From Khalid Amayreh
in Occupied East Jerusalem
The Israeli electronic and print
media on Saturday
revealed that the bulk of the
eight Israeli Yeshiva
(Talmudic religious school) “students” killed or injured
in an attack on the headquarters of the Jewish settlement
movement in Jerusalem on Thursday were actually
paramilitary soldiers.
Israeli spokespersons claimed immediately after the
attack that the lone attacker, a Palestinian from East
Jerusalem, targeted innocent religious students.
The Israeli media, which is subject to routine
government censorship, normally avoids giving
“detrimental details” about Palestinian resistance
attacks, especially when Israelis get killed, ostensibly
in order to reap maximum propaganda benefits by
giving an initial impression that the victims were
innocent civilians, not soldiers or settlers.
The Israeli media, especially those targeting
foreign audiences, also ignored the fact that Merkaz
Ha'rav, the ideological central nervous system of religious
messianic Zionism, combines Talmudic studies with military
training in its educational program. This is known in Hebrew
as “Hesder Merkaz”
Even Yitzhak Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, is
reportedly to have studied at the Merkaz Ha’rav.
Similarly, the bulk of the Zionist-influenced or
Zionist-controlled American media, with the exception of
a few examples, readily parroted Israeli propaganda,
repeating the claim that innocent religious students were
the target of the attack, an apparent retaliation for the
wanton slaughter by the Israeli army of as many
as 138 Palestinians, the vast bulk of them innocent
civilians, including more than 13 toddlers and babies.
The Israeli human rights organization, B’tselem, and
Amnesty International have pointed out that at least
half of the Israeli carnage’s victims were innocent
civilians or people who played no role in hostilities.
It has not been established which Palestinian
(or non-Palestinian) organization did actually carry
out the attack in West Jerusalem.
Some reports have suggested that a Hizbullah-linked
group may have carried out the attack, probably to
avenge the murder by suspected Mossad agents in
Damascus last month of Hizbullah’s military official
Imad Mughniya.
However, Hizbullah on Friday denied any involvement
in the Jerusalem attack on the Jewish settler center.
Meanwhile, a prominent rabbi has once again called the
Palestinians Amalekites, which the Bible says “must be
destroyed” and “wiped out from the face of earth.”
Amalekites were members of an ancient nomadic people
of ancient Palestine which the Bible says were descendants
of Esau's grandson, Amalek.
The Rabbi, Ya’akov Shapira, who is also the current Director of
Merkaz Ha’rav, suggested that all Palestinians would have
to be exterminated.
“The murderers are the Amalekites of our day,
coming to remind us that Amalekites have not disappeared,
just changed their appearance,” the rabbi was quoted
as saying.
One of the people killed in Thursday’s attack is Doron Maharata,
ostensibly a former Indian immigrant to Israel who had
converted to religious Zionism.
The Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, showed him in full military gear,
which obviously belies Israeli media claims that the “victims
were merely innocent Yeshiva students.”
According to Ha’aretz, Maharata at age 17 enrolled in
the Merkaz Ha'rav as part of the “Hesder Merkaz” track,
in which students perform nine months of army service.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials said they would seek to use
bloody scenes from the attack as part of a public relations
campaign to tarnish Hamas’s image abroad, especially in the West.
Hamas officials, however, scoffed at the
Israeli “hasbara gimmicks,” calling it “sickening.”
“This will be like Nazi propaganda operatives displaying
images from resistance attacks in central Europe in order
to give the impression that the Nazis were poor, innocent
victims, and the resistance was all-diabolical,” said one
Hamas official from the Hebron region.
Since the beginning of 2008, the Israeli occupation
army has killed and maimed thousands of Palestinians,
mostly innocent people.
Israel claims, usually when addressing Europeans and
North Americans, that its army doesn’t murder Palestinian
civilians deliberately.
However, human rights organizations operating in the
occupied territories contemptuously dismiss Israeli
claims in this regard, arguing that in the final analysis
killing knowingly is killing deliberately and that when
the number of victims is so vast, as is the case in Gaza,
even intent itself becomes irrelevant.
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