We killed 170 people in Lebanon, most of whom were refugees, during
the month of April, 1996. Many of them were women, old people and children.
We killed 9 civilians, one a 2 year old girl and one, a centenarian, in
Sahmour, on April 11th. We killed 11 civilians, including 7 children, in
Nabatyeh, on April 18th. In the UN Camp in Cana, we killed 102 people.
( )
We made sure to inflict death from a distance. In a very secular manner,
without the archaic idea of sin, without the antediluvian worry to consider
man in the image of God, and without the primitive proscription, "You
shall not kill!"
Our solid alibi is that we are responsible for nothing, that the responsibility
falls on Hezbollah. A most doubtful alibi. For when we decided to launch
a massive attack on the civilian region of South Lebanon (while Israel
ran no vital risk), we decided, ipso facto, to spill the blood of X number
of civilians. When we decided to drive half a million people out of their
homes and to shell those who remained behind (while in Israel, we did not
have one single victim), we decided, in fact, to execute several dozen
of them. This (alibi) allowed us to make such cruel decisions without seeing
ourselves as rotten. ( )
We killed them because the increasingly wider gap between the sacrosanct character that we attribute to our own lives and the more limited character we give to theirs, allowed us to kill.
We believe, in the most absolute manner, with the White House, the Senate,
the Pentagon, and the New York Times on our side, that their lives do not
have the same weight as ours. We are convinced that with Dimona (Israel's
atomic site), Yad Vashem and the Shoah Museum in our hand, we have the
right to compel 400,000 people to evacuate their homes in 8 hours. And
we have the right, at the end of 8 hours, to consider their homes as military
targets. And we reserve the right to rain 16,000 shells on their villages
and their populations. And we reserve the right to kill without any guilt
feelings. ( )
But all this cannot alleviate the gravity of the massacre, Israeli style,
and our responsibility for its execution. For it is perpetrated, in general,
in places to which we give free range to immoderate violence. ( )
The shelling of Cana was executed according to the rules, orders and objectives
of operation, "Grapes of Wrath." There is something wrong in
these rules, orders and objectives. Something that is no longer human.
Something that touches on the criminal.
And all of us, without exception, were an integral part of this machine.
The public supported the media, who supported the government, who supported
the Chief of Staff, who supported the inquiry officer, who supported the
officers, who supported the soldiers who fired the three shells that killed
102 in Cana. ( )
Nothing can prevent Cana from becoming an integral part of our biography.
Because, after Cana, we did not denounce the crime, we did not want to
subject the affair to the eyes of the law, we merely wanted to deny the
horror and go on with our current affairs. That is how Cana is part of
ourselves -- like one of the features of our face.
As the massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein (in the Cave of the Patriarchs
on Muslims while praying) and the crime committed by Ygal Amir (like the
reactions to them) were manifestations of rotten seeds in the heart of
the national-religious culture, the massacre of Cana is no less extreme
a grain of rottenness in the heart of secular Israeli culture: its cynicism,
brutality, instrumentalism, egocentrism of the powerful; this tendency
to blur the frontier between good and evil, between permitted and prohibited;
this tendency not to require justice, not to care about truth.
The manner in which contemporary Israel has functioned during and after
Cana shows that modern, rational Israeli life conceals a terrifying aspect.
Ari Shavit
Haaretz/New York Times Syndication.
Ari Shavit is a writer and columnist of the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.
He lives in Jerusalem.
(Translated from Hebrew in "Liberation" of May 21, 1996.)
[The Editor wishes to observe that the sentence translated from Hebrew
into French by ther French newspaper -- "We believe, in the most absolute
manner, with the White House, the Senate, the Pentagon, and the New York
Times on our side" has been translated in other English publications
seen by this Editor as saying, not "on our side" but "in
our hands". It is not unusual to have the Hebrew press more blunt
than the European one.]
The original French edition (ISBN: 2-951-000-5-10) is available from:
LA LIBRAIRIE DU SAVOIR
5 rue Malebranche 75005 Paris
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