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If you throw a frog into boiling
water, it will jump out and save its life. But a frog swimming
in room temperature water that is gradually heated will grow
used to the heat; by the time the water boils, it's too late
and the frog dies. That's another metaphor for the resilience
of the Palestinians against any new weapon with which they are
attacked, a new Israeli regulation further limiting them, a
land expropriation. True, the frog doesn't die, but it is
exhausted.
But there's an absentee present making sure
the temperature constantly rises. In the development of the
Israeli system of control over the Palestinian people and
their land, the Israeli occupation has raised to the level of
genius the use of gradualness as a means of making people grow
used to something. The gradualness is implemented over a
period of time, but it is also spread out over
space.
The Israeli assault on the chances of the
Palestinian people to lead normal lives is evident in millions
of different ways. Here, a family is hurt, there, a village.
Here it's from ammunition, there from settlers, here it's a
new military order. A lot of it is reported on our side, but
spread out. The assault is intensified gradually. But the
overall totality of the damage is not felt, because of the way
it is gradually applied, dispersed over large
areas.
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Gideon Levy reports on
children from the south Hebron area, killed and wounded by an
Israel Defense Forces phosphorus shell. According to
international law, the use of phosphorus shells in populated
areas is forbidden, Levy reminds his readers. The IDF
Spokesman promises the use of phosphorus shells is "only to
mark boundaries and the boundaries of sectors," and that the
IDF will scout the area and neutralize any shells or similar
devices, if found, for the safety of the residents. In other
words, Levy notified the army that there was a population in
the area, and that when the army leaves a training area it
should neutralize any remaining dangerous ammunition left
behind. The report in the weekend paper passed without any
other media reaction to it, since it's just another
Palestinian child who will be killed and just another
Palestinian child who will suffer dreadful pain because of a
wound, so it's not news. We've gotten used to it.
The
report passed in silence like thousands of other reports that
were published and not published. All show how Israel violates
without disruption international law and how the Israeli
occupier is greedy for the land and how the people who live on
the land are merely redundant. And not only in the eyes of the
people in uniform. Take the army of Israeli planners and
architects, those who "shape the space" in the West Bank, as
the IDF calls the limitations on Palestinian transportation
and the internal checkpoints that constantly pop up, like
mushrooms after rain.
At what school of architecture
and planning did they learn to strangle houses and villages
with highways as wide as any in America and with airy
settlements? By planning Givat Ze'ev, Rechalim and Adam, Beit
Horon, Anatot and other settlements, the Israeli architects
are not only breaking international law. They are also
personally making sure the Palestinian residents of the nearby
village will be cut off from their land, or that the
Palestinian house won't have an access road, or there's a road
for Jews only, like the Modi'in-Givat Ze'ev road, which
reaches right up to the playground of an elementary school
that the military administration will not allow to build a
second floor.
In another violation of international
law, Israel is holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners
inside its territory and not in the occupied territory,
promulgating regulations that discriminate against the
Palestinian prisoners, compared to Jewish ones. The Prisons
Service has a rule that allows only first degree relatives to
visit security prisoners. Sometimes a prison gives in and
doesn't apply the rule to the Israeli security prisoners and
those from Jerusalem. Sometimes it does.
Five-year-old
Mohand has an uncle in one of the Israeli prisons. Up until a
month ago, he and some of his little brothers and sisters were
allowed to visit the uncle, who does not have parents and
whose siblings can't arrange to visit him routinely. But the
State of Israel, in the form of the Prisons Service, once
again decided that Mohand cannot be allowed to visit his
uncle.
The High Court of Justice and the lawyers at the
university and the authors and the heads of the institutes for
the study of anti-Semitism and racism don't pay attention to
such dispersed, small matters, or have grown used to them, or
are not shocked because of the progression. And they become
partners to it all. |
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