Issue of aimed killing

Alarming is that the ‘pattern of focuses attacks’ has been resumed after the Israeli army has partially withdrawn in May. Edward Cody in the International Herald Tribune, Friday, May 17, 2002 reports that: “Israeli soldiers sprang their ambush. It was the latest in a series of almost nightly raids targeting people accused of involvement in terrorism. Such attacks have been pursued in the West Bank with little publicity since the end of Israel’s large-scale offensive.”

What happened that night was that the Palestinian Authority had been warned of a possible raid. Four of the Palestinian intelligence agency went to check. They went by car to a mosque in Halhoul, West Bank. Once there two of them took a cell phone call outside the car, while their chief Khalid Abu Khairan remained with the fourth member behind. That is when the ambush happened:

“From atop the mosque and from the positions beside and just behind it, he said, the Israeli soldiers sprayed the car with automatic-rifle fire, immediately killing Khalid Abu Khairan with explosive bullets that punctured his head and back.”

The one witness that survived, Abu Zalata, reaccounted that after 15 minutes of gunfire “he saw Israeli soldiers pull Abu Khairan’s body out of the car, check his identity card against a piece of paper they carried and cover his head with a floor mat.

After making a similar check of the other dead man’s identity, Abu Zalata said, one of the soldiers picked up the slain Palestinian’s radio and, in accented Arabic, taunted the Palestinian intelligence service over its own radio network: ‘This is Ashraf, he said, according to Abu Zalata’s recollection: ‘I have just killed two of your people, and we are now going to withdraw. You (expletives) can come and get the bodies. We will be back and kill more of you.”

If true, then these kinds of attacks ending in taunting the Palestinians remind of the kind of fighting done 1948. Then freedom fighters and ‘terrorism’ intermingled with the struggle of the Jewish people to create their own state in Palestine. But today under cover of night and public attention the war against terrorism takes on dimensions of state terrorism. This is especially when these special units operating in small numbers “have become, in effect, a target-by-target continuation of a monthlong operation that allows soldiers to arrest or kill Palestinian militants accused of involvement in attacks or planned attacks on Israelis.”

In the twenty-first century such a night raid gives the impression of what used to be the credo of Sparta with ‘zealots’ or slaves being killed by a young man having to prove to the elderly ones that he is mature enough to stand his man. For every threshold between adolescence and manhood had to be crossed by killing alone one of these Zealots and to be able to make it back without being caught oneself. More horrific is the thought to sit now in a café opposite such men who would stalk at night Palestinian militants.

Furthermore, the accusations leveled at Palestinians are based on information that are “squeezed out of Palestinians taken into custody during the broad campaign that began March 29 and ended with the pullout from Bethlehem last Friday.” In normal courts such information obtained perhaps even under torture is not considered to be valid. The fact that no courts are involved at all, makes it worse, not less of a crime being justified by the blanket coverage of being at war, a war against terrorism. The journalist Edward Colby quotes the Israeli defense minister, Binyam-in Ben-Eliezer, who said that these troops are successful insofar as “they have prevented 15 attempted suicide bombings since the end of operations”.

Snipers

As to the phenomenon of snipers itself, no matter from which side the shooting comes from (Israeli forces use them as well), by remaining invisible it says something that people should not know in the end as to who has really been doing the shooting.

As the case in Northern Ireland, snipers can mean also fractions within the one and same side carry out killings of their own people just to drive home a point of command: no submission to the enemy, but also full obedience to the one and not to the other fraction. Anyone crossing not just that one visible border, but also other invisible ones, will be shoot. As a warning to all, it makes the situation still more dangerous.

Obviously snipers serve the purpose of keeping people divided and sticking only to one dominant group guaranteeing them some safeguards in exchange for tacit and open obedience mixed with all kinds of supports. Compliance is here a too simple word. Only those with experiences of working in the underground, resistance and in the case of the Middle East in the biotope of violence know what it means to be careful before picking any side at all.

The point of the sniper is that the source of that violence remains anonymous. Everyone presumes to know who did the shooting, but in reality it works like terrorists with the ‘unknown’. It keeps up the ambivalence of the power structures so that people do not react spontaneously, but remain edgy i.e. off-balance.

Indeed snipers represent a different level of violence linked to keeping the tensions up. It is equally a criminal act and one of counter-violence. Not only in the Middle East, but elsewhere they prevent people from questioning the existence of borders not merely between two sides but also within their own societies.

There is that horrible scene of a young couple in love trying to flee a square in Sarajevo when a sniper killed both. The tragedy of that couple increased once it became known that he was a Croat while she was a Serbian. What was killed that moment were not just two people, but a love that revolted against the absurdity of segregation and separation as if there are two different kinds of people who should not come together.

The abstract rule of power is to divide and to separate. A sniper upholds that by inciting still more violence existing already where borders are drawn by one force and those being checked wishing for some way to overcome this humiliation. To Palestinians this is the case when having to accept the dictates of the Israelis whenever they wish to go from one of their own towns to another town of their own.

In short, the existence of snipers at border crossings means that here people are pitted against fear due to being squeezed in-between one kind of violence against another kind. Subsequently they are put into an abstract suspension to themselves leaving power to dictate what they may do, what not.

Such fear serves to obscure the fact where this violence is coming from. Since common people cannot make any sense out of it, they leave usually political analysis aside and anyhow they are caught in their daily life. That makes them most reluctant to enter any kind of political game. Instead they just do not want any borders or if they have to exist, to be able to cross them without much delay or problems.

To people borders are absurd for everyone belongs to one and the same community of man. There is no need to divide them into Israelis and Palestinians. That is merely an abstract ordering of people and shows itself on how land is divided up, claimed and protected.

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Issue of aimed killing