An innocent man was beaten to death, and a new Hebrew word was born

 

 

 

An innocent man was beaten to death, and a new Hebrew word was born

Sol Salbe·Sabato 7 luglio 2018

At long last the word "lynch" has a Hebrew translation: From now on say “collective rage” what happens when you come out only slightly rebuked having beaten up an innocent person to death, only because they are of the wrong colour

By Avigdor Feldman

It was a great day for Hebrew speakers this week. A new word was born unto us, rosy cheeked and cute as a baby, purring and sneezing. The Hebrew speakers had no Black people to hang on the trees, no witches to burn, nor natives’ limbs to sever, and the Hebrew speakers were those who traditionally were burnt, hanged and hiding under the quilt whose feathers were dispersed throughout the City of Slaughter.

Hebrew speakers were traditionally the ones who listened to the footsteps of the rioters approaching their homes, roaring loudly, in German, Romanian, Russian, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Arabic, coming to slaughter, kill and rape.

But not in Polish, of course, that under the authority bestowed upon our leader, the friend of the antisemites, that language was omitted from those tongues of the murderers, past and future, and so my father and his small family clinging to him, heard not the Poles asking the neighbours in Polish, "Where do the Jews live here?" and heard not the neighbours' silence, in Polish, when the one-year-old baby was torn from his mother, nor was it said in Polish, “You deserve it, stinking Jews because you crucified the Messiah.” Instead, he heard, according to the joint statement of the head of my government and the head of the Polish government, only inexplicable and indecipherable clarifications in a language as ancient as the instinct to murder.

But we began by proclaiming with joy of the birth of a new word in Hebrew and degenerated into a non-existent Polish.

The new word came out of the mouth of heroism, not really heroism, but something quite close: Beersheba District Court Judge Aharon Mishnayot, who was raised on justice's knees at the Ofer Military Court, eventually serving as a judge of the Military Court of Appeals, only a skip, step and a jump away from the Beersheba District Court, down south.

With a new word, Justice Mishnayot this week defined the act of someone who admitted to hurling a bench at the bleeding body of Habatum Zarhoum, who was nicknamed in the pristine legalese of the court: "The aforementioned deceased." I only ask, Justice Mishnayot - when and where did Habatum Zarhoum decease?

Did he decease when he crawled on his knees in an attempt to escape the mob of beaters and shooters that surrounded him and beat him mercilessly? Did he decease when he escaped from a murderous regime in Eritrea and arrived on a torturous route to the Land of Israel, which he knew about from the Bible, and came to Beersheba, which he perhaps read about it in the Book of Genesis, where Abraham planted a Tamarisk tree in the name of Lord God Eternal?

Only in his death Zarhoum was nicknamed "the aforementioned deceased" and was granted the desistance he sought. And again, I bypassed the new baby word, which Judge Mishnayot coined, and again that word felt abandoned and howled in her cradle, and it was time to return to her and announce the birth of the word "collective rage." "Unfortunately," the judge said, the new word "can lead to excessive aggression against the deceased who was beyond salvation, wounded and bleeding from the injuries that hit him, and helpless."

"Collective rage," we roll the word on our tongues. It tasted like baby powder mixed with southern urine, of an armed group that had committed an act of "collective rage." From now on, say not "lynch" but "collective rage". For what do we have in common with said plantation owner and Justice William Lynch of Virginia, who during the American War of Independence, presided over a makeshift court set up to impose death sentences on pro-English loyalists? Who needs him and his name, now stuck in collective memory, when we have Judge Mishnayot? Perhaps from now on we may refer to slaughter by "collective rage" as "an act of mishnayot," only time will tell.

Language is an unpredictable cultural product. The defendant's “act of mishnayot” occurred, according to the definition of the probation service adopted by the court, when the defendant "felt a genuine threat to their life and responded aggressively in order to defend himself. The panic and fear felt by the bystanders created a chaotic feeling that further increased the anxiety and the urge to act against he who was mistakenly thought to be the murderer of a soldier."

Even Justice William Lynch of Virginia could not have worded it any better if he had bothered to formulate the essence of an incident in which a group of people shoot, beat, and throw objects at s person lying on the floor, who appears to be dying, his blood already spilled, and he hardly moves. There is no doubt that such a creature evokes fear and panic and anxiety and increases the urge to act as the defendant did by hurling a large bench at his bleeding body.

The “act of mishnayot” was captured by the security cameras at the central bus station in Beersheba, where the creators of the amazing film "Death from Beersheba" gathered a complete picture of such an act of mishnayot" such that anyone who wants to know what an "act of mishnayot" is will no longer need to resort to the foreign term 'lynch' but need only view the film and see how people surround a human being in the last moments of his life and abuse their helpless body.

I saw no real threat to the life of the scoundrels surrounding the twitching person, I did not see self-defence, I did not see panic and fear, I saw a lynch. I saw an "act of mishnayot". I saw a black man in the south hanging on a tree and swaying in the wind, I heard Billie Holiday's song:

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree

The song was written by the Jew, Louis Allen, who lived in the Bronx in New York, and never imagined that in the future "Act of Mishnayot" would replace "Lynch."

Because of the new legal defence of "collective outrage" or Mishnayot act, the State Prosecution Office agreed to a plea bargain of several months community service, and the judge, who in fact created the defence of the "act of mishnayot," welcomed the agreement and imposed a 100 days of community service on the defendant.

One summer day, the State of Israel became a lynching state, and you ask yourself how much the defence of Act of Mishnayot was enabled by the fact that the "aforementioned deceased " was a black Eritrean refugee who was on his way to renew his residence permit in Israel.

Palestinians, foreign workers, asylum seekers, chauffeur drivers on a hot summer day, babies in kindergartens - they do not sit well with us in Israel. They synthesise a "collective rage," which seeks an outlet. These days, individual rage against courts that impose 100 days of community service for a clear act of lynching has little value and so does individual anger against a court that imposes a 180 shekel fine on someone who called for collective rage against gays and lesbians, erupting murderously like Ishay Schlissel, who stabbed a young woman on a gay march. Imagine that the collective rage would not have been allowed to erupt against LGBTs, Palestinians, blacks, asylum seekers, honking women, emergency room nurses, kindergarten children. It might have also, heaven forbid, sought other channels, perhaps even directed toward those who had wiped out murder from the Polish language.

Translated by Yoni Molad for Middle East News Service edited by Sol Salbe, Melbourne, Australia

Hebrew Original: https://www.ha-makom.co.il/post/avigdor-zarhum-lynch