Posted: 4/13/2018 11:36:00 PM
Author: Giulio Meotti
Source: This article originally appeared on the arutz 7 website on April 13, 2018.
Imagine that you are that Israeli soldierby Giulio Meotti
Imagine that you are that Israeli soldier
The consequences and the causes are eliminated, only the performance remains, chiseled to transform the defenders into aggressors, the besieged into executioners.
Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.
Imagine you are an Israeli soldier in Kissufim. It is a kibbutz on the border near the Gaza Strip. It is there since the Fifties, built by pioneers from Latin America within the "recognized borders" of Israel, those of 1948. After the tragic evacuation of the Jews in 2005, Kissufim is the front line for Israel. Beyond it, there is nothing else. The kibbutz over the years has suffered infiltrations of Palestinian fedayeen, Hamas missile launches, attempts to build tunnels that emerge between its houses and, in October 2017, even an Israeli strike that killed 7 Palestinian terrorists under the kibbutz in one of those deadly tunnels.
Imagine being that Israeli soldier two months after the strike. You are facing a Palestinian uprising beyond the fence that separates Israel from that enclave ruled by Hamas, an organization dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, a sort of Afghanistan of Islamism, terrorism, submission and torture facing the Mediterranean Sea.
The riot has been going on for two hours, with stone throwing and attempts to break the fence. The military order for all is not to approach less than a hundred meters from that fence. Soldiers attempt to disperse the riot with tear gas, megaphones and other instruments. One of the Palestinian leaders of this riot approaches the border. The soldier has the order to hit him non-lethally. There is no other way to stop an invasion if the assailant is determination to pass through the fence. The soldier interrupts the order because a child appears near the target. Then, the soldier fires and wounds the Palestinian. An illegal video is filmed by soldiers who have nothing to do with the action and in the background we hear fellow soldiers cheering for the success of the operation. "Woh, what a video!"
An Israeli non-governmental organization funded by many European countries in order to de-legitimize Israel, Breaking the Silence, spreads the video. We are in the days after the lethal confrontations in Gaza after the "March of the Return". The propaganda needs important material and that video of four months earlier offers the opportunity. And immediately goes around the world.
The media launched it with sensationalist headlines, transforming the legitimate Israeli attempt to stop the invasion of a border and ended with the wounding of a Palestinian - invasion that would later witness the participation of 50,000 Palestinians under the leadership of Hamas - in a sadistic and free videogame of the "Zionist occupiers" who shoot the Arab.
It is a classic case of the anti-Israeli delegitimization: the context, the consequences and the causes are eliminated, only the performance remains, chiseled to transform the defenders into aggressors, the besieged as executioners. They speak Hebrew, that's enough. Nobody wants them to see Palestinians partying after the attacks on Israeli civilians or Arabic sermons in the al-Aqsa mosque against the "sons of pigs and monkeys".
This is the story of the recent Hamas' attempts to demolish the border line between Israel and Gaza. Everything disappears: guns, grenades, human shields, children and indoctrinated families, the money that Hamas gave to the injured and the families of the victims (3,000 dollars to the dead, 500 to the wounded), the cannibalistic proclamations of the leaders of the terror ("we will eat the livers of the Israelis", "we will pull the hearts out of their bodies"), the double identity of the photographer killed (he was a member of the security forces of Hamas), the true nature of the victims (at least 15 of the 19 victims of the first weekend of riots were members of the Palestinian jihadist organizations) and the reason for Israel, which thus prevented the outbreak of war (the one in 2014 took off after the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli boys).
Everything must evaporate, step aside, get out of the screen and newspaper articles, to leave room only for the unequal and iniquitously described confrontation between a great military force and a people armed with stones and joy.
In these thirty years of wars and frictions between Israelis and Palestinians, nobody remembers the Israeli military missions aborted due to the presence of Palestinian civilians, the checkpoints removed and exploited to carry out attacks, the Israeli humanitarian aid trucks entered in Gaza, the Israeli hospitals always full of injured and sick Palestinians, Palestinian ambulances used to transport weapons and murderers, UN schools from which missiles are launched, tunnels dug under mosques, trials and convictions given to Israeli soldiers who have broken rules of engagement.
The Great Lie has eaten the truth of the conflict, namely that Israel, the besieged at every border, it is the true weak part of the conflict.
The conquest of the hearts and minds of the West is the biggest Palestinian booty. This is how the "Palestinian question" has become strategic over the last fifty years and has dominated the UN stage. Without the newspapers, the NGOs, the chanceries, the news of the evening, the social media and the squares, the Palestinians today would be more irrelevant than the Tibetans or the Papuans, their victims yes of an authentic "occupation", but last in the hierarchy of international compassion.
Terror works. Anti-Israel terror also goes viral.
