lubna
19-08-2005, 14:39
Stop Your Sobbing
by Ran HaCohen
Personal Thanks
Friday night I had a visit. I came home and saw a man running to the back door. With, as I later realized, my laptop, my watch, and some cash. I called a friend, but she had little time for me: her sister in Ramat Gan had just enjoyed a similar visit; they even took her car. Another friend took my case as an alarm, in vain: a week later their house in Hod HaSharon was broken into while they were sleeping. My blacksmith in Netanya wasn't surprised: "I've been in this business for 30 years, and never seen a flood like this week. I now take orders exclusively from clients who had a burglary."
The entire Israeli police force is in and around Gaza. Except for a few units left over to break the bones of the peaceful anti-wall demonstrators in Bil'in, the Israeli forces are all in the South. The Masters of the State are struggling with the Masters of the Land, and we, common Israelis, have to live with rising criminality. Thank you, dear settlers.
Our Poor Settlers
You won't find a word about the wave of crime in the Israeli media. The media in now in "empathy mode": we are celebrating the terrible suffering of our brothers the settlers.
Oh, how they suffer. It breaks one's heart. "People are thrown to the street," said Rabbi Shlomo Aviner from Bet-El, who infiltrated Gaza to incite his disciples. "Our life was stopped, and it will never resume," mourns one settler. "My mother was taken out of her home and put on a bus in Poland," cries another victim, "and now they're going to do the same to me." The same, sure thing. "They're going to destroy 20 synagogues, almost like in Kristallnacht," complains a third idiot. Some of them say it out loud: "it's a Holocaust." Perhaps even worse? "If Gentiles had done this to me, it would have been better; but Jews…" one settler said on television. Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit – once the hope of Israel's peace camp, now a sickening right-winger – draws an analogy between a bereaved settler's lost son and her house: "Just as her son is no longer with her, so her home will not be hers." Losing a son, leaving a house – it's all the same. It seems that the more the settlers defy and despise democracy, morality, rationality, history, even the Holocaust, the stronger the media embraces them. Not to portray them as lunatics, but as traumatized victims whose deranged behavior is the ultimate evidence for their suffering.
The "poor settlers" image dominates the Israeli media not because it is in love with the settlers, but because it is obedient. Prime Minister Sharon wants the eviction to be portrayed as a huge national trauma – as a means against any future withdrawals – so that's what the media is doing. The narrative adopted is the settlers' narrative. The tears dripping from my television set day and night are shed by both the settlers and the evicting forces, and it's the same tears: both sides share a narrative that portrays the removal of the illegal settlements, or the decolonization of occupied Palestinian land, as an historic tragedy, "uprooting," "deportation." Neither the government nor the media offers an alternative – neither a narrative of decolonization as a step toward peace (the very last narrative Sharon would ever adopt) nor any other. All that the soldiers and policemen cling to is the formal argumentation of obeying legitimate orders following a democratically taken decision. And at any rate, they have been ordered not to argue with the settlers, so that the latter's narrative dominates the entire stage. The settlers, observes Ehud Asheri, are "Losing on the ground, winning on TV."......
read more at:
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=7007
by Ran HaCohen
Personal Thanks
Friday night I had a visit. I came home and saw a man running to the back door. With, as I later realized, my laptop, my watch, and some cash. I called a friend, but she had little time for me: her sister in Ramat Gan had just enjoyed a similar visit; they even took her car. Another friend took my case as an alarm, in vain: a week later their house in Hod HaSharon was broken into while they were sleeping. My blacksmith in Netanya wasn't surprised: "I've been in this business for 30 years, and never seen a flood like this week. I now take orders exclusively from clients who had a burglary."
The entire Israeli police force is in and around Gaza. Except for a few units left over to break the bones of the peaceful anti-wall demonstrators in Bil'in, the Israeli forces are all in the South. The Masters of the State are struggling with the Masters of the Land, and we, common Israelis, have to live with rising criminality. Thank you, dear settlers.
Our Poor Settlers
You won't find a word about the wave of crime in the Israeli media. The media in now in "empathy mode": we are celebrating the terrible suffering of our brothers the settlers.
Oh, how they suffer. It breaks one's heart. "People are thrown to the street," said Rabbi Shlomo Aviner from Bet-El, who infiltrated Gaza to incite his disciples. "Our life was stopped, and it will never resume," mourns one settler. "My mother was taken out of her home and put on a bus in Poland," cries another victim, "and now they're going to do the same to me." The same, sure thing. "They're going to destroy 20 synagogues, almost like in Kristallnacht," complains a third idiot. Some of them say it out loud: "it's a Holocaust." Perhaps even worse? "If Gentiles had done this to me, it would have been better; but Jews…" one settler said on television. Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit – once the hope of Israel's peace camp, now a sickening right-winger – draws an analogy between a bereaved settler's lost son and her house: "Just as her son is no longer with her, so her home will not be hers." Losing a son, leaving a house – it's all the same. It seems that the more the settlers defy and despise democracy, morality, rationality, history, even the Holocaust, the stronger the media embraces them. Not to portray them as lunatics, but as traumatized victims whose deranged behavior is the ultimate evidence for their suffering.
The "poor settlers" image dominates the Israeli media not because it is in love with the settlers, but because it is obedient. Prime Minister Sharon wants the eviction to be portrayed as a huge national trauma – as a means against any future withdrawals – so that's what the media is doing. The narrative adopted is the settlers' narrative. The tears dripping from my television set day and night are shed by both the settlers and the evicting forces, and it's the same tears: both sides share a narrative that portrays the removal of the illegal settlements, or the decolonization of occupied Palestinian land, as an historic tragedy, "uprooting," "deportation." Neither the government nor the media offers an alternative – neither a narrative of decolonization as a step toward peace (the very last narrative Sharon would ever adopt) nor any other. All that the soldiers and policemen cling to is the formal argumentation of obeying legitimate orders following a democratically taken decision. And at any rate, they have been ordered not to argue with the settlers, so that the latter's narrative dominates the entire stage. The settlers, observes Ehud Asheri, are "Losing on the ground, winning on TV."......
read more at:
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=7007