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Ha'aretz, December 13, 1998
As euphemisms go, 'rubber bullets' is a killer
By Gideon Levy
Last Monday I witnessed yet another violent
demonstration in the territories. Plot, scenery
and choreography combined to produce the
spectacle that has become a fixed ritual: enraged
youth throwing stones at soldiers in front of the
IDF roadblock at Rachel's tomb. Soldiers and
stone-throwers stood a healthy distance apart
from one another, and most of the stones landed
somewhere between the two. They endangered no
one. The soldiers, secure behind meter-high
concrete blocks, fired off salvo after salvo of
rubber bullets. Four Palestinians were wounded.At
the very same time, my colleague Ada Ushpiz was
standing by a roadblock in El Bireh. In the
report she filed in Ha'aretz, Ushpiz wrote: "It
was hard to tell what happened first - the waves
of young people throwing rocks at the soldiers,
or the rubber bullets beating down." Ushpiz
herself was hit by a rubber bullet. Thirty
Palestinians were hit by rubber that day. The
following day, a youth named Jihad Iyad was
killed, apparently from a "live" round. And
another 270 Palestinians were injured, almost all
of them from rubber bullets. Nasser Arikat, a
student at Bir Zeit University, was injured, and
died two days later. He too had been shot with a
rubber bullet.
According to data supplied by B'Tselem, from the
start of the Intifada until the end of last
month, at least 58 Palestinians were killed by
rubber bullets, including 28 children below the
age of 17, 13 of whom were not yet 13. Awad
Hindash, the son of refugees from Jelazoun who
planned to start a new life with his fiancee in
America; 8-year-old Ali Juwarish, who became
posthumously famous when his father donated his
organs to Israelis; or Samar Karameh, the
13-year-old from Hebron who was on his way to a
private English lesson - all of them were killed
by rubber bullets. Rubber kills.
How astonishing it is to discover how a mass act
of slaughter can become a part of the routine -
no one even opens their mouth. A lethal device
that should be employed only in serious cases
when the lives of soldiers are endangered, has in
recent years become a standard tool for
dispersing demonstrations. Tear gas is barely
used anymore, and who can even remember the
gravel-shooting machine, an invention that seemed
particularly diabolical in its time? Nor do we
ever see water hoses, used by darker regimes than
ours to break up violent demonstrations. But now,
rubber is going like gangbusters.
Yet rubber is not just rubber. The "rubber"
bullet is a nice euphemism for a very hard object
that the jargon of the Israeli occupation rushed
to sanitize - exactly like other occupation
terminology, like "civil administration,"
"coordination and liaison authority," and
"prohibited from leaving." It is a metal bullet -
a bullet like all other bullets, as lethal as
every other lethal weapon. The only difference is
that it is covered with a layer of rubber that
makes it less hard than a live round. Indeed, it
is less deadly from a range of 30 meters or more.
And the IDF has clear standing orders on when and
from what range it may be used - but who's paying
attention?
To date, only three of all the soldiers who
killed with rubber have been put on trial. One
was exonerated, later stood before a disciplinary
tribunal, and eventually received a note of
censure in his personal file. That's all. All the
other acts of manslaughter - some of which
claimed the lives of small children whom it is
hard to believe genuinely endangered armed
soldiers' lives - were not deemed improper by the
IDF. The children were killed "in accordance with
regulations," as a senior military source was
quoted in Ha'aretz following the killing of Ali
Juwarish.
And this is the real meaning of "the
regulations": The lives of Palestinians in the
territories are frighteningly cheap, and the
finger on the trigger is unbearably light of
touch. Stones thrown at armed soldiers from a far
distance? Deadly fire. Burning tires? Deadly
fire.
Last Monday near Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem, as
in many other instances, it was hard to
understand why tear gas grenades couldn't have
sufficed: they make a realistic explosive sound,
their gas wafts into the eyes and lungs and
paralyzes all stone throwers for a good long
while. Water hoses don't do a bad job of pushing
back waves of rioters, either. Water and gas have
only one noticeable downside: They are not liable
to kill.
TThe next few days in the territories are sure to
be turbulent. There are many justified reasons
for Palestinians' frustration and despair,
reasons that you need a healthy dose of
indifference to fail to understand. Even in their
despair, one must admit and maybe even rejoice,
non-terrorist Palestinians do not have at their
disposal a great selection of means of protest
that might provide an alternative to stones and
tires.
What do Israelis expect a Palestinian to do, when
his relative is rotting away in jail, his land is
being steadily expropriated before his eyes, his
house may be about to be demolished, and his life
is subject to a never-ending closure order? To
stand with a polite little sign in front of the
roadblocks and the bulldozers? To fire off
letters to the editor? The tire and the stone
have become practically unavoidable means of
protest. The Israeli response must be on a par
with their level of danger: we must use a tool
for dispersing demonstrations, not a tool for
mass slaughter
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