Funerals are generally a moment of contemplation, pause, respect… even between adversaries. The rival mafias observe truces at the time of burials. We’re not going to spit on an enemy’s grave, at least not in front of the cameras.
But that kind of label doesn’t seem to hold up for the State of Israel and its law enforcement agencies, which obscenely caused mayhem as a motorcade formed around the coffin of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, new martyrdom of the Palestinian cause.
By directly charging the coffin bearers, tearing down the Palestinian flags that we wanted to wave for this celebration – an intolerable demonstration of nationalism – these forces have taken a new step in arrogance and impunity. But also in the dehumanization of the enemy – a bit like Vladimir Putin dehumanizes the Ukrainians by calling them “non-existent people”.
Many Israelis maintain a fantasy and a superiority complex vis-à-vis the Palestinians similar to those of many Russians washed away by the propaganda against the Ukrainians.
The difference is that Putin today faces a strong party, while the Palestinians are alone, largely disarmed before an occupying and overpowering enemy… Hence the desperate recourse of some of them to the weapon of the poor: individual terrorism, which has experienced an upsurge in recent weeks, claiming twenty victims in Israel.
Martyr in spite of herself, Abu Akleh was however not an activist, even less a terrorist. She was just doing her job – collecting images, reporting Palestinian reality for an international channel – when she was shot in the head last Wednesday, presumably by a special Israeli security unit.
It wasn’t a stray bullet. The circumstances of his death do not present the possibility of invoking chance, a “blunder”, a melee, an attack followed by a response… or “self-defense”!
Witness accounts indicate that the Al Jazeera television crew was at least 300 meters from the clashes. Jenin, a city in the far north of the West Bank from which some of the recent bombers hailed, was — characteristically — and continues to be the target of punitive Israeli raids on the locations, families, relatives of terrorists .
As for the Israeli denials about the origin of the bullet, with the absurd thesis that Palestinians deliberately fired on the journalist, they are so fanciful that after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s first statements to this effect, other officials Israelis backpedaled, admitting that an Israeli in uniform may have fired the shot.
Bennett who, in passing, quoted by Yediot Aharonot taken over by the Huffington Post of July 29, 2013, has already declared: “I have killed a large number of Arabs in my life and I have no regrets. »
This is a case where even die-hard Israelites (like the United States) are compelled to say they are “deeply disturbed and shocked.” The European Union (EU) denounces the use of “unnecessary” force by the Israeli camp. The French consulate in Jerusalem speaks of “deeply shocking scenes”.
Shireen Abu Akleh’s testimony in death is important: what she finally suffered in her flesh, her sacrifice, is precisely what her reports tirelessly testified to: life under Israeli occupation, in all its small details. Life devalued, life hindered, life without prospects.
Facing the world, his death, and especially the circumstances of his death, today has a thousand times more echo than all his reports put together. But the indignation that has risen today could quickly subside.
The Israeli occupation in the West Bank is a misfortune for the occupied people, who see their prospects for political existence shrink further each day, in general oblivion.
The State of Israel may have won its war against the Palestinian enemy; he may have conquered military force and international alliances — including increasingly in the Arab world — to erase and politically legitimize all past crimes.
But this occupation is also a cancer that gnaws from the inside of Israeli society, constantly more desensitized in the face of this evil and this dehumanization inflicted daily on the Other, this “new apartheid” (Desmond Tutu). This tragic episode is a new and glaring illustration of this.
Postscript which has a report… A few steps from Israel and the occupied territories, the Lebanese voted yesterday to renew their legislative chamber.
“Renew”: the word is strong, since it is precisely renewal that today seems totally impossible in Lebanon. This country has been plunged into economic misery for two years, after the bursting of its “banking bubble”… followed by the physical explosion, on August 4, 2020, of the port of Beirut.
This bubble had kept alive, until 2020, the illusion of a “Switzerland of the Middle East” escaping the fate of Arab brothers and cousins in the region.
But the traditional political formations are still there, with the same party-mafia leaders; the investigation into the explosion was unsuccessful; the secular protest movement of young people, born in 2019, has fallen and is struggling to break through politically, fiercely fought by the old caciques.
Arab fatality?
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist for Ici Radio-
Canada. [email protected]