Jeff Blankfort stands up for Barbara Lubin's report of a Sophie's Choice story in Gaza. My point is, I love Barbara Lubin too, but as to this incident I want more precise information, and some names. Anecdote and journalism are different forms of expression. (Phil Weiss) Blankfort:
our times, working tirelessly in behalf of the children of Palestine,Lebanon and Iraq
while fending off vicious barbs from Berkeley's smug pro-Israel
community. She knows truth from fiction and she doesn't make up
stories, nor do the Palestinian mothers whose treatment at the hands of
Israel's sadist military have been reported over the years in Israel's
Hebrew press, and were available in English through the late Dr.Israel Shahak's translations.
I have my own stories of Israeli sadism to tell. In 1970, while in Amman, I was invited to spend the night at Schneller refugee camp
outside the city by a young man who worked as a guard at the PLO office
in the city. I found that I would be sharing sleeping quarters with
three others besides the guard,the five thin mattresses placed side by
side filling the entire width of the small metal hut. When night
fell,the guard took his uniform to put on his pajama top I noticed that
the upper part of his body, which was all I saw, was covered with
small scars. When I asked what they were he told me that when he was
16, Israeli soldiers in the West Bank
had accused him of being a fedayeen, which is what Palestinian fighters
were called in those days, and asked him for information about things
he didn't know. When he told them that they responded by pushing their
lighted cigarettes into his arms and upper torso and they capped it off
by breaking both of his arms backwards at the elbows. He then became a
fedayeen.
Shortly afterward, also in Amman, I met a woman leader in the Democratic Front,
DFLP, to whom I mentioned the young man's story which prompted her to
tell me her own. It seems she had been caught in her West Bank home by
the Israelis who demanded information and when she refused they began
to rape her daughter in order to get her to talk. When she refused and
after her daughter had been done with, the leader of the Israeli
contingent asked her what kind of a mother she was to allow her
daughter to be raped before her eyes? She told me all this calmly,
without histrionics.
From my own experiences in the West Bank,Gaza
and Lebanon I can attest to the sadism that permeates the Israeli
military. Its overpowering presence dominates even the statements of
Israeli officers and their PR spokespersons about their Arab enemies
who they see as subhuman. The German army
in the 3rd Reich was known for the sadism of its elite units and the US
military as we are well aware has its core of sadists but it is safe to
say that no modern army has descended to the level of sadism as has
that of Israel.
