In one day last week, that came to be known as Black Friday, Israeli forces bombed, shelled and rocketed Aida, a heavily populated refugee camp in the occupied territories. Then soldiers moved house to house, using circular saws, jackhammers, sledgehammers and explosives to burrow through people’s bedrooms to courtyards, and then on to other homes.
Troops later occupied several houses in the camp, waiting silently for nightfall, when their work began again. Well over 40 Palestinians were killed, some bleeding to death from unattended wounds because the soldiers deliberately prevented ambulances from entering the camp.
Similar military offensives took place all over the occupied territories last week, from Bethlehem to Jenin, and from Nablus to Gaza, that killed 100 Palestinians and gave terror a new name.
We all, of course, saw it on our TV screens, as we turned in nauseated disbelief at the spectacle. Writing about the mother of four girls and a boy called Hawaja who was killed crossing from her kitchen into the living room, as soldiers blew in the metal door on her house, Daniel Williams of the Washington Post reported: “Cinder-block and metal fragments pierced her body as her children looked on. She bled to death in the hallway before the arrival of an ambulance, delayed by laborious negotiations for permission to enter the narrow alleyways here in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem. Then Israelis, meanwhile, moved through the house to bore a hole in the wall so they could enter the next house. The door where Hawaja died is still stained with blood.”
Imagine this, if you will: The headlines in Europe and the US read, “Israeli forces mount a Kristallnacht against Palestinian communities. Said to be retaliation for the killing of five military trainees at the hands of a lone Hamas militant.”
The headlines would be accurate.
Kristallnacht was that dreadful day, on Nov. 9, 1938, when Nazis attacked concentrations of Jewish communities all over Germany, rounding up “suspects,” destroying synagogues, smashing homes, burning shops and office buildings to the ground, and generally terrorizing people. Nazi soldiers even prevented fire trucks from entering these Jewish neighborhoods to put out the fires. Scores were killed and injured.
The “excuse” the Nazis gave for Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) was that they were avenging the killing of a diplomat from the German Embassy in Paris 12 days earlier by a Polish Jew, whose family had been expelled from Germany earlier and dumped on the German-Polish border. (Several days after Kristallnacht, the US recalled its ambassador from Berlin).
Israel’s own Kristallnacht last Friday — indeed, a Kristallnacht that, to be exact, began three weeks ago in Balata refugee camp outside Nablus where well over 30 Palestinians were butchered and dozens of homes bulldozed — was justified as revenge for the killing of those five military trainees last Thursday in the Jewish settlement of Atzmons in Gaza.
The assailant in that operation was Mohammed Farhat, a 19-year old boy whose entire extended family had been expelled from Palestine in 1948, and who had grown up in Gaza City knowing nothing but the swagger of Israeli occupation soldiers around him.
Just as the Nazis had done before them, Zionists today have appropriated the language of the oppressed to define their condition. They are the victims, and Palestinians are the victimizers. They are only defending themselves.
This Big Lie is given massive echo in Ariel Sharon’s bellowing, just as it is echoed in the bellowing of thousands of throats, and smashed-down boots, by his soldiers in the refugee camps.
Israel, the occupying force, defending itself? Isn’t the idea of the right of an occupier to defend himself an oxymoron?
Zionist spokesmen have made language a conveyor of terror and falsehood, and used it to put a macabre spin on institutionalized sadism and calculated bestiality.
Along with all the devastation that Zionism has inflicted on Palestinians and their historic homeland over the last eight decades, has been this movement’s horrifying ability, like that of Nazism and Stalinism, to pilfer the language of the oppressed and project it as its own. Words like peace, freedom, security, democracy, and so on, have been turned on their heads and given a conceptual reach justifying the occupation of one people by another.
When the Zionist prime minister justifies Israel’s carnage in Palestinian cities, and its bulldozers, tanks and armored vehicles in refugee camps, as an attempt “to fight back against terrorist organizations in the context of the right to self-defense,” you know this is on a par with how, say, the entry of Soviet tanks in August, 1968, into the free city of Prague, in Czechoslovakia, was glossed over by Izvestia at the time as “a spontaneous, ardently welcomed defense of popular freedom.”
In the speech-battle between occupier and occupied, the former has shown himself to be a cunning master at pilfering the very idiom that is meant to define his victim.
The Palestinian narrative is imbued with an engaging innocence rooted in their decades-old culture of struggle. Confronted by it, foreign journalists have been slow on the pickup.
There is a language world, as Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist from Martinique who lived in Algeria during that country’s struggle for independence, wrote in his seminal work, “the Wretched of the Earth,” that defines and is defined by the objective reality of oppressed peoples.
No two historical epochs, no two cultures, no two social classes, and certainly no two peoples engaged in a dialectically opposed conflict, such as that of Palestinians and Israelis, use words to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of meaning and inference.
When Palestinians speak of freedom, of death, of homeland, of sacrifice, of “al-awda” (return) or “al-ard” (land), of spending time in the occupier’s jails, of fallen patriots whose death is celebrated, not mourned, by family and friends, and of other such notions, the lexicon in everyone of us qualifies them as irreducibly private connotations.
Israelis are the “injured party” in this dispute, who are “defending” themselves against “terrorists”? Come on.
And, oh yes, the Israelis should see to it that the five children of Hawaja are put through therapy, for the vendetta concept of “thaer” in our culture is alive, its roots in our archetype go back to antiquity. ([email protected])
