I have a question: What’s the difference between a terrorist who murders a mother with her two daughters, and a state that murders – in a single night – a mother and her 4-year-old daughter, parents and their son, a 12-year-old girl and her 8-year-old brother, and another two sisters who are neighbors? What exactly is the difference between them? And why is the murderer a terrorist, and not the state? Where does it say that a state can’t be a terrorist? And how many innocent people is a state allowed to kill before being called a terrorist state? And how many children?
And why were a mother and her two daughters who were murdered by an evil man victims of terror, but the mothers and children who were murdered in the same nightare only “collateral damage in combat activity”? And if in the car in which the mother and daughters were murdered there had also been an important general and the police commissioner and the head of the secret service, would their murderer also be permitted to describe the women as “collateral damage in combat activity” and be considered a righteous man?
And why, in God’s name, are the various commanders convinced that the terror they are activating will increase the sacred “deterrence”? And that we would be deterred if they killed our political and military leaders? On the contrary. We would only become prouder and our determination would be sky-high. But we, our leaders are sure, aren’t them. We are us. They are only them.
How much arrogance and racism and condescension do our commanders have? For the past 75 years we’ve been beating them with inhuman cruelty, for 56 years even more intensely. And still they aren’t deterred. They repeatedly return to fight their war of liberation.
And why this stupid war at all? It should be called “Operation Peace for Bibi”. It contains not a drop of purpose, logic, hope or benefit. Only evil and cold politics. As usual.
And why have we become accustomed to a daily dose of two Palestinian dead, and sometimes more? Why do they wander to remote corners in the newspapers and to the margins of the news reports – not far from the feature stories – on television? Why do bands of wild boys, like bands of wild dogs in nature films, attack speakers of Arabic and punish them?
And why are some of them wearing tzitzit, as required by halakha, and grow sidelocks that wave during a pogrom? How long will it take until they also force the Arabic speakers to sweep sidewalks with toothbrushes? Why in hell am I paying for the non-education of these disgusting punks? Why has revenge turned into the only sacred principle of Israeli policy? Why don’t residents of the Gaza “envelope” understand that they have to demonstrate in favor of the residents of Gaza, who are suffering far more than they, rather than against them? Why are they repeatedly led astray by profiteers in blood, who conceal all their failures behind their frightened backs?
And why do the evil, criminal settlers in Judea and Samaria let off steam by chopping down thousands of olive trees belonging to the owners of the land that they have plundered? Are they really so panicked by the sight of an olive branch?
And why and why and why … All these questions weren’t asked to get answers. There are no longer any answers. They were asked to be asked. To scrub our thickening skin with them. To peel off the horny coating that insists on accumulating on it and causes it to lose its sensitivity. To once again expose the nerves. And the flesh that is still living. And the blood and the pain and the anger and the shame.
Those living in a swamp should do that occasionally. To remain human. To not become a rhinoceros.