org
- 11-29-4
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- When I watched Oscar-winning film 'The Pianist', I had
three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the
film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film's depiction
of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German
occupiers;
and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel's much
more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.
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- In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians
to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: "that's one
thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians." I spoke
too soon, it seems. Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz reported last week
that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military
roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a
Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed
that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near
Jerusalem.
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- In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was
dismissed
by an army spokesperson as little more that "insensitivity,"
with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of
course the usual mantra about soldiers having to "contend with a
complex
and dangerous reality" was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all
excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing
the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940's.
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- Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal
occupations
does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual
"punishment"
meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often
sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of
checkpoints
littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common
Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied
Palestinian
territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament
attested to this, writing: "The original founders of the Jewish state
could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the
ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell
similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw
ghetto."
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- Even Tommy Lapid, Israel's justice minister and a
Holocaust
survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel
radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the
debris
for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at
Auschwitz.
Furthermore, he commented on his army's wanton and indiscriminate
destruction
of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying:
"[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United
Nations
and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague."
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- Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid
have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers,
who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their
complicity in the daily hum iliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent
civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable,
even necessary, acts of "disciplining" the untamed natives, as
a measure to maintain "security."
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- According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an
army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the
notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence
presented
against him was a videotape filmed by the army's education branch. In that
particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that
an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat
a Palestinian "flanked by his wife and children," punching him
in the face, and "even kicked[him] in the lower part of his
body,"
the report said.
-
- A recent exhibit titled "Breaking the Silence,"
organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who
served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious
belligerence towards defenseless Pal estinians. Inspired by Jewish
settlers'
graffiti that included: "Arabs to the gas chambers"; "Arabs
= an inferior race"; "Spill Arab blood"; and, of course,
the ever so popular "Death to the Arabs," soldiers used a myriad
of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One
photograph
showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate
goal of such abuse: "Religious penitence provides strength to expel
the Arabs." The exhibit's main curator described a particularly
shocking
policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods,
like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours
on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house
in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.
-
- The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what
Israeli army units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with
Ha'aretz
in November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant
(res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the
gradual transformation of every soldier to an "animal" when
staffing
a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from
home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls
"checkpoint syndrome," a glaring symptom of which is acting
violently
towards Palestinians in "the most primal and impulsive manner, without
fear of punishment ." "At the checkpoint," he explains,
"young people have the chance to be masters and using force and
violence
becomes legitimate ."
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- Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly
beat a Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a "souvenir
picture"
taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they'd thrashed; how one soldier
pissed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had "the
nerve to smile" at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to
stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked
Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused "broke someone's
hand" and "slashed their tires."
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- The most chilling of all the incidents was his own
personal
confession. "I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an
Arab right in the face," he admitted. "Blood was trickling from
his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his
knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside." He then goes
on to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the
tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed "the Arab;" how they hit him
until "he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and
saliva;"
how he "grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side,"
until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then "stepped harder and
harder on his back," to make him stop crying.
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- Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered
them on: "Good work, tigers." And after they took their prey
to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. "All the other
soldiers were waiting there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When
we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly." One
of the soldiers, Furer said, "went up to him and kicked him in the
stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was
funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just
as I'd expected. They shouted and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab
was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy."
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- As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in
any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the
Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and
respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel's massive
reoccupation
of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives
to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained
Palestinian
men and teenage boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown
on Arab satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the
internet.
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- In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a
mass roundup of Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli
troops inscribed identification numbers "on the foreheads and forearms
of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation." The late Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at
concentration
camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the
Holocaust
I find such an act insufferable." Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a
spokesman
for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only about Israel's
image being tarnished: "clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey
a public relations message," he told Israel Army Radio. Parroting
that line, the mainstream media in Israel, too, were far too concerned
about the "public relations disaster" to express any abhorrence
or protestation at the immorality of the act and the irony of it
all.
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- Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel
Aviv University, sees PR as "a fundamental issue in Israeli
life."
"We do not think we do anything wrong," he clarifies in an
interview
with the Guardian, "but we think we explain ourselves badly and that
the international media is anti-Semitic." Obsessed with how Israel
is seen rather than with what it actually does, Israelis, according to
Peri, are mostly worried that "we do not explain ourselves well. When
we discuss the horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk
about the issue but about how it will be seen."
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- Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and
acquiescence
among the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the
Palestinians,
former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with
the Irish publication the Handstand that "gross insensitivity"
was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to
the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, "I am beginning to
understand
why a whole nation was able to say: 'We did not know.'"
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- I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous,
award-winning
director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation tactics
to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making
a Palestinian version of "The Pianist."
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- Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political
analyst. His article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms"
was chosen among the "Best of 2002" by the Guardian.
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- He can be reached at: jenna@palnet.com
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- http://counterpunch.org/barghouti11292004.html
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