Today, they got him dead. It seems a few poor Palestinian day laborers were making their daily trek into West Jerusalem looking for work. The only problem? Crossing from East to West Jerusalem is illegal. And the job of the Border Police is to nab these working stiffs who do nothing more than search for a job to feed their family. It seems that for them, the Fayyad West Bank economic miracle heralded by Tom Friedman and the Obama administration hasn’t quite taken hold.
So they come in their hundreds and thousands each day, crossing over barriers or fences put in their way. And like our own Border Patrol, the Border Police hunt them down. Today, a poor soul lagged behind his comrades being pursued by a policeman. And instead of arresting the Palestinian, the policeman shot this father of five dead. I’ll give you a little test: what do you think the Border Police’s story is? Don’t read down the page to find out. Give it a shot. Of course you know the answer without even having to cheat: the laborer struggled for the officer’s gun and it went off and he died. Sure, that’s precisely what happens whenver the Border Police kill in cold blood, as they undoubtedly did today:
A Palestinian who said he witnessed the incident, which occurred before dawn, disputed the police account.Salah Abed Rabbo said he and the man killed in the shooting, Ezz el-Deen Kawazba, were among six Palestinian labourers who had slipped across an Israeli barrier, which takes in much of East Jerusalem, and fled from border policemen giving chase.
“Ezz el-Deen lagged behind, and the soldier attacked him and shot him. Ezz el-Deen fell to the ground without making any noise,” Abed Rabbo said.
He said he witnessed the shooting after reaching higher ground and turning around to check on what was happening.
You remember Bassam Aramin’s little girl coming home from school one day when a Border Patrol jeep drove up and put a bullet into her pretty little brain, killing her dead. What was their story then? Rock-throwing by local teenagers, maybe one of the rocks killed her, and even if it didn’t we had to defend ourselves. Turns out Aramin was killed wantonly and the government closed its investigation finding no fault by anyone except the little girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now the family is suing the government and recently won a major legal ruling in their long-running suit.
And undoubtedly the wanton shooting by a government-paid settler security guard of a rock-throwing Palestinian is fresh in your mind as well. The story there didn’t wash either. It never does. These tissues of lies are concocted to assuage the Israeli Jewish public which might, if its sleeping conscience were ever roused, actually make a sink about things. But it’s unlikely they will be roused from their slumber when there are real estate killings (in shekels that is, and not bullets) to be made and the economy cruises along, as Time Magazine’s recent cover story confirms.
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One wonders when American taxpayers will start to question the huge sums of foreign aid given to Israel every year even when its economy is doing well. Has this flow of boodle from taxpayers — many of whom do not live as well as the average Israeli Jew — become a kind of Israeli “entitlement” like social security and medicare for US citizens?
RE: “And instead of arresting the Palestinian, the policeman shot this father of five dead.” – R.S.
MY COMMENT: It pains me to say so, but he has undoubtedly “gone to a better place”. And I don’t believe in heaven or hell (at least not in the sense of an “afterlife”). More like the bearable heaviness of not being.
But then, I’m admittedly in one of my more misanthropic moods as a consequence of having watched Christiane Amanpour’s town hall debate yesterday and listening to the likes of Franklin Graham, Robert Spencer, Bauer the Twit, that guy with the world’s fattest neck (and one of it’s more insubstantial brains) and that fundamentalist Muslim ‘nut job’ from the U.K.
I suppose I should look on the bright side: no Hagee, Geller, Pipes or Lewis! Thank G-d for small favours. (I used the ‘u’ so as not to offend Bernard.)
I saw in the Israeli reportage of this incident that the victim and his companions were said to have been caught “infiltrating” Israel. It’s always something like that. Poor Palestinians looking for work are “infiltrators” unless they’re coming through the checkpoint to work on the construction of illegal West Bank settlements.
How one can be shot to death for “infiltrating” his own land is beyond me.