Maiming Palestinians for
Sport is a War Crime
By Marion Kawas
Published in Palestine Chronicle, March 10, 2020
The new Haaretz report entitled
“42
Knees in One Day” is a difficult and painful read, and many people
of conscience have responded with disgust and rage.
For those few who have not
seen the report, it details in chilling fashion the accounts of 6 Israeli
snipers who were stationed at the border with Gaza during the Great Return
March protests. The report is long and gruesome; I had to put it down and then
return to it several times. The “42 knees” reference is the “high count” for
how many Palestinians were maimed by a single sniper team in one day.
The over-all message is one
of devastating impunity and disregard for the sanctity of Palestinian life.
Palestinians and their long-time supporters have always known this was the
mentality at play, but to see it all compiled in one place, in black and white,
in the soldiers’ own words, was damning.
Especially here in Canada,
where barely a week earlier, it was revealed that the Trudeau government had called on
the International Criminal Court not to investigate war crimes accusations
against Israel.
“Canada’s longstanding position is that it does not
recognize a Palestinian state…In the absence of a Palestinian state, it is
Canada’s view that the Court does not have jurisdiction in this matter under
international law,” Canada’s Foreign Ministry reportedly told various media
outlets.
This
is the same Canadian government that is busy travelling the world trying to get
(or buy) votes for a UN Security Council seat. That has sent Joe Clark, a
former Prime Minister, to visit multiple Arab countries looking for
support; the Joe Clark that pioneered the idea of moving
Canada’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem back in 1979, an election promise
that he was later forced to abandon. The same government whose Deputy PM and
former foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, informed an Israeli audience in
late 2018 that Canada would be an “asset for Israel” at the UN Security Council if it got
one of the non-permanent member seats.
Canada,
and other governments, must understand that there is a direct trajectory from
their unconditional support for Israel to the continuation of Israeli war
crimes against the Palestinian people. Hampering the ICC investigation,
refusing to accept your own court’s decision on labeling of Israeli settlement
wines, smearing pro-Palestinian advocates as “anti-semitic” as happened at York
University last year, all of this enables the Israeli government and military
to feel they are immune to any sort of accountability.
This
new report on Israeli sniper violence against Palestinians is most profound in
what lies in the shadows: the Israeli military’s crude but effective approach.
Promoting the concept that maiming these Palestinian youth is somehow “more
humane” than killing them outright. But permanently disabling them in a poor
society with few resources for the healthy let alone the injured, is an equally
cruel fate. And a poignant and daily reminder to the rest of that society of
the price to be paid for rebellion.
Most
of the sniper accounts demonstrated a total lack of appreciation of the
consequences or severity of their actions. One said, when talking about the
other soldiers and their initial reaction to maiming their victims: “He has
fulfilled himself just now, it’s a rare moment. Actually, the more he does it,
the more indifferent he’ll become. He will no longer be especially happy, or
sad. He’ll just be.”
The snipers work in a team with a locator and the “42 in one day” soldier, related how he suggested to his locator to take over the shooting when they were getting close to the end of their shift because “he didn’t have knees”. And “you want to leave with the feeling that you did something”. (Note its just “knees”, not Palestinian lives or limbs.) The parallel here with how sports teams allow rookie players to be involved at the end of a game that they know they are winning, is unmistakable. And it also highlights that these snipers didn’t seem to feel threatened and had few concerns about their own safety.
I
realize that the Israeli snipers are themselves indoctrinated kids. But I hate
the system and ideology that brought them to this, that placed them on those
dirt embankments overlooking the people of Gaza, that made them think this was
all “sport” or a video game where the player with the most points wins. And if
I feel such rage thousands of miles away, I can only imagine (and will never
judge) how the youth of Gaza and their families must feel.
