Hagai El-Ad Who in Israel cares about another dead teen in Gaza? | Opinion
Amir’s mother fainted in the hospital. She fainted on her son’s dead
body, surrounded by family members. When she woke up at home, her cries
were heartrending, but they didn’t bring her 14-year-old son back to
life.
These cries don’t echo. Who in Israel cares about another dead Palestinian teenager,
and in Gaza yet? Another “uninvolved civilian” joining the statistics,
faceless and nameless, without a photo on the front page, without a life
story, without a mother who sees the bloody head of her dead son and
faints.
“A week after my
son Amir was born, he was examined and the doctors discovered a hole in
his heart. The doctors told us he would need an operation when he was
18. They didn’t prescribe any medication for Amir, and they told us that
the hole was between the two chambers of the heart, and that it would
shrink as Amir grew.”
In
Israel, the interest in dead Palestinian teenagers is limited to the
quality of paper on which our investigative and legal system types its
polished whitewashing documents. It’s important that the paper be the
kind that can absorb and hide bloodstains, and it’s important that
what’s printed include a sufficient dose of long sentences, the kind
that have no meaning but whose purpose is unequivocal: to wrap a life
that was cut off in legal absorbent cotton. That will ensure that the
killing will gleam with perfection, and that the investigation will bury
the body of the blood-spattered Arab.
After that summer in
Gaza in which we killed over 500 teenagers and children, the state
comptroller examined the quality of the paper. Earlier this year the
comptroller published a 120-page report examining “the Israel Defense
Forces’ activities in terms of international law, mainly regarding the
examination and monitoring mechanisms of the civilian and military
leadership.”
It’s
a very clean, sterile report, which of course cites from the previous
pile of reports on the subject, and anyone who cites from it in future
reports will probably allude to it properly in the footnotes – footnotes
not mentioning the selfie that Amir and his friend Luray were taking on
the rooftop of that Gaza building in July, shortly before they turned
into collateral damage in a very successful surgical strike. After that
the IDF spokesman bragged that this was one of many expressions of the
IDF’s intelligence and operational capabilities, “which will become
deeper and stronger as necessary.”
In
the videos published by the army, you don’t see Amir and Luray before
the missile strike and don’t hear their cries getting deeper and
stronger, if they managed to cry out at all. You only see the people who
risked their lives and arrived on the rooftop a few minutes later. They
didn’t know precisely in how many minutes the bomb would be dropped
that would redeem the building from its suffering, and still they
climbed up and tried to take care of the dying boys. But then they were
forced to flee for their lives when the second missile hit the roof.
At that moment,
filmed from the air in the army video, they look like a fan of black
spots after suddenly scattering, a fan that opens to the sky, and at its
heart is a spot where the bodies of Amir and Luray are lying.
Amir’s mother says
the most important thing to him was for nobody to know that he had a
hole in his heart, especially not his friends and relatives.
“He told me that he would live a normal life despite his illness, and he ignored the fatigue and the symptoms.”
In the state
comptroller’s report, the aspect that preoccupies Israel’s
legal-military-political elite regarding the bodies of Palestinian
teenagers appears right at the beginning. This comes even before your
fingers become calloused from turning so many pages or are cut, God
forbid, by the sharp edges of, say, page 100, where there’s something
about “examinations to locate unusual incidents that require
investigation.”
The
reader recalls a finding – what was it? – on page 5. Oh, yes, “464
unusual incidents; that is, incidents in which uninvolved citizens were
allegedly harmed and damage was caused to civilian property.” So that
was 464 unusual incidents? Just a minute, exactly how many incidents
have to occur for them to stop being “unusual”? When does the unusual
become routine?
Well, that’s a naive
question revealing that the asker doesn’t understand the basic
principles of the system, because the unusual never becomes routine. In
legal terms, it must continue to be considered unusual, be investigated
as unusual, and be buried in a legal shroud as unusual. For precisely
that purpose the state comptroller immediately explained to us on page
3: “Proper functioning of the investigative and legal systems in the
State of Israel will help prevent intervention by external instances in
the sovereign affairs of the State of Israel.”
