ZGram - 8/14/2004 - "If the Situation Were Reversed"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

august 14, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Gideon Levy said it, not I:

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IF THE SITUATION WERE REVERSED
By Gideon Levy
Jewish Journal, Opinion
July 30, 2004 Issue

What would happen if a Palestinian terrorist were to detonate a bomb 
at the entrance to an apartment building in Israel and cause the 
death of an elderly man in a wheelchair, who would later be found 
buried under the rubble of the building? The country would be 
profoundly shocked. Everyone would talk about the sickening cruelty 
of the act and its perpetrators. The shock would be even greater if 
it then turned out that the dead man’s wife had tried to dissuade the 
terrorist from blowing up the house, telling him that there were 
people inside, but to no avail. The tabloids would come out with the 
usual screaming headline: "Buried alive in his wheelchair." The 
terrorists would be branded "animals."

Last Monday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozers in Khan Yunis, in 
the Gaza Strip, demolished the home of Ibrahim Halfalla, a 
75-year-old disabled man and father of seven, and buried him alive. 
Umm-Basel, his wife, says she tried to stop the driver of the heavy
machine by shouting, but he paid her no heed. The IDF termed the act 
"a mistake that shouldn’t have happened," and the incident was noted 
in passing in Israel. The country’s largest-circulation paper, 
Yedioth Ahronoth, didn’t bother to run the story at all. The blood 
libel in France — a woman’s tale of being subjected to an 
anti-Semitic attack, which later turned out to be fiction — proved a 
great deal more upsetting to people. There we thought the assault was 
aimed against our people. But when the IDF bulldozes a disabled 
Palestinian to death? Not a story. Just like the killing, under the 
rubble of her home, of Noha Maqadama, a woman in her ninth month of 
pregnancy, before the eyes of her husband and children, in El
Boureij refugee camp a few months earlier.

And what would happen if a Palestinian were to shoot an Israeli 
university lecturer and his son in front of his wife and their young 
son? That’s what happened 10 days ago in the case of Dr. Salem 
Khaled, from Nablus, who called to the soldiers from the window of 
his house because he was a man of peace and the front door had 
jammed, so he couldn’t get out. The soldiers shot him to death and 
then killed his 16-year-old son before the eyes of his mother and his 
11-year-old brother. It’s not hard to imagine how we would react to 
the story if the victims were ours.

But when we’re implicated and the victims are Palestinians, we prefer 
to avert our eyes, not to
know, not to take an interest and certainly not to be shocked. 
Palestinian victims — and their numbers, as everyone knows, are far 
greater than ours — don’t even merit newspaper reports, not even when 
the chain of events is particularly brutal, as in the examples given. 
This is not an intellectual exercise but an attempt to demonstrate 
the concealment of information, the double morality and the 
hypocrisy. The indifference to these two very recent incidents proved 
again that in our eyes there is only one victim and all the others 
will never be considered victims.

If a European cabinet minister were to declare, "I don’t want these 
long-nosed Jews to serve me in restaurants," all of Europe would be 
up in arms and this would be the minister’s last comment as a 
minister. Three years ago, our former labor and social affairs 
minister, Shlomo Benizri, from Shas, stated: "I can’t understand why 
slanty-eyed types should be the ones to serve me in restaurants." 
Nothing happened. We are allowed to be racists. And if a European 
government were to announce that Jews are not permitted to attend 
Christian schools? The Jewish world would rise up in protest. But 
when our Education Ministry announces that it will not permit Arabs 
to attend Jewish schools in Haifa, it’s not considered racism. Only 
in Israel could this not be labeled racist. The heritage of Golda 
Meir — it was she who said that after what the Nazis did to us, we 
can do whatever we want — is now having a late and unfortunate 
revival.

What would happen if a certain country were to enact legislation 
forbidding members of a particular nation to become citizens there, 
no matter what the circumstances, including mixed couples who married 
and raised families? No country anywhere enacts laws like these 
nowadays, apart from Israel. If the Cabinet extends the validity of 
the new citizenship law today, Palestinians will not be able to 
undergo naturalization here, even if they are married to
Israelis. We have the right, you see. And if the illegal Israeli 
immigrants in the United States were hunted down like animals in the 
dark of night, the way the Immigration Police do here, would we have 
a better understanding of the injustice we are doing to a community 
that wants nothing other than to work here?

What would we say if the parents of Israeli emigrants were separated 
from their children and deported, without having available any avenue 
of naturalization, no matter what the circumstances? And how would we 
classify a country that interrogates visitors about their political 
opinions as soon as they disembark from the plane at the airport and 
bars them from
entering it the security authorities look askance at the opinions 
they express? What would happen if anti-Semites in France were to 
poison the drinking water of a Jewish neighborhood? Last week 
settlers poisoned a well at Atawana, in the southern Mount
Hebron region, and the police are investigating.

And we still haven’t said anything about a country that would 
imprison another nation, or about a regime that would prevent access 
to medical treatment for some of its subjects, according to its 
national identity, about roads that would be open only to the members 
of one nation or about an airport that would be closed to the other 
nation. All this is happening in Israel and is pulling from under us 
the moral ground that makes it possible for us to complain about 
racism and anti-Semitism abroad, even when they actually erupt.

Gideon Levy writes for Haaretz.

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