Is Palestinian blood cheap?

William Booth of the Washington Post quoted Mustafa Barghouti as saying, “Palestinian life is cheap.” As the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative tried to explain to the American journalist how in recent months Israel’s security forces have expanded their use of lethal force in the West Bank, killing with impunity in occupied territory they now consider a free-fire zone, unsafe even for school children to live in. “Israeli forces are not accountable to anyone. The world was more upset when an American dentist killed a lion in Zimbabwe,” he added. “A 13-year-old Palestinian named Abdel Rahman Obeidallah was in his school uniform in Bethlehem, his book bag by his side, when he was struck by a small-caliber round to the chest in October,” wrote Booth in his news report. “A senior Israeli military official told the Washington Post that the boy was killed by mistake. The sniper was aiming for a “main instigator,” but the bullet ricocheted off the pavement and struck him in the heart.” Yes, right, Israeli Army snipers are that bumbling. In the face of recent protests by young Palestinians, Israeli occupation troops have accelerated their use of deadly force, force that includes resort to live fire, which they are never enjoined against using indiscriminately, at times even whimsically. Israeli politicians had hoped that a hard-line response would pacify, or cow into submission, a population that has lived under foreign occupation for close to half a century. But Palestinian resistance — passing largely unnoticed by an outside world preoccupied with defeating Daesh — continues unabated. And it is turning out to be a costly resistance indeed. Over the last three months, ever since these protests began in October in Jerusalem and spread subsequently to the West Bank, Israeli occupation troops, according to media reports, have slaughtered 46 Palestinians. Most, according to Booth’s own report filed from Bethlehem, were “killed by a single shot to the head or chest, suggesting lethal intent.” Others succumbed to wounds inflicted by tear gas canisters or rubber-coated bullets, projectiles often as deadly as real bullets. No less than 1,887 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, have been wounded, many seriously, by live rounds and 3,105 by those rubber-coated bullets. Another 10,000 — yes, no typo here — were treated for gas inhalation. And this does not include, in that same period, the more than 90 killed during knife, gun and vehicular attacks by Palestinian youngsters who, one suspects, appear to believe that, denied the right to choose how to live, they are left with the right to choose how to die. In Palestinian culture, to die in struggle against a hated enemy for a noble cause much bigger than yourself, turns you into a fallen patriot, or a martyr. And when an ordinary man dies, they believe, his life ends, but when a martyr dies, his life begins. Israeli society is afraid of these kids — afraid of people who are not afraid of death, to die even in pursuit of a cause they know they’re not going to be around to see triumphant. Sadly, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is helpless, at best, or indirectly complicit, at worst, in these assaults directed at the very people it claims to represent. Look, let’s face it. Were any one of these deaths or injuries — a single one of them — suffered by these Palestinians over the last three months suffered by citizens in a state that is not governed by apartheid rules, as Israel clearly is, say the US, Canada, England and France, it would’ve caused an uproar, and many an American Highway Patrolman, a Canadian Mounted Policeman, an English Bobby and a French Gendarme would have been investigated, indicted and tried. But in Israel, today the most reviled entity in the world. To Israel, you see, proud heir of South Africa’s apartheid traditions, human life, so long as it is that of a Palestinian and not a Jew, is very cheap indeed. When will this agony that Palestinians have endured all these years, all these decades, come to an end? When will Palestinians stop being killed with such impressive ease? When will the extra-judicial brutalities, the house demolitions, the check-point humiliations, the disruptions of curfews, the violence of colonists, the heavily armed soldiers storming Palestinian hospitals to arrest patients, seize documents and terrorize doctors, when will it all end? When will Palestinian parents stop burying their children? And when will people in the outside world cease being indifferent at the atrocities taking place daily in Palestine, and come to realize that by their indifference they are giving their approval to the prevailing order in that tormented land? When will they take note of what Edmund Burke, the Irish political philosopher, of what he said when he admonished us about how “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?