The enemy

Video above shot in Gaza in June 2009, six months after the onslaught.

Michael Ratner, speaking on Law and Disorder radio last week about Cindy and Craig Corrie’s civil action against Israel, denied, for the killing of their daughter Rachel in Gaza in 2003:

As they [the Corries] traveled around Israel talking about Rachel Corrie, they always carried with them not a picture of Rachel Corrie, but a picture of a 6-year-old boy who was in the house that Rachel Corrie was trying to protect. They also wanted the trial to focus on the fact of the number of Palestinians killed in roughly the same period when Rachel Corrie was protesting house demolitions. The lawyer for Rachel Corrie during the trial asked the Israeli brigade commander, how many Palestinians had been killed between August 2002 and march 2003? This is the brigade commander for the southern command which is Gaza. Of course the state of Israel objected, saying what’s the relevance of that, this is about supposed negligence in killing Rachel Corrie, etc. 

And then the lawyer for Rachel Corrie replied, and this is a statistic that’s important to remember, that in the Rafah area alone, that’s where Rachel Corrie was engaging in her protest, 101 people were killed, Palestinians, including 42 children, age 10-18. Those are the people Rachel Corrie was trying to protect, those were the people in the violence Rachel Corrie sacrificed her life for, putting her body between the oppressors, the Israelis, and the oppressed, the Palestinians

From Breaking the Silence’s recent report, titled “Children and Youth, Soldiers’ Testimonies, 2005-2011. Testimony 2, from a first sergeant posted to Hebron in 2010:

On your first arrest mission, you’re sure it’s a big deal, and it’s actually bullshit. You enter the Abu Sneina (Hebron) neighborhood and pick up three children. After that whole briefing, you’re there with your bulletproof vest and helmet and stuck with that ridiculous mission of separating women and children. It’s all taken so seriously and then what you end up with is a bunch of kids, you blindfold and shackle them and
drive them to the police station at Givat Ha’avot. That’s it, it goes on for months and you eventually stop thinking there are any terrorists out there, you stop believing there’s an enemy, it’s always some children or adolescents or some doctor we took out. You never know their names, you never talk with them, they always cry, shit in their pants.
Was there a case of someone shitting in his pants?
I remember once. Always that crying. There are those annoying moments when you’re on an arrest mission, and there’s no room in the police station, so you just take the kid back with you to the army post, blindfold him, put him in a room and wait for the police to come pick him up in the morning. He sits there like a dog…

Ali Abunimah, speaking at the Penn BDS conference last February:

How can Israel’s right to be a Jewish state be violated? One of the things Israelis fret about all the time is babies. Babies just like the beautiful Rafeef who I had the pleasure of playing with a few minutes earlier [a girl in the audience]. In Rafeef I see a beautiful child who has hopefully an incredible future in front of her. Israel sees a demographic threat. To Israel, Rafeef is the mortal enemy. Too many babies of the wrong type threaten Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. So Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is under mortal threat from– babies. Too many of the wrong type of babies. What’s the remedy for too many babies? Can anyone think of a legitimate remedy for too many babies? Well, one approach would be to stop the creation of wrong babies…

Again, from Breaking the Silence’s report on “Children and Youth…” Testimony 46, from a first sergeant performing an arrest in Beit Ur village in 2007 after a Jewish settler complained that boys in the occupied village had thrown stones at her. The sergeant describes the suspects as being 13 years old.

We picked up three kids there. The mother was crying, the women were all in tears, the kids were shackled, taken into the jeep, scared. I just try to think what they must have felt, what it’s like to be taken in an army jeep. I was sitting in back with one of those kids and the jeep bumps along the road, those roads out there… I took the driver’s helmet because he doesn’t need it in front, and placed it on the kid’s head. The driver turned around, saw the kid with his helmet, and said: “What are you doing?! I can’t wear it after this!” I got annoyed, I mean, what? If he wears your helmet then it’s filthy? “You’ll wash it out for me,” he said. What a buddy… When he got to company HQ, first he washed out his helmet in soap and water, and only then put it on his head, because it had been on the kid’s head for a few minutes. And this is a guy who votes for the Labour party, claims he is a leftie, but this disgusts him. How has this happened to us?