Israel's Latest Massacre in Qana:
Racist Jewish Fundamentalism a Factor
By Omar Barghouti
Electronic Lebanon, 30 July
2006
Israeli soldiers load missiles onto a
military vehicle, as Israeli orthodox Jews dance to show
their support for the troops, along the Israeli-Lebanese
border, 26 July 2006. (MaanImages/Inbal Rose)
|
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora condemned Israel's massacre
in Qana today as a "heinous crime" and called Israeli leaders "war
criminals." Reacting to an earlier atrocity, he wondered: "Is the
value of human life in Lebanon less than that of the citizens of
other countries?"[1]
The answer, at least as far as Israel is concerned, is an
unambiguous "yes!" Israel's latest bloodbath, which claimed the
lives of dozens of children and women hiding from the relentless
bombing in what they hoped was a secure basement in Qana, betrays
not only Israel's criminal disregard for the value of Arab human
life, a typical colonial attitude towards natives, but also its
increasingly fundamentalist perception of Gentiles in general as
lesser humans.
Israel apologists who will try to spin this new massacre as yet
another "mistake" must expect their audience to have an awfully
short memory or a very low IQ. Israel has explicitly indicated in
the past few days that it may resort to such atrocious measures,
especially since its armed forces have failed to achieve any
tangible military gains after 19 days of rolling massacres and
wanton destruction across Lebanon. Israeli minister of justice, Haim
Ramon, issued a stern warning only days ago that a large area in
south Lebanon was regarded by his government effectively as a
free-fire zone, advocating indiscriminate bombing of villages inside
it to ease the so-far unsuccessful advance of the Israeli army.[2]
"These places are not villages. They are military bases in which
Hizbollah are hiding and from which they are operating," he said,
adding that, since Israel had ordered Lebanese civilians to leave
the area, "All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are
related in some way to Hizbollah."
Israel's biggest-selling paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, advocated
raising the threshold of Israel's response to Katyusha rockets: "In
other words: a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will
simply be destroyed by fire."[3]
It is worth noting that all available evidence points to the fact
that no Katyusha was fired by the Lebanese resistance from Qana
before the bombing.
Among Israel's staunch Zionist supporters in the West, the same
"talking points" were parroted. Harvard academic Alan Dershowitz
recently argued that "Hezbollah and Hamas militants [...] are
difficult to distinguish from those 'civilians' who recruit,
finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and
children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do.
Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important
roles in their attacks."[4]
He concluded by saying, "The Israeli army has given well-publicized
notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that
have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind
have become complicit."
Thus the massacre in Qana.
Qana's name is associated with an earlier Israeli massacre. In 1996,
during its military offensive codenamed "Grapes of Wrath," Israel's
air force bombed a UN shelter in the village, slaying more than 100
civilians, mostly children, and inviting almost universal verbal
condemnation but no real threats of sanctions or any other form of
effective punitive measures from the international community. In the
current Israeli war on Lebanon this is only the most recent episode
in a series of smaller atrocities deliberately committed by the
Israeli army against Lebanese civilians in an attempt to
collectively "punish" them for the humiliating defeat its elite
military units have so far experienced at the hands of the
formidable Lebanese resistance, most noticeably in the legendary
town of Bint Jbeil.
This intentional and coldly calculated Israeli policy of targeting
innocent Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure stems from a
time-honoured, but hardly ever successful, Israeli doctrine of
applying intense "pressure" against a civilian population in order
to compel them, in-turn, to pressure the resistance into submitting
to Israeli dictates, thereby doing Israel's bidding by proxy. It has
been consistently used against the Palestinians ever since the Nakba
of 1948, and is still applied now in the ongoing barbaric offensive
and hermetic siege against Gaza. Israel may have plagiarized this
doctrine from the legacies of previous oppressors, but it has
refined it to a degree that it no longer raises any moral qualms in
most of Israeli society, where it is widely accepted by the public
as a right, even a duty in the fight for Israel's "security."
Such blatant racism, which may have been frowned upon in the past by
many Jewish-Israelis as a pathological anomaly, is now quite popular
in the Israeli mainstream, including among lawmakers, academics,
journalists and, of course, military leaders. While it has become
normal to read scathing -- occasionally valid -- critiques of the
hateful and chauvinistic discourse "inherent" in Islamic and even
Christian brands of fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, which is
among the key factors informing current Israeli apartheid policies
and laws, remains a taboo subject that is rarely discussed or
debated in the West. It is rooted in a long tradition of fanatic,
yet popular, fundamentalist interpretations of Halakhah, or Jewish
law, propagated by influential rabbis and internalized by a widely
acquiescent Israeli society, secular and religious sectors alike.
