August 2 2006

“1 Million Arabs Not Worth A Jewish Fingernail”

Those were the words of extremist Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, who murdered praying Palestinians back in 1994.
Arabs feel, now more than ever, that those words reflect the opinion of the whole world and not the Rabbi’s alone. Their lives are worthless compared to Israelis. They
believe that the world is fine with thousands of Arabs being displaced and butchered in cold blood, but let someone harm one Israeli, and the world will go crazy.

Just came across a great article by Sandy Tolan, the article, although a bit long, but is definitely worth reading. I’ve selected few parts of it to share on my blog, you can read
the article in full here.

“Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier “kidnapped by terrorists” (or, if you prefer, “captured by the resistance”), Israel has done the following: 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 IDF” (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.

In the most recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, as in countless explosions of battles past, the trauma is only reengaged. Fifty-eight summers after the Nakba — as Palestinian women again sell off their gold to buy olives and bread; as Israeli planes again drop leaflets with dire warnings for Arab civilians; as doctors lacking medicines or electricity again struggle to rescue the wounded — a déjà vu settles over the old men and women of the refugee camps, and in the vast diaspora beyond, reminding them of yet another bitter anniversary year.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 American Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 slaughtered 27 Palestinians praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs, part of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. “One million Arabs,” Perrin declared, “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”

Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and Israel’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 completely out of scale to the provocation: For every crude
Qassam rocket falling usually harmlessly and far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down with far more destructive power on the Palestinians. For
one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. Today, Israel’s policy is a case of “never again” gone mad.
The irony is that, contrary to helping build the safe harbor they have sought for so long, the Israeli government, just like the U.S. in Iraq, is only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.”



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Posted August 2, 2006 by Eman Abukhadra in category "My Work Diaries", "Palestine