A newspaper serving the orthodox Jewish community of New York and New Jersey thinks it’s funny to joke about Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinians.
The Jewish Link of Teaneck, NJ, published a “Purim satire” in its issue last week with the headline, “100,000 Palestinans shot by Israeli soldiers” that said that Palestinians were volunteering to be shot by an Israeli “Sharpshooters” unit that is dispensing the COVID-19 vaccine.
The article said that Israel was dispensing the vaccine free to Palestinians so as “to improve relations with its Arab neighbors,” and the “doses are being injected by an elite unit of Israeli soldiers, who are specially trained in the use of hypodermic needles.”
The Health Ministry was “skeptical that Palestinians would volunteer to be shot by the Israeli military,” the Link joked. But 100,000 had been injected, and an Israeli officer said:
“After all the Arabs are shot once, we look forward to shooting them a second time…”
Purim is a Jewish holiday celebrating the biblical story of Queen Esther overthrowing a Persian plot to kill Jews. It is marked by festivities, including costumes and even drunkenness.
The writer/musician Rich Siegel pointed out the satire to us. He wrote a letter to the editor of the Jewish Link saying that “any decent person would find [the item] to be in extremely bad taste.”
In case you don’t understand why your joke is beyond offensive, let me remind you that many many thousands of Palestinians and other Arabs have been shot and killed, or shot and maimed, in the bloody history of your racist apartheid country…
What would your response be if anyone were to make jokes about Auschwitz?
Siegel, who is chair of the activist organization Deir Yassin Remembered, said the editor has not responded to him.
The Jewish Link boasts a wide circulation to religious communities in the New York metropolitan area.
The IDF, the self-proclaimed ‘most moral army in the world’, has distinguished itself over the years with its penchant for black humor. Who can forget the following, popular IDF t-shirts of recent vintage. One, with a picture of a pregnant woman, said, “1 Shot 2 Kills”, while a second, showing a Palestinian child in a rifle sight, said, “The smaller they are, the harder it is.”
This visceral, racist hatred for Palestinians is, at once, both disgusting and terrifying!
I just wrote to the Jewish Link, and said I bet that (a) plenty of their readers assumed the Palestinians were shot with bullets and (b) had no problem with it. Let’s see if I get a reply. I doubt it.
Phil, do you happen to have the article saved? Looks like they removed and replaced the section in-question.
When I read the piece, word for word, I would have published that in The Electronic Intifada’s humor section “Al-Basselah” (“The Onion” in Arabic) back in my editor days. At lot of that stuff could certainly have been argued to be “tasteless”: https://web.archive.org/web/20040803180604/http://electronicintifada.net/al-bassaleh/
The difference would only have been who was saying it. It would have a whole different slant if this was considered Palestinian humor. It’s like African Americans and the N-word. Who gets to make the joke? Not whitey.
Having said that, the general topic of the piece isn’t exactly favorable to the Israeli army, evoke any positive images of Israeli military service, and again reminds everyone that Israel not only abandoned the idea of vaccinating Palestinians but didn’t allow the vaccines into the OPTs—as if viruses used human-drawn maps to spread.
Is this perhaps at some level a protest by the writer at Israeli actions in the OPTs? When Jon Stewart makes a joke, do we assume that he approves of the subject matter? Why in this instance is it different? It’s back to who is saying it. Even if a critique was meant, it wasn’t ever going to work in this context. It’s a punch up vs. punch down situation.
I do recall that a lot of Zionist Purim humor which I’ve seen over the years often does touch on the death of Palestinians. That should be a pause for thought for those in that cult.