Tag Archives: B’tzelem

When a child becomes a stone: the severity of ‘security’

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Poster showing 'Aharanovitch is brave when facing children’. theatrical protest, June 27th 2013. Photo: Guy Butavia.

Poster showing ‘Aharanovitch is brave when facing children’. theatrical protest, June 27th 2013. Photo: Guy Butavia.

Last week my blog, ‘The Silliness of ‘Security’ and Puppets for Peace’, poked fun at  Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch for banning the 19th annual Palestinian children’s theatre festival by closing temporarily the El Hakawati theatre in East Jerusalem, where it was to be held. The minister’s repressive order exposed the ridiculousness of Israel’s security doctrine, showing how empty Israeli government claims are about acting in self-defence. A theatrical protest against the closure used the slogan ‘Aharanovitch is brave when facing children’.

Wadi Maswadeh being led to detention. No photographer credited.

Wadi Maswadeh being led to detention. No photographer credited.

There is a direct connection between his preventing the staging of children’s theatre for Palestinian children and the real-life drama that was documented earlier this week on video by Palestinian field researchers for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. Israeli soldiers from the Givati Brigade stationed in Hebron detained Wadi’ Maswadeh, aged five years and nine months, after he allegedly threw a stone at an Israeli car. The soldiers remained impervious to Wadi’s tears and the pleas of onlookers not to arrest such a young child, who was crying as he was placed in an army jeep and while the soldiers waited in his home for his father to return. For a couple of hours, the boy suffered much distress, until the soldiers handed him over to the Palestinian police (who then released him), but only after his father was bound and blindfolded en route to the Palestinian police. The seven Givati boys were also brave when confronted with a child well below the age of legal criminal responsibility, which is twelve.

Hebron map. Source: Peace Now website.

Hebron map. Source: Peace Now website.

The ‘security’ that the Israeli soldiers in Hebron serve is certainly not the security of its Palestinian residents, nor of the State of Israel; it is the security of the several hundred Israeli settlers in the H2 area of Hebron. H2 was established by the 1997 ‘Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron’, a follow up to the Oslo II interim agreement in 1995. Under the terms of the complex agreement, Israeli military forces redeployed from much of the city, designated H1, but maintained military control of H2, then home to some 30,000 Palestinians, as well as much of the city’s commercial life, along with the handful of buildings in which the settlers live. Not surprisingly, there has been constant tension and periodic violence between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinian residents. Israeli security measures on behalf of the settlers, which severely restrict freedom of movement and entail  excessive use of force, in addition to lack of law enforcement in response to settler violence, have made life unbearable for the Palestinians, many of whom have abandoned the area. Hence, the videos documenting Wadi’ Maswadeh’s detention show almost deserted streets, while the solders’ behaviour partly explains why the area is so empty.

The latest incident is thus yet one more in a long series of events, by no means the most atrocious. Commenting on the detention, Mairav Zonshein remarked that:

what is most shocking about this incident – besides the very fact that soldiers detain a five-year old child, shocking and horrible in and of itself – is how calm everything is. There was no violence exerted by the soldiers … the soldiers, don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with the scene they are actively engaged in; it doesn’t occur to them to question the actions.

Ami Kaufman, also writing on the +972 blog, adds that:

One has to be in an extreme state of apathy toward that child in order to treat him like that. And apathy like that can only be the product of racism.

We might expect racism to prompt hatred towards the Palestinians and Wadi’. Yet, calm and apathy prevail. How should we explain the absence of empathy or sympathy? Why do the brave Givati boys not treat Wadi’ as a child? American Jewish philosopher Judith Butler provides an answer in her book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Framed through Israeli security discourse, Wadi’ is not a child, but an extension of a stone, of a weapon. Operating on the principle of ‘defence without limits’ to protect Jewish Israelis and the settlers, the Palestinians are permitted no resistance to occupation, all of which is treated as offensive. The soldiers did not see Wadi’ as a vulnerable child because they have already made a prior distinction between people whose lives are deemed precarious and in need of security, and those whose lives do not count because they are instruments of war. On the same day that the story from Hebron broke, the Jewish News Service reported that:

Figures released by Hatzalah [Rescue] Yehudah and Shomron, a volunteer emergency medical response organization in Israel [sic], show that there were 5,635 attacks in the first half of 2013 against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, and the greater Jerusalem region.

According to the framing of Israeli security discourse and occupation, it is the lives of the occupiers that are precarious, not the occupied. The settlers must be protected from all attacks, including stone throwing, and in pursuit of that goal, the lives of the Palestinians are made as precarious as possible. Former Israeli military Hebron commander Noam Tivon said as much:

Let there be no mistake about it. I am not from the UN. I am from the Israeli Defense Force. I did not come here to seek people to drink tea with, but first of all to ensure the security of the Jewish settlers.

