In the last week, the name of Muhamed al-Durrah has returned to the news. He was the 12 year old Palestinian boy whose death on September 30, 2000, in his father's arms, caught on camera by a French journalist, triggered the second intifada, which cost so many Israeli and Palestinian lives and lead directly to the separation fence/wall between Israel and much of the Palestinian territories.
Once the picture of al-Durrah being held by his father had appeared around the world, it became the icon of the Intifada, yet questions always lurked in the background. Five years later, the Second Draft has been able to do the investigation none of the MSM ever thought to do and presented a wealth of evidence with which an independent person can determine for himself the likelihood that the death (there are even questions if the boy died on that day) was, to use Wretchard's formulation:
Israel on purpose;
Israel by accident;
Palestinians by accident;
Palestinians on purpose;
Staged
Wretchard applauds Second Draft for allowing for some doubt to remain in their summation. Unfortunately, though this is laudable, most of the world has had no trouble dispensing with any doubt; Israel is always to be seen as having the worst of motives and all her actions are to be cast in the worst light. The perfidy of the French government supported media in perpetuating the notion of Israel purposely killing al-Durrah is also sadly unremarkable.
Neo-neocon has looked at the evidence and finds that Second Draft's Richard Landes has done and continues to offer a great service:
There are thousands of sites for pure advocacy, but usually those end up preaching only to the choir. What Landes is trying to do here is far more valuable: he's trying to present a fair case, and let the reader be the judge and/or jury. A fair trial presents the evidence on both sides, and then a verdict is rendered. Fairness does not preclude judgment--on the contrary, judgment requires fairness.
You should certainly go to the site to make up your own mind. I think there are so few open minds where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned that few will be persuaded, though it is worth the effort.
I would like to add a different perspective to the discussion. Maneuvering Between the Headlines, An American Lives Through the Intifada is a very moving and ultimately very sad book. The author is Helen Schary Motro, an American-born Jew who moved to Israel; she is on the University of Tel Aviv Faculty of Law, writes for various magazines and newspapers and lives in a Tel Aviv suburb. She is a life long liberal and has been a supporter of Peace Now and has made efforts, especially in her writing, but also in her political involvement, to foster cooperative exchanges between Palestinians and Jews. The trigger for the book was her horrified realization upon seeing the picture of Mohamed al-Durrah and his father that she in fact knew the father. Jamal al-Durrah was a Palestinian laborer who worked for the Jewish contractor who built Motro's house; later Motro hired him to build a wall around her garden. She came to know Jamal al-Durrah as well as two such individuals could know each other across such a divide. She learned that when the father tried to start a small business in Gaza so that he would no longer have to rely on the daily 3-5 hour crossing into Israel for laborer's wages, he was beaten by Palestinian thugs under unclear circumstances which suggested they were connected to the ruling elite in Gaza. He was left with a permanent limp after being treated for months at Israeli hospitals at his (Israeli Jewish) boss's expense and later returned to his old job as a construction worker. After the intifada began, she watched from afar as Jamal al-Durrah became famous (and well-to-do by Palestinian standards) in Palestinian society for having given a son to Jihad. She writes about some of the controversy surrounding Muhamed's death, but ultimately, the book is about the slow descent into despair and withdrawal of those who had to live through the intifada, referred to as "the situation" in Israel.
It is truly touching to see Motro try to hold onto her liberal conviction that all are equally victimized by the intifada; she closes the book with these lines:
There are millions of voiceless people of goodwill behind the painful headlines. One is a construction worker from Gaza to whom life brought tragedy. And one, perhaps, is an American woman whose house he built, who learned with time to empathize with tragedy. The accursed situation was created by human beings. All of us inherited it. It can only continue to plague us if we acquiesce.
Motro offers numerous vignettes which inadvertently illustrate a particular folly and wish that the state of Israel can no longer afford and which, perhaps, they are slowly coming to accept. In one story, she first describes her worry that a strong Israel is in danger of forgetting its righteousness and concern for justice. She talks about a friend of hers who performed a "small unpublicized and unchronicled act of courage and heroism, which she herself performed unconsciously, and even against her better judgment." (p. 130). This occurred a few years before the intifada. Her friend was standing on her balcony and had seen a group of Palestinians standing at an informal pick-up spot for Palestinian laborers. When the police drove up for an Identity check, she noticed two teenagers run off and hide. Since even then the Palestinians used teenagers as human guided missiles to kill Israelis, she immediately picked up the phone for the police. However, before the police could answer, she hung up; she was struck by the humanity of the frightened teenagers and pictured other teenagers, in another time and place, running from fascist pursuers in Europe on the 1940's. The friend listened nervously for the rest of the day for sirens announcing a suicide attack and felt great relief when none occurred. Motro applauds her friend's gesture. Sadly, I would see her gesture as deeply immoral; she willingly risked Jewish lives to help preserve her sense of her own empathy and goodness; unfortunately, the risk was asymmetrical, to use a word much in favor these days. The risk to the boys was arrest, inconvenience, perhaps even rough treatment and brief imprisonment if they were truly innocents just out for a day's work; the risk to truly innocent Israelis and Arabs was of death or mangling at the hands of suicide bombers.
Motro tries to draw an equivalence between the Israeli killing of Palestinians and the Palestinian killing of Israelis but her evidence doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. She describes all the deaths by violence during a typical week and cannot disguise the fact that all the Israeli deaths occur at the hands of people who have as their goal the murder of innocents, while all the Palestinian deaths occur during attacks on armed men.
The Arab states have been waging total war against Israeli society while Israel has been attempting to wage a limited war against the Palestinian society. As well, Israel has attempted to win a war without the other side losing; this has almost never worked before and is unlikely to work any time soon. The failure of this approach is revealed by the fact that the war against Israel's existence, which began with the invasion of 5 Arab armies in 1948, is now going into its 58th year.
The liberal credo has always been that if we treat people well and follow the golden rule, they will treat us well. It would be a wonderful world if this were true. It is an extraordinary leap into a blind abyss for a liberal to recognize that no matter how you treat some people they will always want to harm you. What the Palestinians have done is to convince the majority of Israelis that they will never accept the existence of a state of Israel; that they prefer murdering Jewish children to building a home for their own children; that they exalt the murderous suicides more than those who would try to teach liberal tolerance to their own people.
The logic of liberalism is that it is better to accept more Israeli deaths if it will help foster peace than to risk inconvenience or humiliation of the Palestinians. Most Israelis have finally rejected this for perfectly valid reasons. The separation wall is a last ditch attempt by Israel to avoid following the logic of warfare. If the wall does not prevent an unacceptable threshold of Israeli deaths from being crossed, the war will devolve into an existential fight to the death not just for Israel but for the Arabs as well. We must all hope that events do not bring us to such a point.
Golda Meir once said that she hated the Arabs, not because they killed Jewish children, but because they forced Jewish children to kill them. Although Motro would resist Meir's feelings and logic, her book is a valuable and powerful indictment of the Palestinians for their success at breeding such feelings in Israelis, made all the more powerful by her heartfelt refusal to accept those very feelings.
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