A few days ago we had the killing of 36 year-old Jawaher Abu Rahme at a Bilin demonstration for the crime of standing outside her home watching the event. Today, the IDF Central Command has blood on its hands with the execution of a 65 year-old Palestinian man in his bed while they held a gun to his wife’s head and told her to shut up. Ynet: Victim shot to death for “unknown reasons:”
Amr Qawasme, 65, shot to death for unknown reason as soldiers raid house in Hebron area. ‘They put their hand to my mouth and a rifle to my head,’ man’s wife says. ‘I asked them, ‘What did you do?’ They asked me to shut up.’
You bet. He died while Palestinian. It’s getting to be where just sleeping while Palestinian is a death sentence. Don’t need much more than that to become a victim of this occupying army.
Oops, it was all a case of mistaken identity. They wanted a Hamas man who lived one flight down:
An IDF force arrived at a local house to arrest a Hamas member who was recently released from jail. According to neighbors, the detainee lives one storey below the killed Palestinian.
So who do you think fucked this one up? The Shabak or IDF intelligence? Can you imagine giving soldiers the wrong floor of a home and they go in guns blazing and kill the wrong man? It reminds me of the killing of Black Panther Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago Police. A shande.
Edo, from whom I first heard this story, correctly calls for the Central Command senior officer to be tried as a criminal. Your troops kill an old man in his bed. What does that make you? Are you any more than a dog? Actually I love my dog so maybe you’re not even worthy of that distinction.
You want to prove you’re higher than that on the evolutionary scale? Hold someone accountable for this crime. If you don’t, you don’t even deserve to be called a dog.
RE: “Your troops kill an old man in his bed. What does that make you?” – R.S.
ANSWER: Pod People!…“They come from another world. Spawned in the light years of space. Unleashed to take over the bodies and souls of the people…”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Pod People) – link to en.wikipedia.org
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Official Trailer [1956] (VIDEO, 02:20) – link to youtube.com
That movie was one of the friggin’s scariest I ever saw as a child! The movie was seen as a thinly veiled commentary on the Communist hysteria of the Cold War. For Israelis then, the Palestinians are the pod people. But IDF troops obeying orders & carrying out their killings/executions w. great dispatch also resemble the demeanor of the pod people.
RE: “IDF troops obeying orders & carrying out their killings/executions w. great dispatch also resemble the demeanor of the pod people.” – R. Silverstein
ALSO SEE:On the Morning Following the Putsch ~ by Yossi Gurvitz, Wish You Orwell , 01/06/11
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – link to ygurvitz.net
P.S.
FROM PAUL GOLDBERG, Open Left, 01/07/11
(excerpt)…A more significanly more sophisticated version of this explanation can be gleaned from this passage of an essay by Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates (Chip Berlet. 2008. “The United States: Messianism, Apocalypticism, and Political Religion.” In Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman, and John Tortice, eds., The Sacred in Twentieth Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne, pp. 221-257. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan):
ENTIRE POST – link to openleft.com
RE: “That movie was one of the friggin’s scariest I ever saw as a child!” – R. Silverstein
MY COMMENT: I agree. The only thing it was missing was a Bernard Herrmann score (à la The Day the Earth Stood Still).
FROM WIKIPEDIA: …The phrase “Bernard Herrmann lives” is graffitied under a train overpass at the intersection of Bethlehem Pike, Skippack Pk (PA Route 73), and Camp Hill Rd. near Flourtown, Pennsylvania. It has been there for at least 20 years…
SOURCE – link to en.wikipedia.org
RE: “Pod People” – me, above
RELEVANT EXCERPT FROM MONDOWEISS, 01/08/11:
SOURCE – link to mondoweiss.net
“Such a trgic and unnecessary death.
A lack of care in procedure, too casual an approach compounded, perhaps, by a weariness brought on by too long a conflict. So much hate, born out of so much fear.
Since fear is one of the main reasons that drive this struggle and delivers most of the fuel that keeps it in being, it might be to everyone’s advantage to examine that emotion in somewhat greater detail.”
