Killing Children Is No Big Deal
By Gideon Levy
20 October , 2004
Ha'aretz
More than 30 Palestinian children were
killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the
Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing
of children "terror." Whereas in the overall count of all
the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for
every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According
to B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current
operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were
killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human
rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children
killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring
Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent.
Take note of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated
until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were
10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The
youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during
birth.
With horrific statistics
like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since
become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public
agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always
only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
The plain fact,
which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian
children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's
Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to
soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations
people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making
use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children
is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.
As MK Ahmed Tibi
(Hadash) said, in a particularly emotional speech in the Knesset, it
is no longer possible to claim that all these children were killed by
mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500 day-to-day mistakes of identity.
No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous result of a policy driven
mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanization
of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children,
has become normative behavior. Even the momentary mini-furor that erupted
over the "confirming of the killing" of a 13-year-old girl,
Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The scandal
should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not
only by what followed.
Iman was not the
only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house,
the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus,
when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at
the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the
way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets.
She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu
Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy
sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli
tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.
Muatez Amudi and
Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who was standing in the village
square in Burkin and fired every which way in the wake of stone-throwing.
Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a school classroom
when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All of them
were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our
name.
At least in some
of these cases it was clear to the soldiers that they were shooting
at children, but that didn't stop them. Palestinian children have no
refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools
and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been
killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot
remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's
no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.
Death is, of course,
the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it is
not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of Education,
3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them
crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian
youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to
horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in
front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the
middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don't
have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child
who is a "victim of anxiety"?
The public indifference
that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israelis
accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for
a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety
harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have
believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that
the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children
have become part of the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of
them is no longer a big deal.