Double
Standards
By Gideon Levy
21 July, 2004
Ha'aretz
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 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 above. 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.