Odeh Bisharat : Opinion 'Flourishing' Israel Is Drenched in Palestinian Blood
“Never before in history has the Jewish state flourished the way it does today,” Israel Harel wrote in his Haaretz column on Friday, the day after a closure was imposed on some three million Palestinians in the West Bank, which was on top of the two million Palestinians under siege in Gaza.
On Friday, when the Jewish state was “flourishing” as never before,
Israeli army snipers shot 16 Palestinians to death (all but two of them,
at most, unarmed) and wounded more than 700 others. The country,
“flourishing” as never before, is also drenched in a lot of Palestinian
blood.
Millions are celebrating Passover on
the Israeli side while masses of others are burying their dead on the
other side. And those Israelis who feel wonderment over how their
country is flourishing while their neighbors bleed from sniper fire
coming from the Israeli side should seek to find out where they lost
their humanity. It may be the height of economic prosperity, but it is
happening alongside the depths of moral deterioration.
This
year’s spring bloom has faded in the wake of the Palestinian blood that
has flowed on Gaza’s sand dunes. The night of the Passover seder, which
for years has been accompanied by a closure of the territories, was
colored black. Israelis were reading in the Passover Haggadah how
cruelly they were treated by the goyim thousands of years ago, while on
the other side, the goyim were sitting and counting their dead – online –
killed at the hands of the victims of the past.
And
according to Roni Daniel, military correspondent of the Israel
Television News Company, the scenario was even more absurd: The Israeli
soldiers who shot at Palestinians during the day, sat down to a seder
meal that evening and read the Haggadah. It would be interesting to know
what God they pray to.
It’s very strange how it has escaped the
attention of the Israeli media – which manage to reach as far as the
bedroom of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
son Yair – that the residents of the Gaza Strip are subject to a
horrible blockade, that two million human beings are living in the
largest prison in history, and that it is actually because of the
inhumane conditions in which they live that all of the fanatics rise to
leadership positions there.
Meanwhile, strange things are happening on the
ground. Like the saying in Israel that only the right wing can make
peace, it can also be said that the popular, nonviolent struggle that
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas seeks apparently can only be translated by Hamas into
the language of action. Abbas thinks the popular, nonviolent struggle
is carried out in negotiating rooms, but he’s forgetting that it also
requires masses taking to the streets. Today Hamas is implementing the
second part. Many have said, correctly, that this kind of struggle is
the occupation forces’ worst nightmare.
And let’s conclude with the left-wing Israeli political camp. Meretz leader
Tamar Zandberg should be congratulated for her strong criticism of the
Israeli army’s light trigger finger, as she put it, as well as her
demand for an official inquiry into the handling of the events on the
Gazan border. Israel’s right wing has viciously attacked her,
as “enemies of the people” are attacked in totalitarian countries.So
there are situations in which one should not apologize. Yes, when you
adhere to a proper moral position, don’t apologize. If Meretz hadn’t
existed, it would have had to have been invented.
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