Jewish children in West Bank settlements

There was a big news story today about a very young Palestinian boy who apparently was strapped to a suicide bomb, and the Israelis had to get it off him, a tragic example of the conflict consuming the young, for sure. There are some rumors the whole thing was staged but I don't really believe it yet. Looking around the threads at agonist.org, I happened upon one talking about child soldiers and children thrown into conflicts, where one poster found info critical of Palestinian society for putting its kids on the 'front lines' of the fighting and having kids near militants. That, and an article I read in an academic journal today, got me thinking about how the conflict harms Jewish kids forced to grow up in the West Bank (and how hypocritical it is to blame the occupied for their occupation). I responded:
(crossposted to DKos diary)

Firstly, I'd like to respond to Marquis de Sod's post about Palestinian children perched next to armed militants. Where that site imperiously claims that "the Palestinian leadership... accuses Israel of committing human rights violations... while evading its own responsibility for the orchestrated appearance of children at the front lines of the conflict," we have a classic example of blaming those darn Palestinians for being foolish enough to exist under occupation.

The front lines are everywhere, the tanks and snipers are outside the door, down the street, at the checkpoints between the city and the villages. If only the Palestinians would somehow make themselves vanish, they wouldn't shamelessly dare to place their children there.

Of course it's terrible when kids are pawned into the conflict. They are innocent, they didn't choose to be there. They should not have to throw the stones and get shot at.

But everyone forgets civilian life on the flip side of the West Bank, the hundreds of thousands of Jews living there, raising families. Many of them are actually trapped, by Israel's shaky economy and a sort of tax-incentive honeypot that ensnares lower-middle class families in War Zone Mortgages.

It is here that the fertility rate is pushed ever higher, higher even than within Israel proper. The settlements are filled with children; many hold more children than adults. It is held up as a spiritual duty for mothers to be fruitful and multiply in Judea and Samaria.

I would argue that it is grossly immoral to force Jewish children to grow up in the warped, apocalyptic atmosphere of the West Bank settlements (although I'm sure seaside Gaza is really a peach). I am appalled that my country is plunging deeply into debt to offer Israel economic assistance which eventually finds its way into reinforcing this domesticity of madness.

These Jewish kids do not have any choice about where they grow up. The Likud deliberately sets policies to paralyze their parents in Judea and Samaria. Many of them ride armored school buses back across the Green Line to school, and of course many, many have been killed, wounded and traumatized while their moral framework is bent around into a pretzel to serve messianic right-wing power fantasies.

Are the Hebrew children of Judea and Samaria destined to lead disrupted lives, never fully able to tease out the darkness they gasped in? Are they the next ones to give up on the future and turn to violence? Marquis de Sod, have you heard of the "Hilltop Youth"?

Many of the young ones raised around Hebron and Kiryat Arba are truly dangerous. They attack Arabs--actually fighting to occupy portions of Hebron's downtown city blocks--and all too frequently the Israeli police and armed forces. I can't blame them for failing to see who they are and where they are--their whole government has orchestrated an all-consuming, fictional mythos of Jewish redemption and supremacy. It's a terrible thing to do. It's murderous to steal childhood.

Today I found a stunning story in the Journal of Palestine Studies by a researcher named Tamara Neuman, who went to live in Kiryat Arba for several months, and learned how maternity becomes co-opted and absorbed into the politics of the Israeli settlement process. Maternity assumes a pre-dialectal, almost automatic position of fundamental moral authority in discourse. In particular, one woman in the 1970s snuck into the Tomb of the Patriarchs to have a circumcision performed on her son, the first to be born in the settlement. The child later died young, and upon returning from Jerusalem she marched down to where they surmised the old Hebrew cemetary in Hebron was. Using her dead baby as a political flag, she managed to inter the child. More recently, another infant being raised--through no choice of her own--in the settlement was apparently shot by a Palestinian sniper. The child, Shalhevet Pas, was not buried by her father immediately, in order to successfully expedite the political goal of reoccupying the Arab hill neighborhood of Hebron where the shots were supposedly fired from. Eventally, Shalhevet's unhinged father was exposed as a member of a Jewish terror cell.

