urik

This is a voluntary translation of the great post from the "Buena Prensa" blog.

Two audiences, one message.

By Mario Wainstein – Mario Wainstein is an Argentinian journalist, from progresist tendense, living in Israel for more tan 30 years. Redaction chief of the AURORA newspaper. Co-Founder of the "Shalom Ahshav" (Peace Now) and active activist for the Palestinian – Israeli dialog. The movement "Shalom Ajshav", did multiunitary movilizations in the 90's, and moved about 1 million of partners.

This post is directed for two different groups, and because of that, is divided in two different parts. However, it doesn't contain a double message and doesn't change or contradict each other. Actually, they complement each other. So I warn: The quote of one of the parts without the other will be considered a misinterpretation of the expressed and I forbid doing it, like some phantom and pirate websites like to do.

The facts summarized: in the villaje of Naalin, in the occupied territories, there are systematically carried non violent manifestations, but sabotaging against the building of the separation wall in the village's terrain. The IDF repels the demonstrators in a kind of "cats and mouses" game, that don't commit aggressions against persons, but do try to harm part of the constructed, and of sabotaging the machinery.

In one of the manifestation before about two weeks, the soldiers detained a demonstrator Palestinian and, while being detained, evidently disarmed and caught by his arm by the chief of the unit, a soldier pointblank shot him, from a distance of a short one and half meters, injuring him in the foot. The happening is filmed from a neighbor home and doesn't leave place for doubt.

Now comes the part of this note for the Israeli audience, and the Jewish audience in the world.

Stop justifying and comprehending. The conclusion that we have to get from the episode, the biggest conclusion, is that the occupation was able to corrupt us and make us reach places that years before, we would never be able to imagine that we would reach. Obviously, the episode isn't the rule, but poor us if we conform with that, because there's a weather, a warm harvest that allows that this phenomenon appear and be way more regular than we would want.

How do I know? Simply, because the Betzelem organization, which is who presented the denounce, is the one who gave the camcorder to the family and they did it because they had many denounces, but didn't have proofs. The filming isn't a coincidence. They knew that this was happening, they proposed to tape it, and they made it.

The other worrying fact, is that until there wasn't presented a denounce with the tape, and although it's clear that there were numerous witnesses of the facts and between them the very same chief of the unit, there was no internal denounce, and no Military Police was involved. Paraphrased: If it wasn't denounced with evidence in front of the public opinion, it all would have been covered and would have never even been investigated.

Now, when the facts are investigated, when the superior people have knowledge of it, I have the right to believe that it will be taken care of, at least until someone proves me wrong. Said in a bit paradoxical way, it worries me less what I know about the immoral ways of the IDF, than what I don't know. That I don't know and neither do the authorities competent that can, and should combat them.

This conduct is the synthesis of all what should be avoided, and is the sign of our biggest failure, the moral failure. More than forty years of occupation made their work and have been stronger than all of the good intentions of those who believed that this would happen to us. When the professor Yeshaiahu Leibovich predicted right after the six days war in 1967 that exactly this would happen to us, he was provoking the attacks of those who didn't allow him to suspect that our very own sons would be able of having immoral behaviors.

Now comes the part of this post directed to all those who were delighted with the filming, and all the journalists that presented the video as a "proof of the shootings that the" Jewish army" commits against the Palestinians.

It's logic that the shooting of a Jewish soldier at the foot of a Palestinian with a rubber bullet, committing an injury in his foot toe, will have a bigger and diffusion and will provoke more moral denounces than the glorification of a non Jewish subject, that murdered with his hands a four years old girl. It's as logic as the liberation of hundreds of Palestinian Arabs in exchange for an Israeli prisoner.

I don't say it with irony, I think that you're right. You, simply know that we are morally superior and that's why you demand from us what you don't from others. I believe that it's true and you're right. We are superior.

So superior, that the denounce of the immoral behavior didn't come from you, but from us, from a nongovernmental Israeli and Jewish organization that is called, and not by coincidence, "Betzelem"m which means "at image", a name taken from the old testament, that says that the man, all men, were created at the image and likeness of God.

I think that it's okay that you demand that from us, but don't have many expectations: None of you is able of demanding like we do to ourselves. Also, you lack the minimal moral height to demand from us: Those Italian journalists, for example, that by pure coincidence taped the cruel lynch of the two Israelis in Ramallah at the beginning of the second intifada, with a noble freedom fighter having a piece of liver between his teethes, dropping pieces of the corpses from the balcony, not only didn't ask to know which punishment was committed and if by chance they were arrested the glorious anthropophagite combatants, but also sent an apology letter to the Palestinian Authorities, promising that it would not happen again and that they are friend and sympathizers. So please let me giggle if now you tell me something moralist about the injured toe of the Palestinian boy.

The truth is that we, Israelis, live in a constant extreme situation with very little maneuvering margins. From one way, it's obvious that we are a democracy that has to know to defend itself since it's being attacked. From the other side, we have to not let that defense get over the democracy that we wanted to defend. Here we aren't in Spain against the "pleasant" terrorism of the ETA that warns before blowing up a bomb. If repeteadly Arabs citizens of Jerusalem commit terrorist attacks, we have to limit their actions to defend ourselves. But that's a measure that restricts elemental civic liberties.

It will be said to me that everything will be able to be solved if we stopped being an occupying country, and I totally agree. Actually, also the actual government, like the majority of the parliament, like the majority of the Israeli population accepts the creation of a Palestinian State in the West bank, next to Israel. It's Ismail Hanie who has repeated in this week, that "we will come back to Aco, Haifa, ramallah, to Yafo" and in fact, to Tel Aviv.

If in the Palestinian side there was someone to seriously talk with about a territorial partition, something they rejected in 1947 and keep rejecting, although with less excitement, also now we would have a solution at our hands reach.

But there's no one to speak to, and many times they propose us to resign. But at the abyss border we resist to make another step: If you believe that our suicide is a solution, you will have to learn to live with the conflict. The price, lamentably, is being paid by us.

Source: Aurora – 25/7/2008.

Translation by Uri Ezequiel Berman Kleiner.