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CounterPunch
November
18, 2002
The Revenge
of a Child
by URI AVNERY
Since last Sunday, a question has been running
around in my head and troubling my sleep: What induced the young
Palestinian, who broke into Kibbutz Metzer, to aim his weapon
at a mother and her two little children and kill them?
In war one does not kill children. That
is a fundamental human instinct, common to all peoples and all
cultures. Even a Palestinian who wants to take revenge for the
hundreds of children killed by the Israeli army should not take
revenge on children. No moral commandment says "a child
for a child".
The persons who do these things are not
known as crazy killers, blood-thirsty from birth. In almost all
interviews with relatives and neighbors they are described as
quite ordinary, non-violent individuals. Many of them are not
religious fanatics. Indeed, Sirkhan Sirkhan, the man who committed
the deed in Metzer, belonged to Fatah, a secular movement.
These persons belong to all social classes;
some come from poor families  who have reached the threshold of hunger,
but others come from middle class families, university students,
educated people. Their genes are not different from ours.
So what makes them do these things? What
makes other Palestinians justify them?
In order to cope, one has to understand,
and that does not mean to justify. Nothing in the world can justify
a Palestinian who shoots at a child in his mother's embrace,
just as nothing can justify an Israeli who drops a bomb on a
house in which a child is sleeping in his bed. As the Hebrew
poet Bialik wrote a hundred years ago, after the Kishinev pogrom:
"Even Satan has not yet invented the revenge for the blood
of a little child."
But without understanding, it is impossible
to cope. The chiefs of the IDF have a simple solution: hit, hit,
hit. Kill the attackers. Kill their commanders. Kill the leaders
of their organizations. Demolish the homes of their families
and exile their relatives. But, wonder of wonders, these methods
achieve the opposite. After the huge IDF bulldozer flattens the
"terrorist infrastructure", destroying-killing-uprooting
everything on its way, within days a new "infrastructure"
comes into being. According to the announcements of the IDF itself,
since operation "Protective Shield" there have been
some fifty warnings of imminent attacks every day.
The reason for this can be summed up
in one word: rage.
Terrible rage, that fills the soul of
a human being, leaving no space for anything else. Rage that
dominates the person's whole life, making life itself unimportant.
Rage that wipes out all limitations, eclipses all values, breaks
the chains of family and responsibility. Rage that a person wakes
up with in the morning, goes to sleep with in the evening, dreams
about at night. Rage that tells a person: get up, take a weapon
or an explosive belt, go to their homes and kill, kill, kill,
no matter what the consequences.
An ordinary Israeli, who has never been
in the Palestinian territories, cannot even imagine the reasons
for this rage. Our media totally ignore the events there, or
describe them in small, sweetened doses. The average Israeli
knows somehow that the Palestinians suffer (it's their own fault,
of course), but he has no idea what's really happening there.
It doesn't concern him, anyhow.
Homes are demolished. A merchant, lawyer,
ordinary craftsman, respected in his community, turns overnight
into a "homeless", he and his children and grandchildren.
Each one of them a potential suicide bomber.
Fruit-trees are being uprooted in their
thousands. For the officer, it's just a tree, an obstacle. For
the owners, it's the blood of his heart, the heritage of his
forefathers, years of toil, the livelihood of his family. Each
one of them a potential suicide bomber.
On a hill between the villages a gang
of thugs has put up an "outpost". The army arrives
to defend them. When the villagers come to till their fields,
they are shot at. They are forbidden to work in all fields and
groves within a one or two kilometers range, so that the security
of the outpost will not be endangered. The peasants see from
afar, with longing eyes, how their fruit is rotting on the trees,
how their fields are being covered by thorns and thistles waist
high, while their children have nothing to eat. Each one of them
a potential suicide bomber.
People are killed. Their torn bodies
lie in the streets, for everyone to see. Some of them are "martyrs"
who chose their lot. But many others - men, women, children -
are killed "by mistake", "accidentally",
"trying to escape", "were close to the source
of fire" - and all the hundred and one pretexts of professional
spokesmen. The IDF does not apologize, officers and soldiers
are never convicted, because "that's how things are in war".
But each of the people killed has parents, brothers, sons, cousins.
Each one of them a potential suicide bomber.
Beyond these are the families living
on the fringes of hunger, suffering from severe malnutrition.
Fathers who cannot bring food to their children feel despair.
Each one of them a potential suicide bomber.
Hundred of thousands are kept under curfew
for weeks and months on end, eight persons cooped up in two or
three rooms, a living hell difficult to imagine, while outside
the settlers have a ball, protected by the soldiers. A vicious
circle: yesterday's bombers caused the curfew, the curfew creates
the bombers of tomorrow.
And beyond all these, the total humiliation
which every Palestinian, without distinction of age, gender or
social standing, experiences every moment of his life. Not an
abstract humiliation, but an altogether concrete one. To be dependent
for life and death on the whim of an 18-year old boy in the street
and at one of the innumerable checkpoints that a Palestinian
has to pass wherever he goes, while gangs of settlers pass freely
and "visit" their villages, damage property, pick the
olives in their groves, set fire to the trees.
An Israeli who has not seen it cannot
imagine such a life, a situation of "every bastard a king"
and "the slave who has becomes master", a situation
of curses and pushes at best, threats with weapons in many cases,
actual shooting in some. Not to mention the sick on the way to
dialysis, the pregnant women on the way to hospital, students
who don't get to their classes, children who can't reach their
schools. The youngsters who see their venerable grandfather publicly
humiliated by some boy in uniform with a runny nose. Each one
of them a potential suicide bomber.
A normal Israeli cannot imagine all this.
After all, the soldiers are nice boys, the sons of all of us,
only yesterday they were schoolboys. But when one takes these
nice boys and puts them in uniforms, pushes them through the
military machine and puts them into a situation of occupation,
something happens to them. Many try to keep their human face
in impossible circumstances, many others become order-fulfilling
robots. And always, in every company, there are some disturbed
people who flourish in this situation and do repulsive things,
knowing that their officers will turn a blind eye or wink approvingly.
All this does not justify the killing
of children in the arms of their mother. But it helps to grasp
why this is happening, and why this will go on happening as long
as the occupation lasts.
Uri Avnery
has closely followed the career of Sharon for four decades. Over
the years, he has written three extensive biographical essays
about him, two (1973, 1981) with his cooperation. Avnery is featured
in the new book, The
Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.
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