Even before the creation of Israel, the core concept in this
fundamentalist worldview was publicly espoused by Rabbi Abraham
Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, who
said, "The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of
non-Jews ... is greater and deeper than the difference between a
human soul and the souls of cattle."[5]
The late Israeli academic and human rights advocate, Israel Shahak,
traced the roots of Israeli public justification for killing
Palestinians, for instance, to similar readings of the tenets of
Halakhah. While the murder of a Jew is considered a capital offence
in Jewish law, the murder of a Gentile is treated quite differently.
"A Jew who murders a Gentile," Shahak reveals, "is guilty only of a
sin against the laws of heaven, not punishable by court."
Indirectly, but intentionally, causing the death of a Gentile is "no
sin at all."[6]
A booklet published in 1973 by the Central Region Command of the
Israeli army subscribes to this same doctrine. In it, the Command's
Chief Chaplain writes:
"When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot
pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that
those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then
according to the Halakhah they may and even should be killed ...
Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he
makes an impression of being civilized ... In war, when our
forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by
the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who
are ostensibly good.[7]
In 1996, the same year the first Qana massacre was committed,
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a leader of the powerful Lubavitch Hassidic
sect, echoed the same principle, rhetorically asking, "If a Jew
needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save
[the Jew]?," answering, "The Torah would probably permit that.
Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and
unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life."[8]
Moreover, Ginsburgh coauthored a book defending the 1994 massacre of
Muslim worshippers in Al-Ibrahimi mosque (Patriarchs' Cave) in
Hebron, in which he argued that when a Jew kills a non-Jew the act
does not constitute murder according to the Halakhah, adding that
the killing of innocent Palestinians as an act of revenge is a
Jewish virtue.
During the first months of the current Palestinian initfada, it was
common for Israeli army spokespeople to justify killing Palestinian
children throwing stones by saying that they "threatened human
life." (B'Tselem Report) Not soldiers' lives, not Israeli lives, but
human life. One cannot escape the implication that the alleged
sources of the threat are not exactly eligible to be called human in
the army's common diction.
In this context, it is entirely justified to see Israel's second
massacre in Qana as the rule, not the exception.
This often ignored menace of Jewish fundamentalism needs to be
addressed as seriously as other forms of fanatic religious thought
which sows racial hatred, animosity and war mongering. While
adhering to moral principles alone will certainly not bring any of
Qana's murdered children back to life or compensate any bereaved
parent or loved one anywhere, perhaps insisting on the equal worth
of all human lives, regardless of ethnicity or religion, and
rejecting racism from any source, including from sanctimonious
former victims, can help diminish the chances of such ruthless
crimes recurring in the future. Irrespective of the Holocaust, or
precisely because of it, Israel should not be allowed to get away
with its racist, at-will flaunting of international law and its
state terrorism against defenseless civilians. It is time to go
beyond mere condemnation to properly channel irrepressible grief and
simmering anger into morally sound acts of intervention. Just as it
worked against apartheid South Africa, a comprehensive regime of
boycott against Israel is urgently called for. People of conscience
everywhere share the responsibility of stopping this unrestrained
behemoth before it scorches everything in its blind quest for
hegemony and colonial control.
Omar Barghouti is an independent political analyst based in
Palestine
Endnotes
[1] Jonathan Steele and Rory McCarthy. "Strike on
bunker failed, says Hizbullah. The Guardian, July 20, 2006.
[2] Patrick Bishop. "Diplomats argue as all of
south Lebanon is targeted." Telegraph, July 28, 2006.
[3] Harry de Quetteville. "You're all targets,
Israel tells Lebanese in South." Telegraph, July 28, 2006.
[4] Alan Dershowitz. "'Civilian Casualty'? It
Depends." Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2006.
[5] Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish
Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press, London, 1999. p. ix.
[6] Israel Shahak. Jewish History, Jewish
Religion - The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Pluto Press.
London, 2002. P. 75-76.
[7] Ibid. P. 76.
[8] Ibid. P. 43.
