The Apartheid routine — where Palestinian lives don’t matter
This is not a story that will make headlines in the Israeli media. Neither are the Palestinians who are murdered in the West Bank almost on a daily basis. ■ There is nothing more petrifying than the indifference of masters in a regime of supremacy. It can really drive you mad.
By Orly Noy • (Translated by Sol Salbe)
I woke up this morning to a flood of messages from friends and family asking if everything was okay. I quickly figured out that something has happened in Jerusalem and opened the news to read about the attack at the entrance to the city. The heart sinks. It was probably just a matter of time.
About an hour later, Bassel, our Local Call reporter, writes to me that large military forces have arrived with bulldozers to destroy the primary school in Khirbet al-Safa’i in Masafar Yatta in the south Hebron Hills. The school children are inside, he wrote. This morning the High Court of Justice quashed the temporary restraining order against the demolition of the school because, according to the judges, it is in the “wet area” of the free-fire zone, and the right of the army of destruction to train its forces outweighs the right of the children of Massafar Yatta to education. Within no time of the court’s decision, the forces arrived to destroy. Bassel stood there and recorded this destruction.
This is not a story that will make headlines in the Israeli media. Neither are the Palestinians who are murdered in the West Bank almost on a daily basis. Headlines announce a disruption to the routine, and killing Palestinians marks no change to the routine, it is the routine itself. So no headlines. The killing of a Jew, on the other hand, is a serious violation of the Apartheid routine and therefore from this morning every minister and every person wearing a uniform has already been summoned to the microphones to express their shock.
Perhaps this is the same routine perception that causes these soldiers to stand by with such indifference with their backs to the school while it is being destroyed, and with their faces and weapons aimed at the residents. How long has it been since these young people were sitting at their school desks themselves? What makes them be so equanimous when this miserable portable is destroyed by their friends, on top of the girls who study in it?
There is nothing more petrifying than the indifference of masters in a regime of supremacy. It can really drive you mad.
My heart goes out to the to those close to the deceased and from the bottom of my heart I wish a full recovery to those injured in this attack. Their blood, like that of any other Palestinian or Jewish victim, is on the hands of the masters of supremacy and Apartheid who sow in us this sickening indifference to the lives of others, to their dignity, to their rights, to their future. Our destruction and theirs is embodied in the indifferent faces of these soldiers, in front of a bulldozer that destroys a primary school in a remote village so that the Occupation army can exercise on its ruins.
