I am trying to come up with something to say about the body I saw yesterday in the morgue at Kamal Adwan hospital. That body had belonged to an old man, 65 years old, who was shot through the neck by an Israeli sniper from 300 meters away while he was tying up his donkey on land he’d been farming for 40 years. An Israeli sniper murdered him for trespassing on his own land next to his own home in the buffer zone. He is the third civilian to have been killed the buffer zone in Gaza since I got here. No words will bring him back, and no coverage from mainstream news agencies will resurrect him. No eulogy will roll back time for his fatherless children. There’s no way to beg that IDF soldier not to murder Shaban Karmout, there’s no way to warp this world and ask him not to tie up his donkey but to remain inside his small home in Beit Lehiya where it’s safe and the Israeli army can’t shoot him. And there’s no outrage into which one can rub the faces of those who tolerate outrages that will outrage them enough to say that this is one outrage too many. It was not one too many, because there will be more, there will be many more, and tallying up their names in our notebooks with acid in our eyes will do nothing to prevent the slow filling of Gaza’s cemeteries with old men who remember fleeing in terror before Zionist militia. What can I say about Shaban Karmout that doesn’t turn him into a statistic in the endless pile of corpses that might slowly overwhelm the psyches of the conflicted people who support this obscenity? Or those who are not conflicted but simply accept that murdering old men is OK because once our old men were murdered?
Nothing passes like that
without account
All that you have done to our people
So that’s what I can do: register it in my notebook. It is registered, and there is an empty line after Shaban’s name. That is for those who they kill tomorrow.
This post originally appeared on Max Ajl’s blog Jewbonics.
