The never-ending collective punishment of Palestinians under Israel’s military occupation
By Arnon Avni
Once again the same ritual gets repeated.
The “experts” are summoned to the studios to drone and babble on about the “escalation”. The problem is Jenin, the city of terrorism. Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] is weak, he’s not doing his job as overseer with of slaves with privileges granted by the owner. And the experts — journalists and multidisciplinary Arab tamers — deliberate: if we kill more, would they respond more militantly? Or maybe there’s a need for a “big military operation”, the very mention of which results in an adrenaline rush into their bloodstream.
Everything starts over each time the troops arrive to blow up homes.
Once upon a time there was a debate about this practice called “collective punishment”. It’s something that these cannot even be mentioned among ourselves — arresting someone for something their relative did— not to mention the matter of international law. Over here it comes with the Israeli Supreme Court stamp of approval, It has been determined that it has been proven effective — but it is an agreed-upon lie. The real need for it is revenge to appease the Right as a substitute for the takeover of Area A and to calm down the voices of incitement on the streets.
Everything is run along the denial track: who remembers the interview of Begin and Sharon who promised and kept “a lot of Alon Morehs [settlements] . Who remembers the marginal level of marginal resistance to the Occupation that existed then. True, there has been an intifada since then, but somehow everything that happened after it is related to the Oslo agreements — not to the Occupation that exploded before Oslo.
This is true even now. None of the journalists whose job it is to confuse us with the devil’s details about the Palestinians and with a hollow admiration of the IDF, from the dogs of “Oketz” Unit to the Iron Dome.
Similarly none of the Arab tamers whose knowledge is limited to this subject would be caught commenting or asking whether is it not likely that what happened under any occupation in the world, will happen to us too…? Happen to us? Hahahahaha, we are the chosen people.
(Translated from Hebrew by Sol Salbe, Middle East News Service)
