It is so easy to perpetuate the racist myths that some Israelis and Palestinians tell themselves to justify what they are doing to each other. Today, in a chance remark quoted in a longer article about the proposed withdrawal from Gaza, you can see a small new instalment in the long-running "The Palestinians are not people like us, they don't even love their children" lie.
In an interview with Amos Harel, the outgoing commander of the IDF in the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Gadi Shamni, explains how successful IDF operations have been in Gaza on his watch. Even if innocent Palestinians might have been killed in less-than-pinpoint operations in the most crowded strip of land on earth, it is the fault of Palestinian militants who deliberately draw fire upon children to save themselves:
"It is impossible to say that we have not harmed innocent people," admits Shamni, "but when you see a photograph of an armed terrorist who is lifting up a Palestinian child and is crossing the road with him as a `human shield,' during the most recent action in the Sejaiyya neighborhood, you understand with whom we are dealing."
That's a terrible image isn't it? An armed man hiding picking up a child to use as a human shield. The only thing that could make it worse would be if this piece of callous propaganda - presented as fact in a reputable publication like Ha'aretz - were actually true.
IDF incursions into Gaza, and the Indiscriminate Killing left in their wake, are becoming such regular occurences that, unless you have the misfortune to live in Gaza, they tend to merge into an indistinct blur. In my case, ironically, the one exception to this rule is the recent "action" in the Sejaiyya neighborhood of Gaza City, which Gen. Shamni describes.
The reason that Sejaiyya stuck in my mind was the reporting by journalists of the Associated Press and by Greg Myre of the NY Times (subscription-only article), who reported on the IDF incursion and described how, instead of hiding behind the dozens of boys [who] stood in the streets watching the battle as gunfire whizzed by, armed Palestinians actually ordered civilians out of the area. The most memorable incident for me was the narrow escape of one Palestinian schoolboy, caught in the battle zone:
At one point, a small boy bent down in the middle of a street filled with gunfire. A Palestinian militant raced to the boy, swooping him up by his backpack and carrying him to relative safety, in Myre's words.
Picture that. A Palestinian gunman running through gunfire holding a schoolboy out in front of him. What's that gunman doing: saving a child's life, or saving himself by hiding behind him? If you only saw a photo of it, and didn't read the eyewitness reports, what a great "Palestinians hiding behind children" spin you could put on it. Propaganda-101.
I can only speculate what Shamni's motives are. Maybe he wasn't at Sejaiyya to witness events for himself; maybe he thinks he is telling the truth about what he has seen only in a photo. Or maybe he was there, and he simply doesn't care if he tells dehumanizing lies about the opposition. Because if the Palestinians aren't people quite like us, how much easier it is to justify what we do to them.
Update: There is a copy of the subscription-only NY Times article by Greg Myre, available online here.
Recent Comments