When Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian, we are all responsible - Opinion - Haaretz.com
The photograph is exceptional. There are not many like it. An elderly Palestinian shepherd is sitting on the ground at the entrance to his house, his head and face bleeding, his clothing also stained with his blood, an _expression_ of panic and helplessness on his face. Up to this point there’s nothing exceptional here. Lately almost every day Palestinian farmers are barbarically attacked by settlers – routine behavior. But look who’s sitting next to the shepherd: a female soldier in a steel helmet and blue rubber gloves. She’s bandaging his wounds.
This picture was taken last week in the shepherds’ community in Mount Qanub, on the edge of the Judean Desert. This week the shepherd from the photo, Mohammed Shalalda, 72, told me that the nurse from the army even hugged him. “What aren’t all the soldiers like that?” asked the man, hospitalized for five days after the pogrom and still suffering from his wounds. The settlers beat him with stones, axes and clubs, after dozens of them invaded his community to attack him and his family.
This area is swarming with settlers and outposts, most of them wild and violent: Ma’aleh Amos, Avi Hanahal, Metzad, aka Asfar, and Pnei Kedem – names that you’ve never heard, and that’s a good thing. These are accursed places. This wasn’t their first attack against shepherds here, but it was the most serious one. Shalalda was convinced they would kill him.
At the sight of the soldier who was taking care of him, not only was he filled with gladness, so is everyone who looks at this photo. There’s something touching about it, almost to the point of tears. A soldier taking care of a wounded Palestinian man. When Shalalda showed me the photo this week in the home of his son in the village of Sa’ir, where he is recovering from his wounds, I felt the same longing for a moment of compassion, along with a bit of Israeli pride: How moral our army is. An army medic administers first aid to a Palestinian, and what more can we ask.
Why aren’t there more such occasions and such soldiers, like the soldier from Mount Qanub. In a reality in which Israeli President Isaac Herzog was attacked this week with shouts of “You should be ashamed of yourself” from young people at a conference in memory of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, a major spiritual leader of the national religious camp, for daring to mention the fate of another elderly Palestinian, 80-year-old Omar As’ad, who was left to die by the roadside by soldiers of the Netzah Yehuda battalion, even just one young soldier with gloves gladdens the heart.
But this desperate longing for a bit of compassion and pride quickly crashed in the face of reality. That’s also a good thing. We should not have been captivated by the photograph. With all due respect to the soldier, who did simply what was called for, the victim was the handiwork of all of us, including the medic and the army in which she serves, and no military bandage will heal his wounds.
All Israelis without exception participated in this Ku Klux Klan pogrom in Mount Qanub. The rioters of Asfar and its satellites came in the name of all of us to beat the old man because he’s a Palestinian. They came just as people came for the Jews in Europe – violent, hate-filled and racist. The fact that nobody stops them is enough to prove that they are here on our behalf, doing their deeds as our emissaries.
The Israel Defense Forces spokesman is likely to use this photo, as he uses the Israeli field hospitals on the Gazan border while the Israel Air Force is bombing Gaza’s children. The enlightened Israeli will look at the photo and tell himself: Wild animals, those settlers, they abused an old man, but look how the soldier is taking care of him. The soldier is us, the beautiful Land of Israel that was taken from us.
But that’s an illusion. The soldier is not Israel. She’s an anomaly. Seizing on her is a way to cleanse our conscience. The settlers are living to the east of Bethlehem as the emissaries of every Israeli who supported their existence there with silence, indifference and government budgets. The blood of the shepherd Shalalda is on all our heads, those of Israelis both wild and enlightened.
The image of this outstanding soldier is misleading. How tempting it is to be swept up by it, how painful it is to regain our senses.