Israel kills Palestinians all the time. On average, the IDF kills one Palestinian civilian every two days with impunity in the occupied territories, as B’tselem documented last year. Just the other day here, Seham did a post about three arbitrary killings in the occupied territories. There will be no accountability. No American politicians are raising their voices about the boys shot while collecting rubble near the Gaza border fence.
The reason that our media and politicians get so exercised about Israeli dead is –I believe– because of the Holocaust and Never-again-ism. Even one Jewish death is seen as a tragedy recalling the extermination of Jews in Europe. And the Holocaust was the world’s rationale for voting to establish Israel.
The result is that a moral imperative, Never-again, is used to justify exceptionalism. But as Norman Finkelstein’s mother, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and a Nazi death camp, used to tell her son, the meaning of the Holocaust is that her Jewish experience should be shared with everyone– to prevent it ever happening to anyone else.
Americans have dealt with this kind of racist exceptionalism, and (I’m a liberal) we’ve largely defeated it. Mark Twain skewered the attitude in Huck Finn. Late in the book he brings Huck to a farm in Arkansas, and Sally Phelps wonders what’s taken him so long to get there (warning, n-word coming)
“What kep’ you–boat get around?”…
“It warn’t the grounding–that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn long after slavery. The point of his book is that racism was perfectly “respectable” — his word — back in the 1840s. Today, too, we must work to destroy respectable racism.
Update: This post originally stated that one of the Palestinians killed was a 75-year-old mother of 7. She was shot by Israeli forces, not killed.
