The Story, The Whole Story, The Details, Please
News, more news, more bad news. Members of the Israeli Defence Forces have killed two Palestinian women. This is news, this is bad news. We listen and hold our breath, but nothing takes away from the shock of the first sentence of that news report. Members of a nation's army have shot and killed unarmed women who live beside that nation in a state of apprehended nationhood.It's a pity, it's a shame. It shouldn't happen. Life is brutal. Life in the Middle East is particularly brutal. The passage of time between life and death should never be that abrupt, that unnervingly brutal. Not for anyone, less so for women. Women who are obviously loyal to their birth, their tribal identity, their place in geography's lexicon. They did as they were bid. Women determined to make a difference, to aid and assist their own. This has nothing to do with common sense. This has everything to do with identity, with empathy, with compassion, with determination, with an obligation to help right what this tribe sees as a wrong done them.
Reality may bring to light some differences of opinion. After all, there are always two sides to every story if more than one identity or individial or country or religion or purpose or ethos is concerned. Perception is but a human device, an attempt at understanding events, complicated and magnified by prior events.
Details brought together can explain much. The populations within Jewish settlements in Israel abutting Gaza are constantly under seige. They chafe under the constraints to daily life this engenders, let alone the very real fear they live under with Kassam rockets being fired at them from Gaza. This is the Gaza that Israel abandoned to the Palestinians, hauling out protesting Jewish settlers in an effort to give back and appease. A move which was done violently and with hope, but which has brought no surcease to the hostilities.
Of late, the village of Beit Hanoun was identified as the source of many of those rockets. Israel gave orders to the IDF to go into Gaza on a temporary mission to disarm Palestinian terrorists whose raison d'etre appears to be the lobbing of said rockets in the short term; the elimination of the State of Israel in the long term by any and all means, rockets deemed to be a fairly good start. Sixty Palestinian men identified by the IDF as terrorist-inclined sought refuge in a local mosque, which has also been known as a storage facility for weapons and ammunition.
An appeal went out from a Hamas-owned radio station to Arab women in northern Gaza to descend on the scene and surround the mosque, to act as human shields. Hundreds of Palestinian women responded
to the radio broadcast and gathered and marched on the mosque. The Israeli forces have said that among the women were men dressed in female garb who fired from their vantage among the crowds of women at the IDF members who fired back.
Some of the Palestinian women managed to throw women's garments into the mosque, which had been damaged overnight while the Israeli soldiers had encircled it, attempting to get the terrorists out of the building, attempting at the same time to refrain from committing irreparable damage to it, as a place of worship. In the melee that followed, while the IDF was confronted with hundreds of determined women, most of the Palestinian terrorists managed to escape the blockade.
The women's mission was a success. Two women paid for that success with their lives.
Will there ever be an opportunity for those two solitudes to see one another as equals deserving equal opportunity in life? The will for that to succeed has to come from both sides. As long as the Palestinians continue to teach one another that Jews want their land, they want all land, they want to take over the world; the Jews control the world's news media, the world's financial houses, the political situation in the United States and elsewhere in their ongoing mission to take over the world, this won't be likely to happen.
As long as implacable hatred, unremitting enmity exists from one side to the other, workable solutions to the impasse will continue to elude and the best of intentions will come to nothing.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, November 03, 2006
<< Home