According to you, one could get picture that occupying forces of Palestinian lend with all possible logistics and the intelligence are “badly trained” and “tired” or “scared”? Sorry, but you are ridiculous, and your statements are insults to the victim/s. Are you trying to whitewash or obfuscate the event? You, rather, justify this murder.
‘Are you trying to whitewash or obfuscate the event? You, rather, justify this murder.’
Have I given that impression? If I have, it’s not the one that I intended.
I was trying to trace the root of the whole problem. Find the root, you see, and, if you cut through it, the thing dies and can then be disposed of in some orderly fashion. And it can never grow back.
Most comments here seem to concentrate on attacking the foliage, the leaves, branches, the more visible manifestations of what’s happening this in troubled part of the world. The death/murder of Awr Qawasme is certainly one such example of that.
My contention would be that we are all, to some extent, complicit in the murder of this man. And the many others that may yet have to share his fate.
Why? Because after sixty years of conflict and crimes such as this, we have still not managed to end this bloody business one way or another. That we have failed to do so is unpardonable; it is a reproach, both to our humanity and our ability to think the matter through to a proper conclusion.
14 bullets ended the life of Awr Qawasme and, of course, none of us pulled the fatal trigger.
None of us were able to stop it from happening either. Billions of people on this planet and, somehow, a simple thing like that is still beyond our power.
What a bunch of losers we all are; our ancestors would be ashamed of us. And God knows what our children will think.
John Yorke, I do not mean to be unkind, but you have demonstrated repeatedly that you do not have a clue as to the root of the whole problem.
,All I would say is this.
If you have the answer to the root problem confronting Palestinians, Israelis and, by extension, the rest of us, please don’t keep it to yourself. That is unless you’re choosing the historical route with details of compelling reasons why Jews should not be in Israel in the first place. Valid though some or all of these may be, they will not help to address the issues as they stand today.
The Israelis are in Israel/Palestine and it looks as though they’ve decided to stay. Like it or not, that is a fact. Palestinians are in Palestine/Israel also and with very much the same intention.
These two basic facts now dominate, much as they have done over all of the last sixty+ years. And they will continue to do so until some means is discovered that will allow both groups to amicably share this small part of the planet’s surface. Not only to share it but to regard it as home, a place to return to with no barriers whatsoever on entry or exit.
Now such a thing has never happened in over three generations. And this will always be the case if matters are allowed to remain more or less as they are.
So, the situation is in desperate need of a big wake-up call, a policy that can shape the future of this land in a way that delivers both peace and security for all its citizens. Only when such conditions obtain can any real progress be made towards the establishment of a truly cohesive and vibrant society.
Well, you may know how I would propose this new arrangement. Show me how you might do it and then we can both pick holes in each others version.
Fear there is, no doubt. But is people who pull triggers, it is people who order other people to pull triggers – and maybe talk fear into that person to exploit it -, it is people who assemble armies to invade and destroy – also by first instilling fear among the people and then exploiting it later. Fear exists naturally but it can be talked up, exaggerated, exploited. You cannot blame fear itself for anything, fear is not an autonomous authority that takes decisions. People, individuals are the ones that take decisions.
It was some commander’s decision to go in and make these arrests, it was some political leader’s decision to occupy the territory in which it all happened and to construct the army to do it with, it was individuals who decided to vote for that leader. It is the decision of EU and US leaders to provide resources (plenty of it) to support the decisions of subsequent leaders to continue this occupation.
That’s were you need to look for the root causes John, not is some mystique construct that cannot be grabbed and held accountable.
Well, your analysis is very sound; there are people who bear and should be made to bear responsibility for such a crime. Whether they will or not remains for future events to reveal.
But what of the future and the next Mr. Qawasme? And the next? And the next? Any concerns for them?
Mr.Qawasme is dead and no amount of accepted responsibility, compensation or punishment is going to alter that. All we can do at this stage is to surmise why it happened in the first place and go from there.
Now quite a few commentators here have blamed the IDF soldiers involved and those further up the chain of command; in some cases, going all the way to the very top. And why not? The top is often where the most guilty can be found.
