When you stand on Hawara’s main street, now under a sort of curfew – the settler thugs pass by, stopping only to provoke the residents, and the alarmed, frightened faces of women and children peep through the barred windows – your heart knows exactly who you’re with. There’s no dilemma. In your heart, your soul and your values, you’re with the victims.
You have nothing in common with the hoodlums getting out of their cars with their lordly gait and their huge kippas, hissing diabolical remarks at a handful of residents who are frightened to even breathe near them after that night. Hebrew is the only thing left in common between a Jewish Israeli with a remnant of compassion and conscience and those who held a pogrom in the town the previous night. Nor do you have anything in common with the women in their huge headdresses standing at the entrance of a town that isn’t theirs, holding up Israeli flags – the only ones permitted here, guarded by a military vehicle. What are they to me, or I to them?
This is happening in the occupied territories. Your back to the demonstrators, your face to the soldiers: The soldiers are the friends of your sons and the sons of your friends, and your heart is with those standing behind you. They are the victims and they are in the right. Black and white. The Americans say, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” But in Hawara it’s the other way around: Where you sit depends on where you stand. You’re in Hawara, or in any occupied Palestinian town or village, because of what your heart tells you.
There’s no point in faking feelings anymore. There’s no point in spreading slogans against “violence on all sides.” The violence in the territories isn’t symmetrical, nor is the justice. Just as the settlers and their collaborators feel no compassion toward their victims when evicting them, looting them or committing pogroms on them, so there is no way of feeling compassion or solidarity with the victimizers and their acts. Even when their sacrifice is hard to bear, you can’t forget who the real victim is and whose side justice is on.
Sometimes it’s also hard to sympathize with the soldiers. You cannot sympathize with the storm trooper, even if he’s one of your people. The common nationality, heritage, language and culture lose their meaning in view of some of their actions. That uniform and that army you worshiped in your childhood have been utterly stained. Even the acts of courage you’ve been told about as a child are no longer theirs. The Palestinian fighters facing them are braver and more willing to sacrifice than they are. Anyone prepared to die under the Israeli “pressure cooker,” to face more barbaric behavior, is a brave person ready to sacrifice everything. How can you not admire it, even when it’s directed against you and your people?
The right attacked those who organized donations for the victims of the Hawara pogrom. The Zionist left, being the Zionist left, immediately sealed the noble gesture with a despicable attempt to have Shin Bet pensioners look into the “security record” of those receiving the donations. Whatever. The act remains noble, despite the Zionist-left grotesquerie.
How can you oppose donations to survivors of a pogrom carried out by your own people? Israel, which sent aid delegations to survivors of an earthquake in Turkey, isn’t willing to send even minimal aid to the victims of its own rioters, who won both implicit and explicit praise from the entire right side of the spectrum? Not even a bulldozer to vacate the hundreds of burnt-out skeletons of cars? Not even compensation for those who became homeless because of the deliberately closed eyes of the army, which thinks its job is to protect the rioters?
When you face the occupation’s victims, there are no moral doubts. The choice between Haroun Abu Aram and the soldier who shot him in the neck, paralyzing him for the rest of his short life because he tried to save a generator, is absolutely clear. Your heart is with Haroun, who meanwhile has died.