The Israeli army’s libido to destroy
The public accepts any military operation, as long as it ends with Palestinian bereavement and flattened Palestinian houses
Amira Hass Jan 22, 2018 11:13 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-israeli-army-s-libido-to-destroy-1.5751612
Is it the Border Police spokesman or the Israel Defense Forces’ mouthpiece? Who is supposed to reply to a Haaretz query asking why our forces demolished four dwellings in last week’s raid on the Wad Burqin neighborhood in Jenin, whereas official reports led us to believe it was only one?
Was someone embarrassed? After all, there is no need to hide the results of our libido for destruction from the Israeli public. The public accepts any military operation, as long as it ends with Palestinian bereavement and flattened Palestinian houses. Our crowds in the Colosseum like to touch the collective vengeance and the suspicions of the Shin Bet security service are more sacred to them than biblical verses. Even the so-called Supermarket Law could not divert attention away from the soothing sight of ever more piles of rubble, under which lie notebooks, schoolbags, blood pressure medication, school report cards and toothbrushes belonging to 18 people.
On Saturday afternoon, as I was returning from the scenes of devastation in Wad Burqin, which is next to the Jenin refugee camp, the IDF spokesman directed me to the Border Police and the Shin Bet. I followed the advice. The Shin Bet never answered. The Border Police spokesman wrote back: “The overall response will be given by the army.” This response never arrived and the article on the raid was filed without it. On Monday a soldier at the army spokesperson’s office told me that “the incident was managed by the Border Police, from beginning to end. They have to supply answers.”
Is this game of Ping-Pong an indirect admission that the raid failed? Ahmed Nasser Jarrar, the suspect in the murder of Rabbi Raziel Shevah in the West Bank earlier this month, was not found even after we fired a missile at his mother Khitam’s home, after which it caught fire and was razed by our bulldozers.
To the extended Jarrar family, all its children and its elderly, who endured a night of terror, the confusion between Border Police and army spokesmen makes no difference. Ahmed Nasser’s cousin, Ahmed Ismail, was killed. Israel is holding on to his body; an empty hole in the ground, dug immediately after his death, is waiting. Our forces reported that he opened fire and wounded two of our policemen. His brother Mohammed says that the two of them left the house together to finish talking about family matters. They parted near the house of the widow Khitam. Mohammed returned home and Ismail went to sleep at a friend’s house. If he did open fire at the armed invaders, it’s a source of pride for the family, not just pain. However, the family finds it hard to believe that this happened, since Ismail wasn’t interested in guns.
According to Palestinian reports, the people injured in the raid are from the Jenin refugee camp. Three of the arrested men (one of whom has been released) were apprehended outside the neighborhood. They are not members of the Jarrar family. Except for Ismail, whose involvement is still unclear, it seems that if there were Palestinians who opened fire at the armed Israelis, they were not from the Jarrar family.
But four of the family’s homes were demolished. Acting casually, our wonderful boys shelled and demolished Khitam’s house in a cruel and sadistic procedure called “the pressure cooker,” which takes revenge against the entire family without a trial, under the guise of operational necessity. And Ismail’s house? Was that an operational necessity too? The impression is that it was demolished as collective punishment after an on-the-spot trial, after the special forces were enraged that two of its members were wounded and determined that Ismail was the one who had fired at them. Without warning or delay, the bulldozers plowed into the house of Ali and Nasim Jarrar while their family members, the youngest one six years old, were inside. The choice was to die under the bulldozers or to risk being shot as you ran out. They were caught by soldiers when they fled through a back door. They were detained and then released while our bulldozers completed the job.
We also pulverized one more unpopulated old stone building known as Dar Alhajat. The last people to live in it were two elderly sisters. The extended family’s children used to go there to play and be pampered. The children and grandchildren of this family will continue to bear the torch of fury and revulsion directed at the destroyers.