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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Palestinian mothers in the dock
By Mouin Rabbani *Since the beginning of the current uprising in the occupied Palestinian territories, between a quarter and a third of the several thousand Palestinian casualties have been children. While such statistics are depressingly unremarkable compared to similar conflicts in which colonial regimes attempt to subjugate rebellious populations through massive use of military force, the reaction of the international community -- and specifically of that group of industrialised states professing to constitute the civilised world -- has been unprecedentedly callous.
Characteristically taking their cue from Israeli hasbara (disinformation), numerous opinion makers in the West have suggested that the Palestinian Authority is using children as a human shield in its struggle with the Barak government, and even that Palestinian mothers are deliberately sacrificing their children for political profit and/or monetary gain. That Israeli soldiers (including snipers) are deliberately aiming their rifles at children and pumping bullets into their hearts and brains, in each and every instance without any military rationale or legal justification, and thus committing war crimes, is virtually ignored. Elevating the debate to new heights of ignorance, evasion, and verbatim parroting of Israeli apologia, the queen of Sweden recently expressed sympathy for the plight of Palestinian children (without noting how so many have been killed and wounded), while finding it unfathomable that their parents (rather than their actual killers) are exposing them to so much harm.
The campaign against bereaved Palestinian mothers has become so vicious that the Women's Affairs Technical Committee felt compelled to organise a press conference on 4 November for three mothers of children killed during the uprising in order to demonstrate to the international media that Palestinian mothers are no different than those anywhere else. "My greatest wish," said a devastated Mona Hamad, "is that I rather than my son had been buried." A member of the audience later remarked that it was outrageous that the mothers who lost their children rather than the soldiers who killed them were forced to account for themselves.
The macabre propaganda effort recalls Martin Peretz's desperate attempt at the height of the 1982 siege of Beirut to sweep thousands of Arab corpses under the carpet with the unforgettable observation that "what you have seen and heard on television is simply not true." Indeed, despite having each of its succession of fabrications concerning the deliberate (and in this case televised) murder of Mohamed Al-Dorra refuted by the overwhelming visual, physical, and testimonial evidence, the Israeli military in early November again raised the claim that he was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen. For his part, liberal commentator Tom Segev (Ha'aretz, 6 October) questioned why Mohamed's father placed his son behind him during the fatal encounter when, in Segev's considered view, the boy would have been better protected if Jamal Al-Dorra (who as it stands received the majority of bullet wounds) had situated his son in front. The insinuation that this is another Palestinian parent more concerned with his own safety than that of his child is anything but subtle. Segev's post-mortem directive to defenceless civilians that they should have exchanged positions in the midst of 45 minutes of continuous machine-gun fire directed at them (save for those moments when the IDF death squad deliberately shot and killed a fully recognisable ambulance driver seeking to rescue Mohamed), however, is idiotic to the point of being suicidal.
Never one to be outdone in promoting the views of Israel's military establishment, fellow Ha'aretz correspondent Ze'ev Schiff ("Getting the numbers straight," 3 November), dismisses the human rights community's condemnation of Israel's killings of Palestinian children out of hand, citing their exaggerated statistics -- which of course they are when measured against Schiff's innovative definition of a child as "anyone under the age of 13."
In character as well as intent, Israel's claims are best compared to those of General Westmoreland during the US war against Vietnam. Seeking to deflect attention away from American saturation napalming and the CIA's Phoenix programme of wholesale assassination in accounting for the staggering number of Vietnamese corpses, he famously opined that Asians "don't value human life like we do." By the same reasoning, it is the Palestinians rather than the Israeli military who are responsible for the children's deaths; heartless Palestinian parents want their children to die, and are "sending them to demonstrations" in order for them to be killed and embarrass a Jewish state whose soldiers are rendered powerless in the face of such irrational and inhumane zealotry. The resort to an imagined victimisation at the hands of a fanatic, savage breed of untermensch to justify the slaughter of innocents has a long pedigree, and here too Zionism has been a diligent student of the ideology responsible for extinguishing millions of Jewish lives. Rejection of such drivel -- whether in 19th century Africa or 21st century Palestine -- is a decidedly shorter volume.
