The price of ignorance

[Scurrilous]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/376717.html

<snip>

"The suicide bomber at the Geha Junction, Shehad Hanani, was from Beit Furik, one of the most imprisoned villages in the territories that is surrounded by earth roadblocks on all sides. It's a place where women in labor and the sick have to risk walking through fields to get to the hospital in adjacent Nablus. At least one woman in labor, Rula Ashatiya, gave birth at the Beit Furik checkpoint and lost her infant. Few Israelis are capable of imagining what life is like in Beit Furik: the almost universal unemployment, poverty, endless siege and humiliations of life inside a prison. A young man like Hanani, who was 21, had no reason to get up in the morning other than to face another day of joblessness and humiliation.


However, Israelis have little interest in knowing the lay of the land from which terror springs. The Israeli media have next to nothing to say about life in Beit Furik. By the same token, few Israelis heard about the killing of the suicide bomber's relative, Fadi Hanani, 10 days ago in Nablus, just as they hadn't heard about all the killings of Palestinians in the past few months. Life in Beit Furik and the killing in Nablus do not justify a suicide bombing at a bus station, but whoever wants to fight terror must first and foremost improve life in Beit Furik.

Israel counted "81 days of quiet" without terrorist attacks. But there is no greater lie than this. The quiet was only here. During this "quiet," dozens of Palestinians were killed, and almost no one bothered to report it. That is how it becomes possible to speak of quiet and then claim that the Palestinians disturbed it. The fact that the media does not speak of Palestinian deaths does not mean that they did not happen. The eight Palestinians who were killed last week in one day at Rafah, for example, killing along the lines of a medium-sized terror attack, together with destruction that is to an extent unknown in Israel, weren't enough to generate any interest here last week. They barely got a mention. The international community dealt prominently with this frightening killing, and the United Nations secretary-general issued a special statement condemning them. There was only one place where the entire event was ignored - the country whose soldiers perpetrated the killing. The images of giant bulldozers and tanks demolishing more and more houses, and the scenes of the dead and 42 wounded, among them women and children, being taken to hospitals in Rafah were hardly shown in Israel."

<snip>

"This has nothing to do with media critique; it's about our image. A society that disregards loss of human life, caused by its own soldiers, is a tainted society. A society that conceals from its citizens vital information of this kind is undercutting their sense of judgment. The situation is further compounded when one examines the attitude of the Israeli society toward its victims: there aren't many societies that immerse themselves in bereavement so intensely. What we have, then, is a dual morality: we count only our own dead, all the rest don't exist."