I'm 20 years old. So many of the Palestinian militants--terrorists--suicide bombers--are my age. So are the draftees manning checkpoints in the IDF. So are the American soldiers sent to find Weapons of Mass Destruction that our president now mockingly looks under his couch for. ALWAYS, it is my age group forced to die for these absurd totems of militarism and blind power.

When you roll your eyes at the wounded Palestinian children foolish enough to throw rocks at the troop carriers, where the Israelis return with live fire, you should remember that they have known nothing but life under the occupation.

They are on the front lines of the war because Israeli settlement blocs exert "pressure" on Palestinian urban areas. Ever looked at a map of Gush Katif and Rafah in the South Gaza Strip? The "front line" where Rachel Corrie lost her life to a bulldozer is an expanding no-mans land facing the Katif bloc.

I should add that Israelis happily apply an old Ottoman land law which declares that land unused for 5 years reverts to the "sovereign" i.e. occupying power. Hence, to gain control of agricultural land in the West Bank and reallocate to settlements, build a fence and interfere with farmer access. This wipes out the future of those impudent Palestinian children before their very eyes. And then they hire Palestinian teenage laborers to pour concrete in the hilltops. That's where the children are, dumping their own futures into the ground.

Writing on the wall

I have been very busy this week working on a group paper for International Security class responding to Richard Perle and David Frum's horrible book, "An End to Evil." The whole thing filled me with dread. I never want to look at it again.

Having said that, it has been most entertaining to watch CNN these days, as Dick Clarke brings down the Bush Administration's American Grandstanding about their competence in confronting terror. By his account, the Administration's first months were like a special cubicle hell, an inert bureaucracy staffed by cold war geriatrics "encased in amber" who invented task forces that never met and demoted Clarke, the nation's supposed counterterror guru, who tried to put the government on high alert, but found the shell of evildoers around the president almost inpenetrable. Happily, Bush's poll numbers seem to be taking a hit.

I don't quite grasp why the conservatives issue catcalls and deny credibility because Clarke has written a book about it. This is the information age. How is the public supposed to become informed, if not by the printed word?

In any case I wanted to post a link to this amazing story about the graffiti found all over the walls of Baghdad, meticulously collected and translated by an old Iraqi. It's riotously funny. Here are a some that the old man captured:

SADDAM WILL RETURN!
And written underneath:
THROUGH MY ASS!

ANARCHY IS GOVERNING THROUGH A PARLIAMENT AND AN EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY

SADDAM SWALLOWED ALL THE PRICKS OF THE WORLD, AND HE STILL SAID HE WAS VICTORIOUS

SADDAM IS A WORD THAT MEANS A DISEASE THAT HITS DONKEYS

EVERYONE, SADDAM CRAPPED IN HIS TROUSERS

EVERYONE, SADDAM PIMPED HIS WIFE SAJIDAH

DEAR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SADDAM ATE FROM THE KAADAH! [a child's potty]

DOWN WITH AHMAD CHALABI, MAN OF CATS!

CHALABI IS THE ENGINEER OF DEMOCRACY
And underneath is written:
ZIONISTS SAID THAT!

OUR WEALTH IS OUR OWN, OUR OIL WILL ENRICH US IF WE CAN GET IT BACK INTO OUR HANDS

THE GOVERNING COUNCIL IS A COUNCIL OF AGENTS, TRAITORS, SPIES, AND MERCENARIES

DONKEYS PISS HERE!
And underneath is written:
AND PIMPS AND BAATHISTS

ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE POST-LIBERATION IRAQ:
105 NEWSPAPERS (ALL LIES)
110 FAILED PARTIES
300 THIEVES' ORGANIZATIONS
500 UNIONS WITH NO WORK
600 HEADQUARTERS FOR PLUNDERING AND STEALING
700 MOVEMENTS WITH NO BLESSING OR GOOD
25,000 SPIES FOR THE AMERICANS
4,000 EMPLOYEES IN OFFICIAL OFFICES, ALL THIEVES
5,000 DOUBLE AGENTS FOR THE AMERICANS AND FOR SADDAM AT THE SAME TIME
2 MILLION HOMELESS FAMILIES WITH NO DIGNITY
25 MILLION IRAQIS THAT WANT TO LEAVE IRAQ
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical City

