John Pilger 8

De onafhankelijke journalist John Pilger schrijft: 'The Last Taboo.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, an opponent of all kinds of attacks on civilians and a persistent voice for Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, wrote: 'We have to understand - not justify - what gives rise to this tragedy ... Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves.'57 The following are lines from his poem 'Martyr':I love lifeOn earth, among the pines and the fig treesBut I can't reach it, so I took aimWith the last thing that belonged to me.For Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, the sacrifice by a Palestinian of 'the last thing that belonged to me' caused the death of his fourteen-year-old daughter, Smadar. There is a home videotape of Smadar that is difficult to watch. She is playing the family piano, and throwing her head back and laughing. She has long hair, which she cut two months before she died. 'It was her way of making a statement of her independence,' Rami told me with a smile. 'Her brothers used to tease her because she was such a good student. But she knew what she wanted. She wanted to be a doctor, and she loved to dance.'58On the afternoon of September 4, 1997, Smadar and her best friend, Sivane, had auditions for admission to a dance school. Smadar had argued that morning with her mother, Nurit, who was anxious about her going to the centre of Jerusalem to buy books she needed for school. 'I was worried about the increase in suicide bombings,' said Nurit. 'But I didn't want to row, so I let her go.'Rami was in his car when he turned on the radio at three o'clock to listen to the news and heard reports of a suicide bombing in Ben Yehuda shopping precinct. Three Palestinians had walked into the crowd and turned themselves into human bombs. There were nearly two hundred injured, and several dead. Within minutes, Rami's mobile phone rang. Nurit was crying. She had received a call from one of their son's friends, who had seen Smadar making her way into the Ben Yehuda mall shortly before the bombs went off. For hours, Rami and Nurit toured hospitals, looking for her. 'Finally,' he said, 'a policeman gently suggested we go to the scene of the bombing, where we were referred to a morgue.'59Their 'descent into darkness', as Rami describes it, was also the beginning of an inspirational campaign for peace. I have not met anyone like Rami, and the interview I conducted with him in the sunny sitting room of his Jerusalem home moved me deeply. Sometimes, solutions to apparently intractable political problems seem closer at hand when there is a Rami Elhanan engrossed in them, saying the unsayable.'It's painful to acknowledge, but it really is quite simple,' he said. "There is no basic moral difference between the soldier at the checkpoint who prevents a woman who is having a baby from going through, causing her to lose the baby, and the man who killed my daughter. And just as my daughter was a victim [of the occupation], so was he."' Lees verder:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13529.htm