An Israel Defense Forces soldier is seen abusing a helpless young Palestinian who has Down syndrome. The soldier shoves him hard against a wall, points his rifle at his victim's body, threatens, curses and barks. His victim starts coughing and the soldier screams at him in Arabic: "Shut up!" And then shouts: "Where's your phone? Give it to me!" There is no phone. The soldier then demands: "ID card."
The frightened young man, who is about 25, somehow retrieves his ID from his pocket, only to have the soldier fling it angrily to the ground. The soldier calls him a "son of a whore," uttering something foul about his mother, which is unprintable here, and then declares: "I am going to shoot you."
The soldier spits curses at the helpless man, who coughs and begins to retch, apparently due to the pressure and fear. An Israeli police officer observes the scene, but makes no move to come to the aid of the helpless fellow, who is Samur Rajabi, a resident of a neighborhood in Hebron. A military jeep appears on the scene – and the video is cut off. It is hard to watch.
The clip was taken by an anonymous passerby this past October in a part of the city's H-2 zone that is inhabited by Jewish settlers. Subsequently, it was disseminated on social media, mainly among Palestinians. One of those who saw it was Fatma Jabbar, who held onto it in her phone. For the army of the occupation, in the cradle of apartheid in Hebron, that would turn out to be an offense that demands harsh punishment.
Haaretz
Fatma Jabbar was arrested for having the video of the incident on her phone. She was handcuffed and blindfolded for hours while her children wept.
Since most Israelis spent years in the military, they are affected by this kind of cruel behavior and take it back with them into regular society. The Midrash says if you speak lashon hara about gentiles you will come to speak it about Jews. Accordingly, there is much cruelty and obnoxiousness in israeli society. Even the frum sector is affected by it. German Jews were punctual. Russian Jews were stoic and drank lots of vodka. We are affected by the countries we live in. And since EY is half Arab and those Arabs don't have a country of their own, the Jewish Israelis police them, particularly those who don't have citizenship, which is 1/3 of the population. Whatever your opinion about whether there should be a Palestinian state, or about Arabs, the fact is that Zionism produced a situation where Jewish boys and girls are policing millions of Arabs. Is there another society where half the people lord over the other half of the people, and have been doing so for 75 years? Let's say you have a negative opinion of Arabs. Well, Zionism has created a situation where Jews have to be heavily involved with them, and under terrible circumstances. The result is not good, and doesn't produce "a wonderful place to live," as Rabbi Hershel Schachter naively puts it.
So what you see is a high anxiety society, where many teachers are mean to students, where clerks are mean to you, where bus drivers howl for your every 'mistake' or request of them. It's not all teachers, not all clerks, and not all bus drivers. But there are so many bad encounters, that you or your children can develop nervous disorders.
No it's not a wonderful place to live. Where RHS lives is pretty wonderful. It's called the USA. He shouldn't recommend that you live in a place where he has never lived, particularly when it's a place with as weird a history and circumstance as this one.
The story about the kid with Down syndrome is one thing. Then there's what's going on in Gaza. I bring you the words of legendary journalist Seymour Hersch.
Gaza has become a killing field—that is the view of a well-informed Israeli veteran who was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. He believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind of the all-out retaliatory bombing and ground attack there, is now a contemporary Colonel Kurtz, the psychotic killer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the famed Vietnam War movie of 1979 based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.
What began as a retaliatory war by the internationally revered Israel Defense Forces against a disciplined Hamas guerilla force turned into the systematic starvation of a society whose civilian survivors—men, women, and children—are the victims of an Israeli military whose combat units are often led by the second generation of Israeli settlers. These officers, increasingly prominent as the war in Gaza goes on, are religious zealot majors and lieutenant colonels who believe it is their calling to shoot and kill any Palestinian who moves, whether combatant or civilian.
There are more than 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including fifteen in East Jerusalem. There are also more than two hundred illegal outposts that are supplied with weapons by the increasingly radical Israeli government while not officially sanctioned by that government. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has grown steadily, including Israeli Air Force bombing missions.
The IDF recruiting pattern explains the growing violence against Palestinian men, women, and children in the war. I was told that 40 to 45 percent of today’s higher officers in the IDF come from settler families in the West Bank who combine “deep religiosity with Netanyahu’s political fervor.’’ The Israeli veteran told me of watching in horror, with colleagues, as Israeli bombings and earth-moving machinery were continuing to, as he put it, “level” north Gaza and turn it into a dead zone. He said that there “have been more and more reports of colonels and even generals issuing orders to kill every Palestinian you see and destroy every building still standing. Israel’s war in Gaza has become fanatical. It’s apocalypse now. Killing for killing’s sake. It is corruption like never before.”
You want to say that Hersch is lying and Haaretz is lying or that they are self-hating Jews because they criticize a secular anti-religious government and its chief institution -- the military? You want to say that every human rights organization is biased, even those dominated by Jews. You want to say that every video we see of destruction and cruelty by the IDF is a fabrication or is taken out of context, even though we see 1000s of them, released moments after the events take place? Then I want to say that you are in some kind of cult and have closed off your mind. There's no point talking to you. You live in a closed little world like the Mafia. Meanwhile, Jewish boys and girls are being dragged through all this. They are the ones doing the killing that allows you to continue with your petty ideologies. And many are getting killed to. But what does that matter to you? You don't care about them. You don't care about the people you push to move to Israel. You don't care about the kids who wind up off the derech. You just don't care.
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