Palestinians Are Fighting for Their Lives; Israel Is Fighting for the Occupation - Opinion - Opinion - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2015-10-07/ty-article/.premium/the-purpose-of-the-escalation/0000017f-e53a-d9aa-afff-fd7a560e0000
2015
Young Palestinians do not go out to murder Jews because they are Jews, but because we are their occupiers, their torturers, their jailers, the thieves of their land and water, their exilers, the demolishers of their homes, the blockers of their horizon. Young Palestinians, vengeful and desperate, are willing to lose their lives and cause their families great pain because the enemy they face proves every day that its malice has no limits.
Even the language is malicious. Jews are murdered, Palestinians are killed and die. Is that so? The problem doesn’t begin with our not being permitted to write that a soldier or police officer murdered Palestinians, at close range, when his life was not in danger, or by remote control or from a plane or a drone. But it is part of the problem. Our comprehension is captive to a retroactively censored language that distorts reality. In our language, Jews are murdered because they are Jews and Palestinians find their death and their distress, because presumably that’s what they’re looking for.
Our worldview is shaped by the consistent betrayal by Israeli media outlets of their duty to report events, or their lack of the technical and the emotional ability to contain all of the details of the world war that we are conducting in order to preserve our superiority in the land between the river and the sea.
Not even this newspaper has the economic resources to employ 10 reporters and fill 20 pages with reports on all the attacks in times of escalation and all the attacks of the occupation in times of calm, from shooting through building a road that destroys a village to legalizing a settlement outpost and a million more assaults. Every day. The random examples we do manage to report are but a drop in the ocean, and they have no impact on the comprehension of the situation for a large majority of Israelis.
The goal of this unilateral war is to force the Palestinians to give up all their national demands in their homeland. Netanyahu wants escalation because experience so far has proved that the periods of calm after the bleeding return us not to the starting line, but rather to a new low in the Palestinian political system, and adds privileges to the Jews in Greater Israel.
Privileges are the chief factor that distorts our understanding of our reality, blinding us. Because of them, we fail to comprehend that even with weak, “present-absent” leadership, the Palestinian people — scattered in its Indian reservations — will not give up and will continue to find the strength necessary to resist our malicious mastership.