The Answer: A society that deserves to be slaughtered many times over.
Israel
killed 546 Palestinian children over the course of only 50 days in Gaza
in 2014. Of those, 180 were babies and toddlers under the age of five.
ed
note–for the record, I like Gideon Levy. He always seems reasonable on
the various positions he takes and displays a seemingly innate rejection
of the same Judaic supremacist tendencies that unfortunately prevail
within the Judaic community as an inescapable result of the supremacism
that is written into Judaism’s operating system.
However,
when he asks questions such as the one functioning as the title of this
piece, I am left scratching my head as to how he just doesn’t ‘get it’.
For thousands of years, Jews the world over have celebrated Passover,
which, among many things, celebrates the deaths of the first born of
Egypt. For thousands of years, Jews the world over have celebrated
Purim, which, among many things, celebrates the deaths of 75,000
Persians murdered by a mob of fanatical, vindictive Jews, and whose
victims would had to have included at least some children. For thousands
of years, Judaism in its writings and pronouncements has been very
clear on how Gentiles are to be dealt with, and particularly those who
defile the ‘purity’ of the Holy Land with their presence, to wit-
‘When
the LORD your God brings you into the land you are to possess and casts
out the many peoples living there, you shall then slaughter them all and
utterly destroy them…You shall save nothing alive that breathes…You
shall make no agreements with them nor show them any mercy. You shall
destroy their altars, break down their images, cut down their groves and
burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people unto the
LORD thy God and He has chosen you to be a special people above all
others upon the face of the earth…’–Book of Deuteronomy
So how
can he in all seriousness wonder out loud for even a microsecond just
HOW Jewish society can turn a blind eye to the numbers of Palestinian
children that have been deliberately murdered by the Jewish state when
such behavior is sanctioned at the highest level–by the ‘god’ of the
Jews, Yahweh himself–within the words of the Jewish Torah?
Gideon Levy, Haaretz
One
hundred and eighty babies and children up to the age of 5. One hundred
and eighty helpless babies and toddlers that the Israel Defense Forces
killed in Gaza in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. In their sleep, in
their play, as they fled; in their beds or in their parents’ arms.
Try to
imagine – the army killed 546 children in the course of 50 days. More
than 10 children a day, a classroom every three days. Try to imagine.
But these
updated, verified figures, released by the B’Tselem NGO on the second
anniversary of the killing, are hard to imagine. It’s easier to dismiss
them with a shrug, a look in the other direction or the lame excuses of
Israeli propaganda.
The figures
that should have haunted Israeli society and keep it awake at night –
that should have sparked a stormy public debate and shaken it– are of no
interest at all. Any natural disaster at the end of the world would
have evoked more human feelings here than this slaughter, which Israel
committed an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.
By
comparison – 84 Israeli children, horrific, were killed in the difficult
eight years from the start of the second intifada to Operation Cast
Lead in Gaza in 2008; 546 Palestinian children were killed over 50 days
in the summer of 2014.
They
weren’t killed by the hand of God. Ideological pilots, conscientious
artillerymen, humane tank crews and moral infantrymen killed them at the
order of their no-less virtuous commanders.
They didn’t
kill them in a real war, facing a significant military force, nor in a
war of no choice. They killed most of them with bombs from the air or by
shells from a distance, without even seeing them. In most cases all
they saw was their tiny figures playing on the beach, huddling in their
shabby homes, sleeping or running for their lives on the sophisticated
computer screens and joy sticks of the no less sophisticated soldiers
and pilots. They didn’t mean to kill them, but they pressed the button
and killed them. Hundreds of soldiers who killed hundreds of children.
Two years
later, the huge headline “The parents’ outcry” (in Yediot Ahronoth
yesterday) doesn’t, of course, refer in any way to the outcry of the
bereaved parents over there. Israel has never paid any heed to its
actions there. If a commission of inquiry is set up to look into the
Gaza conflict, it will be over the tunnels.
Israel
hasn’t even looked straight at the facts and confessed. It was all for
security’s sake, inevitable, Israel is the victim, they are Satan,
that’s how it is in war, that’s how it always is – a 100 times more
Palestinian fatalities than Israeli ones in Cast Lead, 30 times more in
the 2014 conflict. (“So, did you want more Israelis to be killed?”)
This
ghastly lack of proportion doesn’t raise any question or doubt, not to
mention criticism. Nor does what’s left – 90,000 residents still
homeless, living for the past two years among the debris or in wretched
tin huts. A Swedish journalist who visited Gaza for a few days last week
returned with the pictures – tin boxes housing people whose homes were
destroyed in Huza’a, near Khan Yunis.
There’s no
point in continuing to describe the magnitude of the disaster in Gaza.
It’s of no concern to anyone in Israel. Human compassion over Gaza?
Funny. Even the fact that, due to the bombardments and the siege, 90
million liters of raw sewage flow from Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea,
the same sea our children bathe in, doesn’t bother anyone here.
But it’s
inconceivable how Israelis can go on being so pleased with themselves
and their army in view of the facts of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict.
How come, even as time goes by, their stomachs don’t turn, if only for a
minute? What can we make of people who say seriously about an army that
killed hundreds of children only two years ago, that it’s the most
moral army in the world? And what should we make of the society and
state that has this as its discourse?
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