Recently I heard Robert Massoud, the man behind Zatoun, a small Palestinian-Canadian initiative to lend some needed solidarity to the beleaguered people of the West Bank and Gaza. Robert is doing some creative work “watering the plants” doing something positive to help Palestinian farmers who regularly see this historic indigenous crop uprooted. His talk was simply a description of what he saw. He said he never was afraid but once riding into Jenin he saw something which terrified him and should sicken us.
Out of nowhere his car was “attacked” by (get this) 4 year old children.They climbed all over his car like feral beasts. This is just a small snapshot of the state of mental health in the biggest prison in the world. What is happening there is shocking beyond belief.
“Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run, and no space to hide,” wrote the senior UN relief official, Jan Egeland, and Jan Eliass .
The adolescents, according to Massoud, play these pathetic video games, almost all of them violent. Shaking his head in disbelief, Massoud was pulled aside by a wise elder who understood: This is the only act of psychic enlargement these young people have. Driven to an internalized impotence, they can blast the Israeli occupier to smithereens. How sad is this?
Dr. Mona El-Farra a friend of the journalist John Pilger recently wrote him to describe the unrelenting and shocking psychological abuse this has on his teenager: “I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms [a collective punishment by the Israeli air force] and artillery on my 13-year-old daughter. At night, she shivers with fear. Then both of us end up crouching on the floor. I try to make her feel safe, but when the bombs sound I flinch and scream…”
Trauma is a way of life for most of these kids.
Look at these figures provided by the nonpartisan Remember These Children -href=”http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/”>- 122 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 869 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000.
Catherine Cook writes:
“The majority of these [Palestinian] children were killed and injured while going about normal daily activities, such as going to school, playing, shopping, or simply being in their homes. Sixty-four percent of children killed during the first six months of 2003 died as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks, or from indiscriminate fire from Israeli soldiers.”
Amnesty International reports
“The overwhelming majority of Palestinian children have been killed in the Occupied Territories when members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) responded to demonstrations and stone-throwing incidents with excessive and disproportionate use of force, and as a result of the IDFs reckless shooting, shelling and aerial bombardments of residential areas. Palestinian children have also been killed as bystanders during Israel’s extra-judicial execution of targeted activists, or were killed when their homes were demolished. Others died because they were denied access to medical care by the IDF. At least three Palestinian children have been killed by armed Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories.”
Recently, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers put forth a resolution condemning such egregious abuses only to be attacked once again by B’nai Brith, a pro israeli lobby group, one of several around the world which has defaulted on the ethical values of Judaism.They refuse to see, to listen, to fact find.Maybe if the Catholic school teachers had the courage to speak out, B’Nai B’rith might take another look.
Pilger ends his latest column in Great Britain’s New statesman thusly:
“Amira Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking,” she wrote. “This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ’looking from the side’.”
“Looking from the side” is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many western Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism and say, “Not in our name!” are abused as “self-despising”.”
Don’t be cowed into silence. Israel is a state which needs serious criticism. Too bad so little of it comes from the diaspora.