But will that be the end of the matter? Will some miraculous catharsis then take hold at all levels of Israeli and Palestinian society, ushering in a new dawn when ‘peace will rule the planets and love will steer the stars?’ Most unlikely as things stand at the moment.
And yet, ideally, isn’t that what should have happened at some point in all the sixty or so years that this conflict has been with us?
Why is it then that this has not proved to be the case? Are we, as a race, so bereft of ideas, so conditioned by tired old methods that nothing and no one will cause us to consider alternate scenarios, new appraisals, other ways of overcoming so massive an obstacle in our path?
Maybe we too are refusing to acknowledge our collective responsibility here; dodging the issue, blaming others for what may have become, in some small degree, a test of our own morality and resourcefulness.
In other words, if we can’t crack this one wide open and soon, then don’t expect the next Amr Qawasme to thank us for whatever efforts we’ve all made on his behalf.
Because, very likely, they won’t have amounted to diddly-squat.
“Maybe we too are refusing to acknowledge our collective responsibility here; dodging the issue, blaming others for what may have become, in some small degree, a test of our own morality and resourcefulness.”
I think we do have a share of the responsibility here. As I mentioned, the EU and its members states are more than happy for the occupation to exist and to continue to exist and have been ever since it started. Where were the calls for boycott until the occupation is over and the forces are withdrawn? Nada. In fact European leaders went the other way, offered free trade and other goodies to the occupying force. That does make us Europeans partially responsible for the death of Amr.
Even if they were after a Hamas militant. What did that militant do?? Did he kill someone? I don’t think so, because I haven’t heard of any Israeli dying from a terrorist act lately. It would have been splattered front page on every media site. So why were they out to kill anyone in the first place?? Because Israeli Wild Wild West unwritten laws state that “the IDF shoots first; asks questions later”!
Israeli justice begins with an injustice and ends with a crime.
Some, or all of the five men are indeed suspected of killing someone, according to Haaretz. Still, even suspected murderers aren’t routinely shot on sight – in civilised societies, that is. But that dreaded “T” word is knocking any remaining sense out of some people, especially since someone had the insane idea to call law enforcement “war”. Israel is by no means alone with this, just ask the folks a few countries farther east if counter-terrorism isn’t terrorism, too.
If you had read the link in Richard’s article before commenting you’d see that the original target is a Hamas militant involved in the murder of an Israeli in a suicide attack in Dimona a few years back, and even mentioned by name.
Shmuel I don’t care what the “original target” was accused of. In civilised countries, people accused of crimes are tried in court not assassinated by soldiers in the middle of the night.
Well, here’s the catch 22, Light. Since the Israeli legal system excludes the death penalty, if they provide due process they will not be able to execute. Therefore, if they want to execute someone they must deny them any due process.
I wrote something similar to that here recently. It’s true. Targeted killings are Israel’s standard form of capital punishment. It’s as if Israel doesn’t have or need an execution chamber. Whenever an IDF soldier goes out on such an assignment he becomes a mobile and individual firing squad wreaking justice on behalf of himself or his buddies or his regiment or his nation. It’s vile.
That’s just it. Since there is no due process that allows them to execute, the only way they can execute anyone is by denying them any due process whatsoever. Thus extrajudicial execution is the method of choice because it is the only choice. The justice system does not allow for anything else.
And Israelis used to boast
As I was saying, Israelis boast about what a civilized place Israel is because the death penalty was not allowed. I used to laugh in their faces when they said that.
Actually in civilized countries cases like this happen all the time by mistake or otherwise by over-zealous law enforcement officers. The question is not whether it happens but how the case is dealt with in the press and by the courts.
We have to wait and see on that one.
I know what you are trying to say although I think saying that ‘in civilized countries cases like this happen all the time’ is maybe going a bit too far. How many incidents like this have we really had in places like France, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Switzerland etc in the past 10 years? Not many think.
The claim was that the suspects they were after were involved in the murder of 4 settlers outside Hebron a few months ago. The PA had been seeking to arrest them, but the IDF got there first.
The true Supreme Court of Israel is the IDF’s rifle. Shame :/