Saturday, November 24, 2012

Israeli Fear vs. Palestinian Death


I’ve really tried to understand the Israelis. I used to work on a farm in Israel. I speak Hebrew. I watch their news. All the time they talk about fear. How they have to run to their bunkers to hide from the rockets. How their children can’t sleep because of the sirens. This is not a good way for them to live."
"We Palestinians don’t talk about fear, we talk about death. Our rockets scare them; their rockets kill us. We have no bomb shelters, we have no sirens, we have nowhere we can take our children and keep them safe. They are scared. We are dying.
If Israelis live in fear of the randomness of Hamas rockets, Gazans have a perhaps over-confident sense of Israel being in absolute control of where its missiles land.

On Sunday, Fateh Nasser, a resident of a block of flats in neighbouring Jabaliya that was home to five families, received a phone call in which an anonymous voice told him that everyone had five minutes to get out of the building. Minutes later it was destroyed by an Israeli missile. That sense of Israeli all-pervasiveness draws many Palestinians towards what they say is an inevitable conclusion.

"If they know who to call, then they know who they are killing," said Mohammed Yunis at his vegetable stall. "They know every inch of Gaza. They have maps from the occupation. They have cameras in the drones. How can it be an accident that our children are killed?"
"The Jews brought all their tanks to the edge of Gaza and then they thought about what would happen if they came here," said Ayman Salameh, after attending the Hejazi boys' funeral. "Many Palestinians would die, yes. But so would many Israelis. For what? Do they think the resistance will go away? They will have to kill every Palestinian. They know this. It is the lesson the Americans learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. When resistance is everywhere, the size of your guns doesn't matter."

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