In Israeli new speak Palestinians are "terminated", not murdered, writes Haim Bresheeth* Is it still possible for an Israeli to murder a Palestinian? To read the papers, or listen to the media, one must assume it is not, and that it never happens. Palestinians, on the other hand, murder Israelis all the time -- usually blowing themselves up to achieve this. Israeli soldiers are normally reported as having been involved in shootings with "militants" or "terrorists" which led to some of them "dying from their wounds" (not from the bullets...) or in shootings which "led to the death" of some Palestinian boy or girl; sometimes Israelis are described as killing in "self-defence", (normally defending themselves against unarmed civilians). Sometimes, Israeli soldiers even claim to have killed someone "by mistake" -- they actually meant someone else, you see... Sorry! We won't kill him again, promise... At other times they are "forced to shoot into a crowd of protesters" (by whom? one wonders), or shoot at "suspicious" Palestinians (are there Palestinians who are not suspicious?). The Israeli media, on the other hand, has developed a whole raft of Orwellian Newspeak to describe the death and destruction inflicted daily by the Israeli occupation forces. Assassinations and extra-judicial murders are described as "(ex)termination", "focussed termination" "taking out targets" and "cleansing" or "neutralising". "Surgical strike" is now more popular than ever, obviously, as is "collateral damage". After all, a bomb dropped from a plane onto a Gaza street, killing tens of civilians is not murder, is it? To read the descriptions, you might be excused for thinking that it is rodents and vermin that are being discussed. And therein lies the painful parallels, hardly ever to be voiced or even hinted at, with other, famous occupation regimes, allowing the blood of people belonging to the wrong ethno-national group. It may have been the Hebrew Bible which, some millennia back, has placed murder as one of the highest taboos of all cultures, and quite high on the Ten Commandments; There is another set of commandments in force now in the Palestinian territories terrorised by Israeli forces, though. It is also a very different group of moral legislators that make the rules now, led by the chief commander, Gen Ariel Sharon, a man who even the official Israel inquiry which looked into the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, could not cleanse him of responsibility for that atrocity, and banned him for life from becoming minister of defence ever again, due to the role he played in letting the Lebanese militias into the camps to do the dirty work for him. It is the commanders who are in charge now, and they rewrite the Commandments. Listen for example to the chilling voice of the Commander R ("Israeli officer: I was right to shoot 13-year-old child", The Guardian, 24 November) who was recorded killing a 13-year-old girl, described on the tape as "scared to death" and on her way away from the Israeli forces. The Army communications record has him as saying this, after he not only killed (that word again!) the girl, then turning back and emptying the rest of his bullets into her dead body: "I and another soldier... are going in a little nearer, forward, in order to confirm the kill. Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her. Over." But this is not all that he said. He continues on the tape: "This is Commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over." So the new Commandments are now clear. Anything that moves needs to be killed. Thou Shalt not Let the Enemy Live, even if he or she are three years old. From a Commander to a Commandant, in one easy step. This murder, just one of many thousands, was too much for the hardened soldiers of this commander, and they went to the most popular Israeli daily paper to tell their story, after all their attempts to get him court-marshalled were turned down by a tissue of lies spun by the army spokesperson, and supported by the brass all the way to the top. An inquiry set up by the army found "no wrongdoing". Naturally; Was the girl not a Palestinian, after all? Palestinians can be only terminated, not murdered, and what is "wrong" about this? The Commander R is not an aberration, as we will soon be told by Israeli propagandists. He is not even just a maniacal killer, as others will try and pretend. Instead, he is a typical Israeli "commander", who has been dehumanised by the occupation to the point this recording clearly demonstrates. After all, he is only doing what his leader is preaching -- did Sharon not announce to the world media that the killing of Arafat is authorised by him, with the missing detail being the date? By concentrating on this one murder, terrifying as it really was, we may be forgetting all the others; Let us not examine the trees, but notice the wood. The pictures of the bullet-ridden body, together with the story told by the newly- unveiled recording, tell a story not of one murder, but of murder as a system, a systematic murder which is condoned by the powers-that-be, newly-ensconced in the White House, and dealing with their own Orwellian setup, so closely inspired by the bloody and apocalyptic scripts of Gen Sharon. So what needs to happen for us to move decisively against this murderous regime of hatred and destruction? What needs to take place for Israelis to free themselves of this illegal, immoral and iniquitous occupation? How many little girls like Iman Al-Hams need to be murdered in this fashion for Jews everywhere to realise that their continued and unquestioning support for this regime is making it totally unlikely that peace will ever come to the Middle East. Do they not remember that those who live by the sword, shall also perish by it? It is the combined responsibility of the international community to bring this occupation to an early end, thus removing a festering wound which, if not treated now, will continue to create more havoc than any other trouble spot on the globe. If, as the papers now report, Tony Blair intends to see Gen Sharon, this is what he must bring about, or was it all just bluff and hot air? Now is the time to act. * The writer is an Israeli academic living and working in London. He is the co- editor (with Nira Yuval-Davis) of The Gulf War and the New World Order , published by Zed Books, and co-author (with Stuart Hood) of Introduction to the Holocaust , published by Icon Books.
