A mother embracing her soldier son — a beautiful picture or a horror personified?
‘The mother of all ethnic cleansing’: Using one photo to justify the ethnic cleansing of a city of 200,000 people.
By Kobi Niv • Translated by Sol Salbe
“For all intents and purposes, Jabaliya no longer exists” wrote Ariel Kahana, one of the reporters brought by the IDF to describe and glorify its handiwork, “and it will never exist again. The place as it was cannot be restored. The IDF has made the city and the refugee camp adjacent to it unfit for human habitation.” This place, by the way, was home to about 200,000 people, something on the scale of Ramat Gan or Beersheba.
“With one foot in the military Hummer and the other foot in the mountain of dust that was churned by the tanks’ chains, at the end of the patrol, one of the soldiers, the destroyed Jabaliya around us, approached me. Bursts of gunfire in the background. Stray dogs sprawled on the sand, waiting for the remains of food from the ‘brigade commander’s house’ next to which we stood,” Kahana began his elegy of the destruction, and “showed [me] a picture he found in one of the nearby houses. It shows a smiling young terrorist with a green headband on his head, next to an older woman dressed in a blue dress with hearts and holding a Kalashnikov.”
“Tell Bogie [Moshe] Ya’alon that these are the people whom we are supposedly ‘ethnically cleansing’. What does he think? Shouldn’t we be sorting them out?” asked [the soldier] rhetorically in anger, and Kahana added to his voice to the question, and presented us with the incriminating picture in the newspaper as well.
“The words of Ya’alon, once an illustrious chief of staff and now an elderly man who has lost his marbles,” the bard concludes, “severely hurt the soldiers, and precisely at the point that is most important to them: their [fighting] spirit. Commanders and non-commissioned officers, men and women, in the regular army and in the reserves, all told me one after the other how much it is the sense of mission that motivates them to risk their lives for the sake of the people and the state,” Halleluiah!
But wait. Let us try to comprehend what we have just read here. Ostensibly, Kahana was summoned from the keyboard to the field in order to prove that the IDF did not and does not carry out anything, even vaguely resembling: “ethnic cleansing”. Haven forbid, how could anyone suggest this? No, what it did was merely completely destroyed a community in which some 200,000 people lived, so that they would never be able to return to their homes or rebuild them. And if this is not ethnic cleansing, then Bogie Ya’alon is not merely an elderly man who has lost his senses, but an old turkey whose brain has been fried to a crisp.
Kudos to the IDF, Kahana tells us here, for carrying out in Jabaliya and its environs the mother of all ethnic cleansing, even though it is not ethnic cleansing at all, because they deserve this ethnic cleansing, and here is also the proof — a picture of a proud mother with her son in uniform and his weapon. In fact, this picture ostensibly tells us, everyone there in Jabaliya — the mothers, sons, women children — everyone is a terrorist, and therefore “out of a sense of mission” and “for the sake of the people of the state” [the Jews] it is appropriate and even great that we have ethnically cleansed them, an ethnic cleansing which never existed and never happened, you maligners!
But such a picture, of an Israeli mother or father, good Kosher Jews, embracing their soldier son or daughter proudly, with or without their weapons is in your family phone album (if we discount the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs, as Netanyahu likes to say). Whether it’s on the day of enlistment, at the end of basic training, or squad commanders’ course, or tank commanders’ course or the whatever-you-have course: You all have such photos, and here, just for example, is a picture from the family album of one such proud mother, Ayelet Shaked.
Well, Ariel Kahana and dear readers, does the fact that almost all Israeli citizens have pictures on their phones with their soldier son, armed or unarmed, permit their killing and justify the ethnic cleansing of Beersheba or Ramat Gan or Israel as a whole?
Note: the above headline is my rendition of the headline Kobi Niv sent to the paper. They opted for: When the mother is called Ayelet, it’s pride and joy. When her name is Fatma, the family home must be demolished
