By Gideon Levy
October 17, 2004 - Cheshvan 2, 5765
Haaretz.com
More
than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation
Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such
wholesale killing of children "terror". Whereas in the overall count
of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for
every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According to
B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in
Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110
Israeli minors.
Palestinian
human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children
killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring
Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent. Take note
of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated until about a
month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and
eight were two years old when they died. The youngest victims are 13 newborn
infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With
horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have
long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the
public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always
only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
The
plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of
Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF
Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to
soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people
in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children
will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no
restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.
As MK
Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said in a particularly
emotional speech in the Knesset, it is no longer possible to claim that all
these children were killed by mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500
day-to-day mistakes of identity. No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous
result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by
the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves,
including children, has become normative behavior. Even the momentary
mini-furor that erupted over the "confirming of the killing" of a
13-year-old girl, Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The
scandal should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not
only by what followed.
Iman
was not the only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a
sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the
Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly
close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her
parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the
car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and
Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy
sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank
crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.
Muatez
Amudi and Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who
was standing in the village square in Burkin and fired every which way in the
wake of stone-throwing. Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a
school classroom when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All
of them were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our name.
At
least in some of these cases it was clear to
the soldiers that they were shooting at children, but that didn't stop them.
Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their
homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of
children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their
killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's
no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.
Death
is, of course, the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it
is not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of
Education, 3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them
crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters
is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes
are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers
storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on
their classrooms. And they don't have a psychological service. Have you ever
heard of a Palestinian child who is a "victim of anxiety"?
The
public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes
all Israelis accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety
for a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety
harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed
that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of
Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become part of
the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of them is no longer a big deal.