SADDAM ATE BEANS AND EMITTED STINKY AIR

LONG LIVE SADDAM, IN SPITE OF HIS FOOL CRAZIES!
And underneath is written:
SADDAM IS A PIMP; ASK YOUR SISTER!

PATIENCE, BAGHDAD, PATIENCE, SADDAM IS COMING BACK SOON
And underneath is written:
TO FINISH OFF WHAT REMAINS OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR TO FUCK YOUR MOTHER?

LET YOUR HEADS APPEAR, YOU BAATHISTS. WHERE ARE YOU HIDING? IN THE SEWAGE PIPES?

IRAQ IS THE MUSTACHE OF EVERY HONORABLE MAN--The Army of Mohammed

WE SWEAR WE WILL MAKE MASS GRAVES FROM IRAQ'S LAND FOR ALL THE TRAITORS AND ALL THE AGENTS OF THE AMERICANS AND THE ZIONISTS--Army of Mohammed
And underneath is written:
WE ALREADY KNOW MASS GRAVES ARE YOUR SPECIALTY; GOD IS OUR WITNESS ON THAT

INCREASE IN RATION SHARES:
100 KG. SADNESS, PAIN, AND MELANCHOLY FOR EACH CITIZEN
50 KG. WORRY, GRIEF, AND SORROW FOR EACH HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD
10 PROBLEMS PER FAMILY
4 VOLTS ELECTRICITY PER HOUSE
1 MASS CEMETERY PER CITY DISTRICT
5 RANDOMLY SHOT BULLETS PER STREET, INCREASED TO 50 BULLETS ON THURSDAYS
1 GAS CANISTER PER FAMILY PER MONTH
2 KEROSENE BOTTLES PER FAMILY PER MONTH
10 CANS OF FOOD PER FAMILY PER MONTH: VARIOUS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN AND FULL OF DIFFERENT POISONS
NB: TRANSPORTATION COSTS ARE BORNE BY MR. BREMER
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical City

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, EVEN THE PORTERS AT THE SHARJAH BAZAAR

BE FRIGHTENED OF GOD, PROSTITUTE OF JORDAN! AND YOU THE TURBANED MEN OF IRAN, AND YOU GRANDSONS OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS

WE WILL RETURN SOON!--The Baath Party
And underneath is written:
AND WE WILL WAIT FOR YOU WITH SLIPPERS, YOU DREGS!--The Al Daawa Islamic Party

KIRKUK IS FOR THE KURDS
This has been crossed out and written instead:
KIRKUK FOR THE TURKMEN
And this has been crossed out and written instead:
KIRKUK IS FOR THE IRAQIS, YOU TRAITORS!

BREMER! IF YOU DON'T KNOW, IT'S A DISASTER, AND IF YOU KNOW, THE DISASTER IS GREATER

IF SADDAM SPENT THE OIL REVENUES ON THE WELFARE OF HIS PEOPLE IRAQ WOULD BE:
THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
EVERY IRAQI WOULD HAVE TWO HOUSES: ONE FOR WINTER, ONE FOR SUMMER
EVERY IRAQI WOULD HAVE THREE CARS: ONE FOR WORK, ONE FOR HIS FAMILY, AND ONE FOR PICNICS AND TRAVELING
EVERY IRAQI WOULD TRAVEL THROUGHOUT THE WORLD ANNUALLY
EVERY IRAQI WOULD BE EDUCATED TO THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING, AND EDUCATION
IRAQ'S POPULATION WOULD BE 50 MILLION
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical City