The release last month by B’Tselem of a video recording showing a member of the IDF shoot a bound and blindfolded Palestinian in the foot at a demonstration against the separation wall sparked a lot of comment. I was particularly struck by the piece below by Mario Wainstein. It originally appeared here in Aurora, a Spanish-language newspaper in Israel, on the 25^th of July.  The translation is mine and the article is published here with the kind permission of the author, without whose further authorization it may not be reproduced anywhere else.

Two audiences, one message

This article is aimed at two different audiences and so it’s divided into two parts. In spite of this, it doesn’t contain a double message and neither part contradicts the other, rather they are complementary. This is true to such a degree that I want to warn that citing one part without the other would amount to a distortion of what I am trying to express and I therefore forbid it.

A summary of the events: in the village of Ni’lin in the occupied territories demonstrations involving non-violent direct action are regularly held against the separation wall on village land. The IDF drives back the demonstrators in a sort of cat and mouse game. The latter don’t attack people but they do attempt to damage the wall and the machinery being used to build it. In one of these demonstrations, which took place on the 7th of July, a Palestinian demonstrator was detained by the IDF. With his hands tied behind his back, blindfolded, obviously unarmed and while being held by the arm by the officer in charge of the unit, he was shot in the foot from a range of about a meter and a half. The scene  was filmed by a local resident and leaves no room for doubts about what actually occurred.

Now comes the part of the article aimed at Israelis and Jews living outside Israel.

Stop trying to justify and understand. The conclusion to be drawn from the episode, the big conclusion, is that the occupation has been able to corrupt us and to take us to places that years ago we would never have imagined that we’d arrive at. Obviously what happened is not the norm but woe betide us if we content ourselves with that, because there’s a climate, a breeding ground, which allowed the phenomenon to appear and which has penetrated much more deeply than we would like.

How do I know? Quite simply because the B’Tselem organization, which brought the event to light and which gave the camera to the person who filmed it, did so because they had received numerous complaints that this sort of thing was happening but lack sufficient proof. The filming didn’t occur by chance, they knew what was happening, set out to capture it on film and did so.

There’s another worrying aspect to all this and it’s that until the recording was produced and in spite of it being clear that there were numerous witnesses, among them the officer commanding the unit involved, nobody made an internal complaint within the IDF such as would have resulted in the involvement of the military police and a proper investigation. Stated another way, if irrefutable evidence had not been presented in the court of public opinion, it would all have been covered up and never investigated.

Now that the events of that day are being investigated and that higher command levels know about them, I feel within my rights in believing that appropriate measures will be taken, at least until the contrary is demonstrated. If I may express myself in a somewhat paradoxical manner, the immoral conduct of the IDF that I know about worries me less than that which I don’t know about. I don’t know about it and neither do the competent authorities who could and should be acting to combat it.

This conduct sums up all that should be avoided and is symbol of our worst failure, our moral failure. More than 40 years of occupation have had their effect and  it has been strong enough to overcome all the good intentions of those who believed that this wasn’t going to happen to us. When the late Professor Yehoshua Leibovitz predicted right after the Six Day War that this was exactly what was going to happen he became the subject of furious attacks by those who wouldn’t even let him suspect that our children could be capable of such immoral conduct.

Now comes the part of the article directed at all those who delighted in the release of the recording and all those journalists who presented it as “evidence of the shootings” which the “Jewish army” carries out on the Palestinians. It was to be expected that a Jewish soldier shooting a Palestinian with a rubber bullet in the foot and causing him an injury to his big toe would be more widely reported on and provoke more moral condemnation than the glorification of someone, not a Jew, who beat a four year old girl to death. It shares the same logic as the release of hundreds of Palestinian Arabs in exchange for a single Israeli prisoner.

I say it without any irony, I believe you are right. There is no question of a double standard. Quite simply, you know that we are morally superior and therefore demand from us what you don’t demand from others. I believe that this is how things are and that you are right. We are superior, so superior that the revelation of immoral conduct came from us, not from you, from an Israeli and Jewish NGO called and, and  not by chance, B’Tselem,  which means “in the image of” , a name taken from the Bible which says that all men were created in the image and likeness of God.

I’m glad that you make these demands on us, but don’t get carried away; none of you will be able to demand of us that which we demand of ourselves. Furthermore, you lack the most minimal moral authority to ask anything of us. Take, for example, those Italian journalists who by pure chance filmed the lynching of two Israelis in Ramallah at the start of the Second Intifada, with a noble fighter for liberation holding a piece of liver between his teeth and throwing bits of body from the balcony. Not only did they not ask what punishment had been imposed on them or even whether the glorious cannibal fighters had been arrested; they sent a letter of apology to the Palestinian Authority promising that they would never do it again and saying that they were friends of Palestine and sympathizers with its cause. So allow me a smile if you attempt to moralize about the injured toe of the Palestinian youth.

The truth is that we Israelis are permanently living on the edge and have little room for manoeuvre. On the one hand, it’s obvious that we are a democracy and had better be able to defend ourselves because we are being attacked, on the other, we’d better be careful that our efforts to defend ourselves don’t end up drowning the very democracy that we want to protect.  We are not in Spain with the polite ETA terrorism that gives warnings before the bombs go off.  If Arab citizens of Jerusalem repeatedly commit terrorist attacks then limitations have to be put on them to protect ourselves. But that means infringing their basic liberties.

Some will say to me that a solution could be found if we stopped being an occupying power and I completely agree. What’s more, the current government, a majority in the current Knesset and a majority of Israelis accept the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, side by side with Israel. It’s Ismail Haniye who has repeated this very week that “We’ll return to Acre, to Haifa, to Ramle to Jaffa”, in fact to Tel Aviv.

If, on the Palestinian side, there was someone to talk seriously with about dividing up the territory, something they rejected in 1947 and continue to reject, albeit less vehemently, today a solution would be easy to reach.  But there is no one like that to talk to and yet you often ask us to give up everything anyway. But on the edge of the abyss we refuse to take a step forward; if you think our suicide would be a solution than you’ll have to get used to living with the conflict. Unfortunately we will be the ones that pay the costs of it.