Abir Aramin was shot in the head, but nobody shot her

No one has been punished and no one will be punished.

Abir Aramin photo: Sixteen Minutes to Palestine

(TEL AVIV) - On Sunday 10 July 2011, 8 Tammuz, the legal seal of approval was given to the book The King’s Torah [1] by Israel`s High Court of Justice, which ruled that the child Abir Aramin, age 10, who was shot in the head three years ago in Anata, was struck by a bullet that came from an unknown rifle fired by unknown soldiers or police. The projectile that was found under her small body has found no home, and it might as well stop searching.

The late Abir Aramin

In other words: the High Court has authorized the shedding of the blood of all little Palestinian girls and sent a clear message to the soldiers/police of the Israeli Occupation Forces – the murder of little Palestinian girls, especially those who are buying candy at a kiosk next to their school at nine in the morning, is not a crime.

No one has been punished and no one will be punished.

The allegations of the prosecution, that is, of the parents, the eyewitnesses, the Yesh Din organization, the proof and the evidence – did not make their way into the ears of the [female] judges.

Are they mothers too?

This judgement is the climax of an evidently wonderfully planned and oiled campaign to render permissible the killing of Palestinians that has been conducted for decades now in newspapers, in political speeches, in literature and song, in military plans, in the formulation of the army’s ethical code and in the textbooks that explain that every massacre of Palestinians since 1948 was good for the Jews, for the Jewish democracy and for the conservation of the Jewish majority in the State of/Land of Israel in the long, short or middle run.

Young, precious, and gone at the age of 10.

This campaign has gained momentum since the cast lead and phosphorus massacre in Gaza two years ago. Since then everybody has found justification and rationalization for the killing of Palestinians.

Retired military officers and officers who are not retired appear before schoolchildren and students in military preparatory programs, or just people who want to sleep with a clean conscience at night, and explain to them that the most moral army in the world does not do anything without moral-ethical-“value” justification, so if Palestinian children are harmed in the course of a moral-ethical-justified military operation, full of values and bursting with morality, then it was certainly the lesser evil, a necessary injustice, splinters, imposed by circumstances, a necessity that is not to be condemned – never to be condemned.

Because the killing of Palestinians is always done in the name of the law – international or national, or in the name of the laws of the Torah, in the name of the sublime values of preserving non-Palestinian human life, in the name of the War on Terror, military accomplishments, the principle of deterrence, which is always justified and explained in words that do not include the human component.

Dead Palestinians are a target, an objective, a “sector”, an operation, an action, a procedure.

And indeed the [female] judges of the High Court – are they mothers too? – did not condemn the murder, nor did they call for punishment for the soldiers who stuck a rifle out of an armoured jeep and aimed it at the nape of a little girl’s neck who was buying candy at a kiosk with one hand while holding her sister’s hand with her other hand, and fired with precision, a shot that left one hand raised, holding Arin’s hand, and the rest of Abir`s little body sprawled on the empty, dusty street.

They did not condemn the deed or demand that the soldiers or police (since the Kfar Qasim massacre [2] the IDF has always emphasized that members of the Border Guard are police, not soldiers) be put on any trial of any kind.

They did not condemn the murderers, nor did they express sympathy for Abir`s family.

Palestinian families do not experience grief – never, and so there is no need to share in their grief. They have too many children to feel grief at the loss of one of them.

And for this reason we should demand an immediate end to the harassment of Rabbi Elitzur and other rabbis who endorsed to the book The King’s Torah, which explains, using the holy scriptures and Jewish Halacha, why non-Jewish children should be killed without regret or remorse, for the good of the Jewish nation, and who preach at the gate as well as in organized meetings with soldiers, in schools and in the newspapers, for the killing of Palestinian children.

The harassment of the rabbis could, God forbid, be interpreted as racism or discrimination, since the High Court has certified that their preaching is kosher. Not that they need any such certification.

And the only consolation that remains for those of us who knew her, and are pained at her death and the grief of her brothers, her sisters and her parents, is that God will avenge her blood.

_____________________

Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the daughter of the former MK Matti Peled, the wife of Rami, the mother of Smadar who was murdered on 4 September 1997 in an attack at a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem.

Translator’s notes

1. In Hebrew, Torat ha-Melech. A controversial book by two Israeli rabbis, Yosef Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira, in which it is argued that Jews may kill Gentile children if they believe that they will grow up to harm Jews.

2. On 29 October 1956, Border Guard troops (technically police officers) killed 48 Palestinians in the Israeli Arab village of Kfar Qasim, while enforcing a curfew that had been imposed on Israeli Arab villages because of the Suez War.

Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent