The Ghosts and Illusions of the Occupation
By everything, I mean the understanding, or at least an acknowledgement, over here, in American Jewish conversation, of the occupation. After all, can you look at Tariq Abu Khdeir’s swollen, bruised, and bloody face, or at the video of the police officers pummeling him on the ground, and not say to yourself, “is this what ‘supporting’ Israel means?”
It’s not an aberration, as Noa Yachot, an editor at 972 magazine, writes. But these abuses rarely receive media attention:
According to Defense for Children International Palestine, 214 children were detained in Israel as of May of this year. In the last 12 years, Israel has detained more than 7,000. Testimonies detail terrible abuse and torture while in Israeli detention, with few of the protections afforded children under international or Israeli law. Due process is something of a joke; Palestinians are tried in military courts, where the conviction rate is nearly 100 percent.
Many of those children are accused of stone-throwing - an allegation leveled by the police against Tariq, as well.
But despite the myriad human rights reports and their chilling descriptions, the regular injustices of the occupation rarely make mainstream headlines. Although what happened to Tariq is far from an aberration, few other Palestinian children who land, battered, in Israeli military prisons prompt calls for an investigation by the U.S. State Department and headlines in the likes of TIME Magazine, New York Times the Daily News, ABC, and many more.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who can hardly be accused of being anti-Israel, called Tariq’s beating possibly “more consequential” than the horrific execution of his cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, because it was committed by “agents of the state,” and therefore evidence of a “state failure”—a failure that Goldberg was quick to point out was “not a one-off failure.”