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Totenkopf verbande
5/13/2002 (14:42) |
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'Nobody Should Preach to Us Ethics, Nobody!'
Israel, a Light unto Nations?
By Kathleen Christison
Former CIA political analyst
In the never-ending propaganda show designed to depict Israel as a
moral nation victimised by immoral terrorists and anti-Semites, CNN
recently ran a film clip of the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin declaiming, as only he could, 'Nobody should preach to us
ethics, nobody!'
And, of course, few do.
It's the general assumption among the vast majority of Americans
that no on can preach ethics to Israel, that light unto nations. No
nation is more ethical or more innocent--or so we are told.
But I can't get something I recently saw off my mind. Every so often
in the midst of a deluge of information something leaps out at you as
unique--utterly electrifying, utterly horrifying, almost mind-altering in
a way. One's senses become dulled after months, years, of reading
about and seeing images on television of innocents dead from Palestinian
terrorist attacks, of other innocents dead from Israeli tank or sniper fire,
of cities and refugee camps devastated, in recent weeks of the entire
civilian infrastructure of Palestinian society destroyed. But one searing
article leapt out the other day that has stuck in my craw, and I cannot
let go of it.
In an article in the May 6 issue of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
entitled 'Someone Even Managed to Defecate into the Photocopier,'
Amira Hass--an honest, courageous Israeli woman who has spent
years living among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza--described the scenes of destruction at the Palestinian Ministry
of Culture left behind after Israeli military forces lifted their siege of
the towns of Ramallah and its suburb al-Birah, where the ministry is
located.
Entering the building after its month-long occupation by an Israeli
military unit, ministry officials, foreign cultural attaches, and reporters
found a scene of grotesque vandalism. Equipment from the local radio
and television station had been hurled from windows in the multi-story
building, electronic equipment was destroyed or had been stolen,
furniture was broken and piled up on heaps of papers, books,
computer disks, and broken glass. Children's paintings had been
destroyed.
And then there was this, as described by Hass: 'There are two toilets
on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere
else in the building, in several rooms of which they had lived for about
a month. They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots,
even in drawers they had pulled out of desks. They defecated into
plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them
had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a photocopier.
The soldiers urinated into empty mineral water bottles. These were
scattered by the dozen in all the rooms of the building, in cardboard
boxes, among the piles of rubbish and rubble, on desks, under desks,
next to the furniture the soldiers had smashed, among the children's
books that had been thrown down. Some of the bottles had opened
and the yellow liquid had spilled and left its stain.
'It was especially difficult to enter two floors of the building because
of the pungent stench of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was also
scattered everywhere. In some of the rooms, not far from the heaps
of feces and the toilet paper, remains of rotting food were scattered.
In one corner, in the room in which someone had defecated into a
drawer, full cartons of fruits and vegetables had been left behind. The
toilets were left overflowing with bottles filled with urine, feces and
toilet paper. Relative to other places, the soldiers did not leave behind
them many sayings scrawled on the walls. Here and there were the
candelabrum symbols of Israel, stars of David, praises for the
Jerusalem Betar soccer team.'
This is not a tale we are ever likely to see in the American\Zionist press, so
the vast majority of Americans who think with Menachem Begin that
nobody can preach to Israel about ethics, that Israel's army is the
only moral army in the world and always employs the doctrine of
'purity of arms,' will go on thinking that way.
But I cannot.
I am forced to ask some questions that that American majority
will no doubt never hear: Can it, for instance, be called terrorism
if an entire unit of the Israeli army forsakes purity of arms and
spends a month crapping on floors, on piles of children's artwork,
in desk drawers, on photocopiers?
Is this self-defence, or 'rooting out the terrorist infrastructure'?
Is it anti-Semitic to wonder what happened to the moral compass
of a society that spawns a group of young men who will intermingle
their own religious and national symbols with feces and urine, as if
the drawings and the excrement both constitute valued autographs?
Do they think Israeli shit is cleaner, holier than anyone else's?
Why are my taxes paying for this army?
How can Palestinians ever make peace in the face of filth and
disrespect like this?
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