[Peace-discuss] the child

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

The article below is an accurate description of what internationals report 
life is like for Palestinian children and their families.  A cruel cycle of 
revenge that provides a never-ending supply of terror and terrorists.

Also -- a report from a human rights worker who was shot protecting children 
from being killed on the day that a UN worker was also killed: 
http://www.counterpunch.org/butterfly1123.html



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.