... It's a war crime
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| Writer: |
Benny Barbash
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| Source: |
Ha’aretz
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| Date: |
Friday,
15 February 2002
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My son Assaf is a year and a half old. Last week, when he came down with a bad case of the flu, we took him from our home to a clinic on a nearby moshav. It was a very brief trip, but his anguished crying and feverish appearance made the way seem much longer. At about the same time, the mothers of Suleiman Abu Hassan and Mahmud Zakin - two newborn infants - were trying to go from the village of Yamoun to the hospital in Jenin. The distance between the village and the city is no greater than the distance that separates our moshav and the neighboring one, but unlike us, they were unable to complete their short journey. They were stopped at IDF checkpoints and sent back the way they came. Both babies died. Or, I should say, were murdered.
What flag does Ran Goren think is flying over the order that prevents all passage through a checkpoint? A black flag, or maybe just a blackish flag, or perhaps a gray flag - where it's hard to tell just what degree of legality its color represents? Because this is something we all have to know - the daily reality in the occupied territories, when observed at eye level and not from the cockpit of an airplane, produces a constant flood of events and decisions to be made, all of which float in that gray area between legal and illegal, moral and immoral, human and inhuman. There are only two ways to deal with this nightmarish vision, which, like a wildly changing kaleidoscope, keeps rearranging and creating ambiguous and grotesque situations that require the conscience to rapidly make complicated calculations of what is forbidden and what is allowed. One possibility is to neutralize the conscience's operation, which is what Goren proposes and is, unfortunately, what most of us do. The other is to simply cease taking part in this cruel and insidious saga, to refuse to participate in it any longer.
Which flag flies over an order to enter a Palestinian family's home and send the tenants out into the cold and rain, while inside, Shin Bet men - covered by our soldiers - turn the house upside down to search for weapons? The small children stand barefoot in the cold and scream; the fear makes them wet their pants; the women wail. The piercing sobs of an old woman get on the nerves of the tense and scared soldier standing next to her, so he slaps her on the cheek to shut her up.
I am quite certain, Major General Goren, that you would apply the principle of relativism to an utterly routine occurrence of this type. If the family uprooted from their home in the dark of night and the driving rain was your family, and the wailing woman who was slapped by the soldier was your mother, perhaps you would wave the blackest of black flags over this event. But since the family is a Palestinian family and our forces were carrying out a legitimate and routine "subversion" operation, you would probably wrap your definition of this horror in shrouds as pure as snow.
And what can we say about the weeks-long siege imposed on a population of hundreds of thousands of impoverished, undernourished and unemployed people? Not to mention the stealing of land, the wholesale expulsions, the administrative detentions and the sealing of houses, or the bombings, assassinations, robberies, uprooting of orchards in "exposure" operations, flattening of entire neighborhoods, the exploitation and humiliation. And is it only weeks, months or years that all this has been happening? All of these injustices have been going on for 35 years now.
True, blowing oneself up in the middle of a city and killing innocents is an appalling form of terror, but the ongoing military and bureaucratic terror that is carried out under the sponsorship of the State of Israel through directives, military orders and dryly worded procedural rules - this terror that denies millions of human beings their rights and dignity, which imposes collective punishments on entire populations is also appalling. This is the equation that should be put forward and not the one that you described - on one side, a phantom that bombs an empty police building whose inhabitants were given advance warning by us, and on the other, a radical suicide bomber who blows himself up on a crowded street. That is a false and misleading representation of the situation.
When my son Assaf grows up and becomes a person who, I hope, lives his life in accordance with the Jewish heritage and spirit, he will not do to another what is hateful to him. When this son comes to me and asks me - Where were you all those years when these horrors were happening? - Unlike you, Major General Goren, who knew how to strike targets with surgical precision (what a twisted use of a term originally meant to describe a curative and restorative action!), I won't be able to wash my hands clean of it and tell him that I didn't know what was happening there. I knew very well. Unlike you, who looked down on this vision from a distance so great that the creased face of the humiliated old woman and the dying body of the newborn in his mother's arms were erased - I ordered my soldiers to take this old woman outside. Maybe I also prevented a pregnant mother from getting to the hospital.
And you didn't do anything? - Assaf will persist. I joined a protest movement, I'll tell him, in a bid to improve my modest record. I signed petitions, I participated in demonstrations - all those legitimate activities in a "democratic society" that Ran Goren suggests Yigal Shochat should do so that a common platform may be preserved.
Is that all? - My son will ask with some disappointment. Well, once, in a moment of weakness, when I was a young battalion commander in the reserves, I signed a petition circulated by Yesh Gvul, which called for soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories, I'll tell him somewhat sheepishly.
So you refused to serve?
Not exactly, I'll reply uncomfortably. It's very complicated. There are rules in a democracy that ...
But what you had there wasn't a democracy. It was a regime in which a strong majority oppressed a large and helpless minority.
In the kingdom of darkness that we ran in the occupied territories, I'll explain to him, in that torn and violated territory, in that total darkness, I tried to be a little firefly, a tiny drop of purity of arms in a sea of malice. I believed those who seemed to share my outlook, friends who, by using tricks of the tongue and bending the laws of logic, explained to me what Major General Goren, with his less persuasive rhetoric and childish and insipid arguments, explained in his letter to "his friend Yigal" - something about losing the state before we manage to fix it if we refuse to serve in the territories (as if we hadn't already lost its real essence). My friends added another argument - the cherry on the topping of the arguments against refusing to serve: If I'm not there to do the dirty work, someone else, who is even worse, will do it for me.
Today, as a retired firefly, I know that a little firefly doesn't exactly illuminate things. It barely lights up its own ass.
My son Assaf is getting better now. When I hug his soft, warm body, I think about what I would have done if foreign soldiers at a checkpoint prevented me from bringing him to the doctor and this led to his death. And you, Major General Goren - What would you do if you found yourself in similar circumstances? Sign a petition?
** Benny Barbash, a screenwriter and author, was formerly a battalion commander in the paratroops.
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