|
The file has been closed in the murder case of Abir Aramin
Nurit Peled Elhanan
How sad it is to come to the realization that the number of those who
evade service in the army of occupation is so low that there is
virtually no effect on the motivation of Israel's children to put on the
uniform of brutality.
Professor Stewart Cohen of Bar Ilan University consoles us by declaring
that the "blame" lies in the increase in the number of Haredis who do
not serve and he informs us that the army of the United States would
have been happy with such a low percentage of evaders during the Vietnam
war. Maybe we would do well to learn something from the Americans of the
1960s, or even from the Haredi Jews who fear for the safety of their
children.
When the extent of evasion became known, I was invited onto the
programme of Oded Shahar, "Politika", as a mother who will not permit
her son (now 15 years old) to join the army. Apart from me, I was
informed over the course of a protracted campaign of persuasion, only
men were invited, most of them warmongering generals like Effie Eitam
and Yossi Peled. After I was convinced that my participation in the
program would be important and decisive, I agreed. The researcher asked
me why I would not allow my son to enlist. I explained to her that an
army that has been involved for forty years now in systematic and
growing abuse of a civilian population, (abuse that even a courageous
journalist like Gideon Levy calls by the strange mitigating name of
"policing"), an army that teaches its soldiers that killing Palestinian
children and those who protect them, like Rachel Corrie and James
Miller, is not a crime, an army whose commanders are immune to
punishment though they commit daily crimes against humanity, is not a
suitable place for my son, who was brought up to love people, who has
Palestinian friends, whose brothers and parents have Palestinian friends
who are subjected to that same reign of terror and daily torment. After
half an hour I was told that despite my decisive contribution there were
not enough seats on the stage.
A few days later we were told in an isolated solitary news broadcast
that the file on the murder of Abir Aramin, the daughter of Salwa and
Bassam Aramin. Bassam is one of the founders of the Palestinian-Israeli
movement Combatants for Peace, where my sons Elik and Guy are members.
Bassam Aramin spent 9 years in an Israeli jail for being a member of the
Fatah in the Hebron area and trying to throw a grenade on an Israeli
army Jeep which was patrolling in Occupied Hebron. On a Tuesday
afternoon, the 16 th of January [2007], an Israeli soldier shot his nine
year old daughter, Abir, in the head as she was leaving school to go
home. The soldier will not spend an hour in jail. In Israel, soldiers
are not imprisoned for killing Arabs. Never. It does not matter whether
the Arabs are young or old, real or potential terrorists, peaceful
demonstrators or stone throwers. The army has not conducted an inquiry
in Abir Aramin's death. Neither the police nor the courts have hardly
questioned anyone except for Abir's sister, who was holding her hand
while she was falling. The young sister was asked time and again how
many meters were they from the school gate, from the kiosk, from the
jeep????? How many meters? Don't you remember??? There was hardly any
investigation except for a private one by Bassam and his friends who
know exactly who the killer is. But as far as the Israeli Defense Forces
are concerned, the shooting did not happen. The army's official account
of her death is that she might have been hit by a stone that one of her
classmates was throwing "at our forces." That regardless of the finding
of a senior pathologist, who worked for many years in an institute of
forensic medicine.
One of the allegations against the evaders is that they have stopped
believing in "values" such as sacrifice. Whose sacrifice, exactly? On
what altar? To what god? The soldiers of Israel are called upon to
sacrifice children, parents, volunteers, and sometimes themselves on the
altar of the megalomania of the insolent corrupt leaders of the State,
who succeeded in converting this whole country into one big altar on
which they sacrifice other people's children to the god of death.
Children, fetuses and newborns are daily flung with cold blood into the
kingdom of dead children that is constantly growing beneath our feet.
And no one is guilty of their deaths; no one is ever punished for the
murder of a Palestinian child. The State takes care of those who serve
it, sometimes. Other times it sacrifices even them, with the same
cold-bloodedness and for the same reasons.
And the murderers? What about them? Do they know that they committed
crimes? Do they toss and turn in their beds at night? Are they tormented
by images of the small bodies that convulse and fall under their rifles,
bombs and shells? Probably not. We know of no case in which any soldier
turned himself in and expressed remorse for his actions. That is the
biggest success of Israeli education: the distinction between blood and
blood, between dead child and dead child, and the inculcating of the
secure belief that the murder of Palestinians and their friends is not a
crime.
Everyone who enlists in the army knows this and is prepared for it. Half
the nation! How many millions are there in half the nation? How many
millions of young men and women who are simply unmoved by the crying of
a child, the agonies of a woman in labour, the pleas of an old man and
the deaths of thousands of innocent people? How many millions of people
who never learned to refuse orders that are manifestly inhumane even if
they are legal according to the racist laws of their state, and to say
no to corrupt leaders and bloodthirsty generals?
Well done, IDF! Well done, Israeli Jewish education, that has succeeded
nearly perfectly in bestowing the values of racism, nearly without
opposition.
And if my son Yigal really does want to participate in the military
programs that they impose on high school students starting in grade 10,
or God forbid, to enlist in the army of occupation and torment, I will
see it as a dreadful educational failure. A terrible maternal failure.
And if I do not do everything I can to prevent him from becoming a
murderer or a corpse at age of 18 I will know that I betrayed him and my
vocation as a mother.
Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall |
