Stop Your Sobbing

[not systems]

http://antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=7007

August 19, 2005
Stop Your Sobbing
by Ran HaCohen

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Oh, how they suffer. It breaks one's heart. "People are thrown to the street," said Rabbi Shlomo Aviner from Bet-El, who infiltrated Gaza to incite his disciples. "Our life was stopped, and it will never resume," mourns one settler. "My mother was taken out of her home and put on a bus in Poland," cries another victim, "and now they're going to do the same to me." The same, sure thing. "They're going to destroy 20 synagogues, almost like in Kristallnacht," complains a third idiot. Some of them say it out loud: "it's a Holocaust." Perhaps even worse? "If Gentiles had done this to me, it would have been better; but Jews…" one settler said on television. Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit – once the hope of Israel's peace camp, now a sickening right-winger – draws an analogy between a bereaved settler's lost son and her house: "Just as her son is no longer with her, so her home will not be hers." Losing a son, leaving a house – it's all the same. It seems that the more the settlers defy and despise democracy, morality, rationality, history, even the Holocaust, the stronger the media embraces them. Not to portray them as lunatics, but as traumatized victims whose deranged behavior is the ultimate evidence for their suffering.

The "poor settlers" image dominates the Israeli media not because it is in love with the settlers, but because it is obedient. Prime Minister Sharon wants the eviction to be portrayed as a huge national trauma – as a means against any future withdrawals – so that's what the media is doing. The narrative adopted is the settlers' narrative. The tears dripping from my television set day and night are shed by both the settlers and the evicting forces, and it's the same tears: both sides share a narrative that portrays the removal of the illegal settlements, or the decolonization of occupied Palestinian land, as an historic tragedy, "uprooting," "deportation." Neither the government nor the media offers an alternative – neither a narrative of decolonization as a step toward peace (the very last narrative Sharon would ever adopt) nor any other. All that the soldiers and policemen cling to is the formal argumentation of obeying legitimate orders following a democratically taken decision. And at any rate, they have been ordered not to argue with the settlers, so that the latter's narrative dominates the entire stage. The settlers, observes Ehud Asheri, are "Losing on the ground, winning on TV."

Our Spoiled Settlers

This representation may seem inevitable to Israeli media consumers, but it's definitely not the only possible one. There is a lot of antagonism toward the settlers; none of it reaches the media, except for rare scoops like the police officer unknowingly recorded telling his men to "f*ck these damned settlers" (he was dismissed immediately, of course).

Why hate the settlers? Look: last week the worst-ever Poverty Report was published, giving Israel a Western-world-record in child poverty: 33 percent of Israeli children now live in poverty, compared to 22 percent in the United States, 15 percent in Canada, 10 percent in Germany, and 4 percent in Sweden. On this background, take a close look at the pictures from the settlements: a great villa for every family, beautiful gardens, well-paved streets, luxurious community facilities. Nothing to compare with the slums of nearby Sderot, the poor, unemployment-struck town inside Israel, not even with the common apartment blocks of the Israeli middle class within the Green Line. In a rare interview, an elderly man from Sderot told Israeli television that if all the money hadn't gone to the settlements, it could have made his home town prosperous. Meanwhile, rows of slums in Sderot, often bombed by Palestinian homemade missiles, are offered for sale. Unlike the settlements, here there are no generous public facilities, no bulletproof windows, and definitely no compensation for those wishing to leave.

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