Letting the IDF fight, of course
And what is that
“proper functioning of the investigative systems?” An investigation of
the unusual incidents. Because if God forbid we don’t have exceptions,
what will we investigate and what reports will we publish and throw in
the face of all kinds of hostile international agencies that have the
chutzpah to try to interfere in our affairs? After all, without
“exceptions” what we have is a blatant situation of routine killing and
the bodies of dead teenagers, bloodstains that cannot be absorbed, and
scandal. And since when will dead teens from Gaza cause a scandal for
us?
“In the family we
did everything possible to refrain from things that could make Amir
angry. He had a special status with his grandfather, father and
brothers. He loved soccer and always bought balls to play with from his
pocket money. He was a fan of Real Madrid and would go to cafes to watch
the championship games.”
And those exceptional
Palestinians, whom we’re killing in Gaza, are definitely “our sovereign
affair.” Actually, there’s a great deal of logic to that, because to
successfully administer Gaza, in a sense the largest prison in the
world, we use all kinds of methods to disperse demonstrations and
suppress uprisings. Methods that run the spectrum between shooting
bullets – precisely of course – and dropping bombs – surgical of course.
Do you know of any other country where someone interferes in the
administration of its prisons?
So to prevent
international agencies from interfering, we have to clean the blood
thoroughly while maintaining meticulous international standards. And why
is it important that they not interfere? Because “the international
repercussions that could stem from harming uninvolved civilians” might
affect “the IDF’s ability to achieve its goals in combat.”
Well, it’s a fact
that there are large numbers of “uninvolved civilians” in Gaza. We’ve
killed them and will continue to do so. But if they don’t die in an
“exceptional” manner, we won’t be able to continue with “combat” and to
kill, in an exceptional manner, additional “uninvolved civilians.” And
then the administration of the prison would be removed from our
sovereign control. You there, Amir and Luay, sitting at the edge of the
roof and taking a selfie on a hot summer evening, did you understand
that?
The state comptroller
apparently didn’t check whether the uninvolved citizens understand
their function of dying as exceptions. But the military advocate general
definitely continues to “examine and investigate” the hundreds of
“complaints regarding exceptional incidents during Operation Protective
Edge” in Gaza in 2014. Here is our diligent miliary advocate general,
examining and classifying one complaint at a time: Whose case will be
whitewashed and buried based on the work of the “General Staff inquiry
mechanism,” and whose will be entitled to a Military Police
investigation and whitewashed during the prosecution.
Four years have
passed since that summer in Gaza, and the job of whitewashing continues
gradually, slowly sailing to safe harbor. It’s a harbor where, near the
“independent and effective” platform, all the bodies are tossed into the
sea and the slight chance of being held to account drowns in the
depths.
The feet of this
chance, as it were, get attached to the concrete weights of the military
advocate general’s updates on the dozens of exceptional incidents in
which – copy-paste, copy-paste – “the actual harm to citizens who were
not involved in combat” was “a harsh and regrettable outcome” but “has
no implications, in retrospect, for the legality of the assault.”
“When he was 13,
Amir was referred for medical tests at Beilinson Hospital in Israel. He
went with my father. The tests showed that the hole in his heart had
shrunk from 8 millimeters to 6 millimeters. The doctors told us that
they preferred to postpone the operation until he was 19. Amir was
supposed to undergo additional tests in Beilinson at the end of August.”
It turns out that
Gaza is a strange place where strange, surprising and totally unexpected
things happen. In Gaza, people who are at first identified as fighters
in Hamas’ naval force turn out to be – “in retrospect” of course –
children (four dead). In Gaza there are “coincidences,” and civilians
insist for some reason on being on the roof just when a shell hits it
(seven dead, members of a single family). Get down off the roof already,
exceptions!
In Gaza “as opposed
to what was planned” the “upper stories of the building” rebel and
collapse on their own half an hour after we attack the place (14
civilians killed). In Gaza, when you fire at Hamas men on a motorcycle,
somehow the strike takes place, as if deliberately to make us angry,
“near a school.” In Gaza, when a bomb is dropped on a target, it turns
out “in retrospect” – surprise! – that “the building was also used as a
café” (nine dead).
Four-step process
And in Gaza – and
this sure is an exception – people insist, time after time, on being
inside buildings and dying by the dozens despite “the professional
assessment of the operational bodies regarding the number of civilians
liable to be harmed by the attack.”
That’s how it is with amateurs in Gaza who don’t listen to the professional’s assessments.
“Amir lived all his life in Gaza and never traveled anywhere. He liked shawarma and always preferred white clothes.”
To the military
advocate general, this is a fail-safe system that can be endlessly
recycled and whitewashes any “exceptional incident.” All you need is for
the decision on the attack to be made by “the authorized bodies,” that
it be “against a patently military target,” that “the extent of
anticipated collateral damage won’t be disproportionate relative to the
military advantage,” and for dessert, “cautionary measures, whose
purpose is to limit the harm to civilians,” will be adopted.
And that’s it: one,
two three, four on high-quality absorbent paper, and so on. Dozens of
civilians are killed that way, children, entire families. Time after
time, without any problem. You simply have to take the retrospect option
when it turns out that there was a school, a café, another story, a
nearby building or a family or two on the roof or inside the building.
“A regrettable
outcome” and another “regrettable outcome” – so what? When we decided to
drop the bomb on the building we didn’t know that all those civilians
would die, it wasn’t on purpose. Can we get on already with the next
surgical strike? It’s also based on “precise intelligence” showing that
the expected collateral damage will be proportionate to the military
advantage.
And if in retrospect
it turns out once again that it wasn’t intelligence and it wasn’t
precise and it wasn’t surgical, that we didn’t know and didn’t assess
and didn’t count, and another 14 “uninvolved civilians” joined the
statistics, even then, the thousandth time that this has happened, we’ll
simply click our tongues and say something about “a harsh and
regrettable outcome.” Then it’s on to incident 1,001.
Late last month, an article in Haaretz expressed concern for the snipers
at the Gaza border fence “who shot at dozens of people at close range,
for hours at a time, saw them falling and heard their cries.” But the
snipers, according to the story, “have not received any specific
handling by their units,” referring to psychological counseling.
Does anyone in the
military prosecutor’s office recommend treatment for the lawyers exposed
to trauma? After all, these are young lawyers tasked with, in their own
sense, burying hundreds of dead. Despite the broad use of copy-paste
from one file to the next, whitewashing the killing must last “for hours
at a time.” Do they receive any counseling in their unit, at the
prosecutor’s office, for closing files?
“My life after
the death of my son Amir has become hell. I cry day and night for my
innocent son. I still hear his voice and his charming laughter, and see
the smile that’s always on his face. I waited a long time so that he
would grow up before my eyes. But the fighter planes of the Israeli army
bombed him. That’s how Amir died. That’s how his dreams died.
“Although Amir
lived with a hole in his heart he loved to play soccer. He wanted to
grow up and be a driving instructor. His dream was cut off and ended. He
liked school and was one of the outstanding students. His younger
sister, Malak, who’s 5, always asks about him. Every day she asks me
where he is, and I answer that he’s now in heaven.
“I pray for
Amir’s soul. The parting from him is unbearable. I pray to God to help
me keep going and contain this pain from the parting from my son, my
beloved Amir.”
Amir al-Nimra and
Luay Kahil, both 14, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on
July 14. The testimony of Amir’s mother, Maysoon al-Nimra, was given to
two researchers of the B’Tselem rights group, Olfat al-Kurd and Khaled
al-Azayzeh.
Hagai El-Ad is the executive director of B’Tselem.
Hagai El-Ad
ho in Israel cares about another dead teen in Gaza? | Opinion
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