To drink tea with Palestinians would be a step towards acknowledging that their lives matter too, and that they too deserve security and workable living conditions. But the occupation in general and H2 could not be sustained if the brave Givati boys and the rest of the occupation forces recognised that Palestinian lives are as grievable as Israeli lives, and that Wadi’s tears and fear should be felt as keenly as those of their own younger siblings.

How should we picture the blood of Occupation?

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Lubna al-Hanash

Lubna al-Hanash

Gerald Scarfe's Sunday Times cartoon

Gerald Scarfe’s Sunday Times cartoon

Picturing oppression by portraying blood can cause wounds, a lesson that the British Sunday Times and its political caricaturist Gerald Scarfe learned following the publication of a cartoon on January 27th 2013. The cartoon depicts Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had in effect been re-elected for another term of office earlier in the week, building a block wall in which the bodies of people are crushed, using blood as mortar. That Sunday was also Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and other countries (but not in Israel). The response was swift. In The Commentator blog, Raheem Kassam wrote that the cartoon shows ‘the large-nosed Jew, hunched over a wall, building with the blood of Palestinians as they writhe in pain within it’, accusing the newspaper of repeating the infamous mediaeval anti-Semitic blood libel that was repeated by the Nazis in their Der Sturmer propaganda paper. Less polemically, a piece by Mark Gardner, of Britain’s Community Security Trust, republished by The Guardian on January 29th, argued clearly that the cartoonist’s intentions were beside the point. Rather, what matters is the association between the blood (that appears often in Scarfe’s work) in this case and the ‘blood imagery, sometimes explicitly as Blood Libel, [that] is commonly found in obscene anti-Israel propaganda in Arabic and Iranian media’. Because of its visual motifs, its iconography, the cartoon belongs to ‘the canon of contemporary antisemitic imagery’. In the face of such criticism, the cartoonist, the newspaper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, did not take long to apologise for the timing and content of the cartoon.

I do not want to rehearse the argument about whether the cartoon is anti-Semitic, or whether it should have been published that day or another day. I want to ask another question, which is: how should we picture the blood of occupation? The critical responses to Scarfe’s cartoon adamantly insist: ‘not this way!’ But they focus on this cartoon blood at the expense of the blood that is shed by Palestinians subject to Israeli occupation. In the weeks leading up to the Israeli election, and in the days that followed it, there was a rash of fatal shootings of Palestinians by Israeli forces using live ammunition in circumstances that did not, even by Israeli military standards, seem to justify the use of such deadly force. Israeli human rights watchdog B’tselem reported five such fatalities in January 2013, their report being the basis for coverage in The Guardian on Sunday 27th January of the spate of bloodshed. One of the dead Palestinians, 17-year old Samir ‘Awad, was shot on January 15th by soldiers beside the Separation Barrier near Budrus, a location where anti-wall demonstrations are so frequent that a documentary film has been made about the village. So, when Scarfe depicted the bloody wall in his cartoon, he illustrated one of the occupation’s most potent symbols and most damaging, concrete, practices. His caption written beneath his illustration, ‘Will cementing peace continue?’ is an apt comment on the continuity of the occupation in its most vicious form following Netanyahu’s re-election.

There is blood spilled by Israeli forces in the occupation to be depicted. How else, then, to show it, if not in political caricatures with risky associations? There is always the practice of photojournalism, now more widespread because of the common use of cameras and the open publicness of social media. The blood of Lubna al-Hanash, fatally shot by soldiers on January 23rd near al-‘Arrub Refugee Camp is shown in this way, among a torrent of photographic images of the occupation that appear each day, attracting far less attention or concern than Scarfe’s cartoon. And some of the attention her death did attract shows the vile abuse of anti-Semitism. Blogger Aussie Dave simply accepted the Israeli military’s initial justification of al-Hanash’ killing, given the conflicting eye-witness accounts of her shooting he could find (in English) on the web, calling the incident a Palestinian blood libel. Once again, the victims are turned into the victimisers in the logic of denial that sustains the occupation.

Is, then, the picturing of the blood of occupation too contentious, too repetitious, or too open to denial for it be worth bothering? No, this blood needs to be pictured, it needs to be acknowledged. We need to take responsibility for it. In the painful documentary film, To See if I’m Smiling one of the women soldiers who served in the occupied territories during the second intifada tells of how she is haunted by her experience. Rotem knew that her observation procedures led directly to the shooting of a boy. After her release from service, she tells the camera that she called a friend and pretended to be joking about the blood she could not wash off her hands. Rotem is horribly traumatized by the blood. She needs to find a way to picture it, to talk about it. We all need to picture it, because the path to peace is through the trauma we have wrought and brought on ourselves, and because if we do not, Lady Macbeth’s madness awaits us.