AND SHE SAID '' I SEE''

NOVANEWS She was a girl back then, in 2003. She had just stopped eating meat because she wouldn’t be

 an accomplice to killing, she said. And on the street she pitied the homeless. When she learned

 about the segregation that had been common practice in the US not so long ago, whereby the

dark-skinned were not allowed to sit next to the fair-skinned, she asked me, her voice quivering,

how could that be? A sensitive girl, a bleeding heart, not quite sixteen. And I told her about

fourteen-year old Omar Matar from Qalandiya refugee camp who had been murdered two

weeks before that. How he and a group of children and youths had run from the soldiers at

the checkpoint and how the soldiers had chased them, knelt, took aim and fired at the boys

as they ran. And how a live bullet entered his neck and he fell, and how he lay dying for a whole

week, and then died.
 

And I finished telling her and waited for her tears, certain they would come. I remember

I also wanted to apologize to her for telling her something so terrible even though it will be

so sad and hard to hear, because one simply must know what is happening so near, and

because he had been alive and now he’s dead. Perhaps I also needed to get it off my chest,

and whom would I tell if not her.Her eyes remained dry and I wondered. Her gaze was

 flat, and stiff, and empty. Time went by.

Then she said: “But what did he do?”

What did he do? What kind of question is that? What does it matter what he did? He is dead.

Shot in the neck. Murdered. Is that your first question? What did he do?

And I told her, I think I said, “They were throwing stones, and he…”And she said, “I see”.
True, I didn’t tell her – I didn’t have the chance to tell her – that it was not at the innocent

that he was throwing stones, not at the guiltless, but at those who incorporate violence

since they are soldiers.

That he threw stones at those who sit between him and his felled life because they are there,

which is not their home, and that he lives in the ghetto which they maintain, and his neighbors

and family and he himself are humiliated day by day all day, because there is the Occupation,

and they – its facilitators – are there at the gates of his life, at the aorta of his spirit and

rights, and life.

That he threw stones at the checkpoint where the assailant sits, he who bullies and violates

and steals and takes, the executioner, the soldier who is guilty of maintaining and facilitating

 a policy that hurts him.

Perhaps I didn’t tell her all of this, because I did not yet believe that I would have to excuse

myself to her. That dead Omar Matar would have to prove to her his innocence, and his right

 to remain alive and not to die.

“I see” she said, because for her that was enough. Now everything had become clear.

He threw stones and so he could be shot while running away. In the neck. With live

ammunition. And his life could be taken. “I see” she said to me, and her face remained

After I already realized where she had gone inside herself, in the middle or at the end of her

meeting with me then, or perhaps only later in my own feverish thoughts, there was a moment

when – in my mind – I said these words to her:

And if I had told you that not Palestinian Omar Matar but a Haredi (ultraorthodox)

fourteen-year old Jew was the one throwing stones at the checkpoint, at a soldier, at

a policeman? And the policeman then knelt, took aim and fired at his neck while he

was running away and the bullet entered his neck and he fell and died, would you still say

“I see”?

And if I told you that an angry fourteen year-old Jewish boy, had thrown a stone at a

military base housing Wehrmacht soldiers, and after he had thrown the stone he ran away,

and a Wehrmacht soldier chased him, then knelt, took aim and shot him in his neck, and

killed him, would you then, too, say “I see”?

And if I told you that a fourteen-year old boy had entered my next door neighbor’s yard and

thrown stones at his house, and at him, and my neighbor opened his window, took out his

pistol and shot him dead, would you still say “I see”, about this imaginary boy throwing

stones at my neighbor who had never done him or anyone else around any harm, where

there is no occupier and no victim, and my neighbor had never harmed anyone around him

But I didn’t say anything. I sealed my ebbing sob and my anger and astonishment,

and kept silent.

And I never saw her again. I didn’t happen to, nor did I want to. And perhaps our paths

never crossed again because I didn’t want them to. And years went by.

2010. Not very long ago, on television, I was watching the coverage of a settler’s attempt

to run over boys in Silwan, and remembered her.

A Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem. In a segregated discriminating city where the

 law forbids Palestinians to build their homes, and the law keeps demolishing their homes,

which will never be made legal, because they are Palestinians. Where Jews have settled and

are protected by the Occupation forces while taking over the place, step by step at the expense

A car drives along, downhill, deviates from its track, collide with two children one of whom

is hurled in the air and falls on the road.

One’s mind and heart refuse to believe one’s eyes.

With what ease the scene was televised time and again – the child flying in the air again

and again and crashing down on the road – and the Israeli anchormen and women, male

and female reporters all click their tongues, their faces empty and cold just like that of

He threw stones, they say. It wasn’t the driver who started, it was the boy. The boy the boy

the boy the boy. Who threw stones. Who lay in wait, who threw, who started, who is guilty.

 And the little body is hurled in the air before crashing on the asphalt. And this tiny humanness,

But a car, never mind why, hit a boy. A boy was hurled in the air. And crashed down on

the asphalt. Is this not a closed, complete, objective, absolute event?

And even if the driver was afraid and didn’t mean to do it, and did not intentionally change

his course in order to run them over –

And even if other children had thrown stones at him earlier, or even these very

children whom he ran over –And in spite of this automatic acquittal of the Jew

only because he is a Jew be what may, regardless of what he had done – Before all of this,

ahead of all of these contexts and interpretations and rationalizations, is there not a child there?
A child whose little body was hit by a car, its impact hurling it in the air until it fell and

True, the child’s skin may have been slightly browner than the assailant driver’s, and if not

his skin color, than his accent may have been different, and he was most likely not the boy

next door, nor possibly the son of a family relation of the Israeli television’s reporters.

And true, by means of ‘mandatory conscription’ that stamps its recruits with the State’s stamp,

be what may, the assailant driver himself – settled in Silwan and manifesting Israel’s inherent

injustice towards this neighborhood – is to a certain extent everyman, every man who serves in

the Israeli army, as are the sons and daughters of all those anchors and reporters, and they

themselves, are either the hitting driver or those who protect him in deed or in some future potential.
Because they too are soldiers.

And it is certainly not easy to sympathize with the victim of someone you might know and be related to. Of your son and daughter. Your own potential victim.

But is there – still – nothing that is not relative, I wonder, that is not merely in the eyes of the beholder, that bears inherent meaning and value regardless of circumstances and identities of those involved? In his poem On the Slaughter, written following the 1903 Kishinev pogroms, didn’t the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik write:Vengeance such as this, vengeance for the blood of a small boy,
Satan himself has not devised-
Words that have become emblematic of the non-relativity of evil. Words that say that a crime is a crime, and a child is a child, and injustice is injustice, always.
Again and again I recall that girl, now already 23 years-old. And I imagine her witnessing a horrific traffic accident, perhaps, how her heart begins to pound, how she approaches, with her bleeding heart that I remember so well, and the driver stands there and one person lies dead on the ground, covered, and she approaches the body, lifts the sheet and sees the identity of the victim, and raises her eyes and sees the identity of the hitting driver, and only then does she weeps, or merely says – “I see”.
And I think to myself, no, Bialik, you were wrong. Not the blood of a child. The blood of a Jewish child, perhaps, but not the blood of just any child. Not in these parts and not at this point in time.

Here there is no such thing as ‘a boy’ or ‘a child’ if it is a Palestinian, for a Palestinian is not ‘a child’ but always a Palestinian.Here it is all – really all – about ‘ours’ and ‘us’ and ‘them’. And we are right because it is ‘us’, and they are wrong because it is ‘them’.And there is no evil or good conduct, justice or its violation, as an inherent, permanent and absolute value regarded only in view of the deed itself. Only who killed and who died.
There is only ethnicity.Only that.

Since the attempt to run him over at Silwan, 11-year old Omran Mohammad Mansour whom the car hit was tried and found guilty. He has been placed under house arrest and fined. However, 57-year old settler David Be’eri who drove his car into the two children is not under any kind of arrest, nor fined.

And just as I did back then when Omar Matar was murdered, now, too, I stitch inside me the tears that rise and my anger and astonishment, I lower more curtains, and again I distance Omar Matar and all the other murdered children of Qalandiya refugee camp and the run-over children of Silwan whom I’ve already distanced a bit, and already they are almost mere words, and even less – stains of memory.