[statecom-discuss] From the front page of Google-News, 'Never again' gone mad in Israel

[Colby E.Peterson]

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
'Never again' gone mad in Israel

By SANDY TOLAN
GUEST COLUMNIST

In the name of forcing the release of a single soldier, Israel has  
seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its  
interior ministry, the prime minister's offices and a school;  
threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing  
overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the  
civilian population if it does not "follow all orders" of the Israel  
Defense Forces; loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the  
Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza";  
fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and  
demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity  
and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-down Gaza, are  
down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate  
conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme  
Israeli measures in the name of security.

"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer  
from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The  
Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our  
children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No  
feelings at all? The world is silent!"

For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective  
understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely  
less valuable than an Israeli's; that no amount of suffering by  
innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single  
Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it  
fuels, has been driven home endlessly through decades of shellings,  
wars and uprisings past.

Indeed Omer's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back  
to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of  
Independence, is called al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe, by  
Palestinians. During the 1948 conflict, more than 700,000  
Palestinians fled the violence or were driven from their homes. In  
the middle of July, when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, more than  
30,000 Arabs marched into exile, some for more than 20 miles. Many  
never made it; those who did were certain they would be coming back  
in a matter of days or weeks. Fifty-eight years later, they remain in  
exile.

Some refugees wear the keys to their homes around their neck; others  
tell stories of golden fields, or of a lemon tree whose fruit grows  
larger in the memory with each passing year.

Fifty-eight summers after the Nabka, as U.S.-made weapons pound Gaza  
from Israel, a déjà vu settles on the old men and women of the  
refugee camps, and in the vast diaspora beyond, reminding them of yet  
another bitter anniversary.

The latest attacks by Israel in Gaza, ostensibly on behalf of a  
single soldier, recall the comments by extremist Rabbi Yaacov Perrin,  
in his eulogy for U.S. Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994  
massacred 27 Palestinians praying in the Hebron mosque. "One million  
Arabs," Perrin declared, "are not worth a Jewish fingernail."

Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and their nation's current  
actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the  
Holocaust, to "never again go like sheep to the slaughter." But if  
"never again" drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice  
that the reprisals themselves are obscenely out of scale to the  
provocation: For every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far  
from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down on  
the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half  
Gazans are made to suffer. In Israel, today, it is "never again" gone  
mad.

The irony is that, contrary to making themselves more safe, the  
Israelis, just like the Americans in Iraq, are only sowing the seeds  
of more hatred and rage.

Sandy Tolan is author of "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the  
Heart of the Middle East" and a professor at the Graduate School of  
Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. He will be  
reading from his book at 7 p.m. Thursday at University Temple United  
Methodist Church in Seattle.