Two weeks ago I saw the thrilling production of Julius Caesar at St Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The actors are all women; and the image of the show the company highlights at its website is of Harriet Walter as Brutus, wearing red gloves. Brutus and the other senator/assassins put on those gloves to show that they’ve washed their hands in Caesar’s blood.
It’s an arresting image; and the New York Times’s Sara Krulwich made a photo of the actresses wearing those gloves, which ran with the Times review.
The scene reminded me of an exchange I had with Scott Roth in Ramallah earlier this year. We were talking about the famous incident during the second intifada when a Palestinian mob carried away two Israeli soldiers who were being held by authorities and murdered them, and some stained their hands in the soldiers’ blood. The incident is generally called a “lynching” in the Israeli press, and it figures in two books by Israelis arguing that Palestinians are not partners for peace.
‘”For the Israeli public, that was the moment when the peace process with Arafat died. A lynching inside a police station became the symbol, for Israelis, of Arafat’s real intentions,” Yossi Klein Halevi writes in his new book Like Dreamers. 
- The Ramallah “lynching” of 2000
While Yaacov Lozowick writes in Right to Exist:
[T]wo reservists who mistakenly entered Ramallah, where Arafat has his headquarters, were lynched by a mob in the center of town. The purportedly wild and uncontrollable mob had the presence of mind to confiscate the film from all of the cameramen present, except for an Italian who smuggled out video images of the killers exultantly bathing their hands in Jewish blood. It was a deeply shocking illustration of the savage hatred of the enemy we had thought we were making peace with: say what you like about Israeli policies, we could not think of a single case where Jews washed their hands in the blood of their enemies.”
In Ramallah, Roth made the point that while horrific, the “lynching” was not actually extraordinary: it is not all that unusual for political militants to defile the bodies of their enemies. The history of Algerian independence, for instance, is littered with grotesque mutilations of bodies. I just read Ted Morgan’s book. The French tortured Algerians with electricity applied to their genitals and threw people out of airplanes. The revolutionaries cut off the sexual parts of political victims and stuffed them in their mouths.
Supporters of Israel have sought to argue that Palestinian resistance is in a different category from other forms of resistance. And that Israelis are specially moral. As Lozowick writes:
“[The] need to account for their actions in a way that shows a decent respect for the opinions of mankind is one of the things that distinguishes the Jews from their enemies, who observe no morality at all in waging war and show no compunction in twisting the truth to their ends.”
In Julius Caesar, the senator-assassins justify their actions by itemizing Caesar’s abuses of power. Here’s what Shakespeare had Brutus say, to explain the bloodying:
Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth, even to the marketplace,
And waving our red weapons o’er our heads
Let’s all cry, “Peace, freedom, and liberty!”
Good. OK for Shakespeare (and perhaps for Brutus et al) but not OK for (perhaps a few) Palestinians (on whose behalf the ENTIRE peace process was deemed null and void by excuse-hungry Israelis who probably hadn’t intended to make peace anyhow).
“[The] need to account for their actions in a way that shows a decent respect for the opinions of mankind is one of the things that distinguishes the Jews from their enemies, who observe no morality at all in waging war and show no compunction in twisting the truth to their ends.”
Following the advice of Kissinger, whose advice they certainly did not need in this matter, Israel has not sought the “decent respect of the opinions of mankind” in their actions (as snipers shot kids throwing rocks that couldn’t even reach the snipers, as soldiers broke the bones of Palestinians, as Israelis ushered Lebanese murderers into Sabra and Shatilla, as * * *), but by keeping reporters away from the action.
And by seeing to it that their supporters in the USA suppressed as far as possible American knowledge of “GOLIATH” .
Israel wants the respect without the cost of moderating their actions to deserve it. The BIG LIE and its cousin the BIG SILENCE are the weapon of choice against the American people (very much including the American Jewish public).
When I was in the Israel army, I heard of cases of Israeli soldiers cutting off the ears of dead enemy fighters in Lebanon, as “souvenirs”. The person who told me the story (an officer in a very sensitive position) said that she had actually seen one of these “trophies”. I found it especially disturbing that this officer found the whole thing incredibly funny, and that she described the severed organ as “cute”.
I’m confused. The israelis are at war with the Palestinian people, as they’ve demonstrated for decades. They also refuse to abide by any of the laws of war in their dealings with the Palestinian people. Here, two soldiers are captured and are given the same kind of not-in-accordance-with-the-laws-of-war treatment that they dish out to the Palestinian people in their war against them. On what basis do the israelis believe that they should have been treated better than the way the israelis treat their opponents??? If the israelis believe it is okay to use snipers to kill children and farmers, burn them with white phosphorus, use bombs and poison to kill anyone they want, around the world, murder children by dropping 2000 lb. bombs on their apartment complexes, etc., etc., etc., etc., on what basis do they complain that these two active duty soldiers, participating in the generations-long war against Palestine, were KIA’d??
Jews have the same wiring as everyone else, capable of soaring magnificence and dreadful cruelty and everything in between , with Israel fond of the cruel end of the spectrum.
Israel would class even the Norwegians as barbarian if it meant more houses for
their miserable settlers.
Settler colonialism always dehumanises the natives. The Aboriginals were no better than dogs, the Irish stupid, the Algerians barbaric and so on. Sad to see the jewish state resort to this sort of thing,