If the televised murder of Mohamed Al-Dorra puts the definitive lie to Israeli claims of "extreme self-restraint" despite "life-threatening attack," it is nevertheless true that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinian youths, unlike Mohamed Al-Dorra on his last day on earth, do actively participate in demonstrations. Many and probably most of those killed and wounded sustained their injuries while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers (or more precisely, towards Israeli fortified positions). The extraordinary, almost suicidal courage displayed by so many of them, often when there are no television crews around to record their actions and injuries, does not mesh well with the suggested image of terrified youngsters prodded into martyrdom by pitiless mothers. Indeed, the occupied territories are full of parents who desperately seek yet fail to prevent contact between their children and trigger-happy soldiers and settlers (of course, the notoriously pro-Palestinian international media far prefers stories of elders punishing children who have been merely wounded -- rather than killed --, in accordance with "traditional Islamic rituals" too horrific to recount).
In a population of which some two thirds is under the age of 18, the political awareness of the average Palestinian teenager tends to be at least as developed as that of the average adult in the industrialised world. Reality is too stark for it to be otherwise; survival demands it. Peer pressure no doubt plays a part in their actions, as do the systematic provocations of Israeli soldiers (and settlers) who while regularly sought out often cannot be avoided, for example on the way to and from school. And if confronting the Israeli military carries an element of sport and excitement for teenagers with few other outlets for their considerable energy, at the end of the day the "children of the stones" have earned their label and wear their bandages with pride despite rather than because of their parents, in the full knowledge that they are confronting an army of occupation on their land, and based on their determination to contribute to its expulsion. Similar factors were at work a decade ago in South Africa, where recognition of the role and sacrifices of South African youth formed the basis for Nelson Mandela's unsuccessful proposal to lower the voting age by several years.
The comparison with South Africa is interesting in other respects as well. Because Apartheid was generally recognised as a vile system whose destruction was a worthy project, the legitimacy of mass uprisings against minority rule was rarely questioned, and the leading role played in the struggle by schoolchildren, such as in Soweto, was considered an inevitable reaction to unbearable oppression by conscious actors, and applauded for its heroism. As formalised in Oslo and Camp David, Israeli apartheid by contrast enjoys significant support in Europe and America, and more importantly is considered beneficial and uplifting for the Palestinians. When faced with popular resistance in occupied territories, therefore, the standard colonialist fare about brainless natives, pathetically incapable of recognising their real interests, terrorised and manipulated into a violent frenzy by an evil chief, and docilely sacrificing their own children to his insatiable lust for blood and personal power, strikes a familiar chord in societies with a rich tradition of such thinking.
As televised scenes of Palestinian security personnel unsuccessfully preventing youths from approaching Israeli positions demonstrate, there is indeed -- to use that tired American phrase -- "much more the PA can do" to prohibit children from getting embroiled in confrontations with the military. In the immediate term, it can permanently mobilise thousands of its men to guard each Israeli position located within a Palestinian city against Palestinian protests, and conduct mass arrests supplemented with beatings and the occasional shooting to ensure the success of its policy. In the longer term, it would have to jettison the nationalist ethos inscribed in the school curriculum and articulated in the media, and begin educating for Arab-Jewish coexistence -- within Hebron.
Faced with these alternatives and an uprising produced by Israel and directed by forces increasingly independent of his control, Yasser Arafat has this time decided not to pull Barak and Clinton's coals out of the fire. On the whole his forces are at best half-heartedly preventing Palestinian youths from venting their rage, and to the universal satisfaction of his constituency Arafat has endorsed the uprising and tacitly encouraged further resistance. The predictable consequences are not an act of God or nature, but the result of deliberate policy choices by the Israeli leadership designed to maintain the occupation, and for which it bears legal and political responsibility. To condemn Arafat for cynically exploiting the bloody consequences of Israeli conduct is to make the rather banal statement that he is a politician.
In the meantime Palestinian children keep dying so that Barak's election promise of "Ofra and Bet El forever!" will not be broken. On the same day that three Palestinian mothers were put in the dock to answer for crimes committed against their children by others, more joined the convoy of the bereaved in what was generally described as a "quiet day." Ghazala Jaradat, 14, was shot in the head while walking home from school and is clinically dead. Hind Quwaydar, having lived all of 24 days, died from asphyxiation after her home in the Israeli-ruled part of Hebron was inundated with CS gas. They joined two teenagers from Hizma who had the day before been throwing stones at the forces of occupation, to be gunned down in cold blood some time later as they recounted the incident on a distant hilltop.
* The writer is a Palestinian scholar and activist.© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
