21-Jul-16: Palestinian Arab ass being saved, once more, by concerned Israelis

Image Source: Screen shot

Thanks to Aussie Dave over at Israellycool, we just watched a brief video clip that, on its face, is about Israeli police confiscating Palestinian Arab property. It originates with Corey Gil-Shuster, who interviews subjects for his Ask an Israeli/Ask a Palestinian video project and who came across the Hebrew-only source on an Israeli channel for animal lovers.

In dry terms, it's a clip filmed recently by someone from Israel Police that graphically shows the mistreatment of a neglected, very badly-lacerated donkey. And the frightened, angry, frustrated boy in charge of the animal. And the animal being saved from a slow and awful death through the intervention of grown-ups wearing Star of David symbols on their uniforms.

Dave quotes Corey noting the significance of what's being shown, beyond the cruelty and the animal, and touching on truths that are central to the generations-long Arab/Israel conflict. Paraphrasing Corey,

• An Arab child of 11 from the West Bank, despatched into Israel on his own to work illegally, almost certainly by his hard-scrabble family. He could have been hurt or killed. And it's certainly illegal to do this to a child of his age.
• Indications, based on what we see the child do once the police move, that he gets beaten at home and will likely be beaten some more for losing the donkey to the Zionists.
• And "this video will end up being edited to show that Israelis steal donkeys from Palestinian children".

Dave adds that "it shows the compassion of the Israeli police officers towards this illegal entrant into Israel, even though he has abused a donkey and is not cooperating with them". He's of course right. He could have also mentioned their admirable patience and forbearance.



But there's also this aspect:

Deeply cynical, and very often life-threatening, abuse of Palestinian Arab children is not only a well-documented reality. It's also one of these perplexing sides of the conflict that causes human rights bodies  - the sort we would otherwise expect to scream to the heavens in protest - to lose their voices and stare off into the distance, humming.

Palestinian Arab children, whether they are having their heads filled with life-changing hatred and often-lethal bigotry by an education system run by UNRWA, or whether being incited by their despotic president to go out into the fields and onto the streets and (literally) kill Jews and die for the "purity" of their "homeland" - in other words, when they are being weaponized - are egregiously ignored by the likes UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and others.

The self-incriminating silence of the thriving multi-billion dollar children's rights industry on what's being done to the Palestinian Arab children by their own ruling clique is an articulate expression of their priorities and of the ideology motivating many of the prime movers of those charities and NGOs. It's a scandal that ought to get more attention than, say, a plagiarized paragraph in a politician's wife's speech. But it gets close to none.

In an age of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, they certainly can't say they don't know. They have decided to not care, not intervene and not do what their donors want them to do. Instead, they align themselves with the sadly familiar narrative that preposterously ascribes "Palestinian suffering" to "occupation" (as the British House of Lords, in a report it withdrew this week after a single day's exposure, does and did) Since it's children's lives being ruined, we're entitled to feel and express fury. It surprises us to see that so few other people get that. 

There's something about advocacy for the Palestinian Arabs that makes smart people stupid, empathetic people cruel and philanthropy-minded Westerners witless.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Palestyński osioł, palestyńskie dziecko, izraelska policja") including the video clip - all by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her once again, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]