Haaretz | Gideon Levy | April 2, 2023
A family is informed that their son has fallen in battle. Another family, from the same community, is informed that their son has been wounded and captured, and is now lying in the enemy’s hospital beyond the border. For over a month, this family has tried to visit their son, while the other family grieves over the death of its loved one, whose place of burial is unknown. Ultimately, the anticipated permit arrives and the mother travels to visit her wounded son. As soon as she enters his hospital room, her world collapses: The young man in the bed is not her son. He is the son of her neighbors who was believed to have died. The 40 days of ritual mourning have elapsed in any case.
This is what happened in recent weeks at Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, located on the outskirts of Jericho. Tayer Aweidat was declared dead; Alaa Aweidat was said to have been wounded. When the mother, Nawal, came to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital to visit her son, after a month of trying to obtain a permit, she was astonished to find a wounded man who was not her son. Since then, she and her family have been beside themselves. They want to know only one thing: What happened to their son?
The state actually replied: “The relevant person is apparently no longer alive and his body is being kept at the National Center of Forensic Medicine. … That ends our involvement,” wrote attorney Matanya Rosin, a deputy in the State Prosecutor’s Office, High Court of Justice department. The attorney was resolute: The son is “apparently” dead and that was “the end of our involvement.” That’s enough information for you subhumans, continue living with your doubts and don’t dare bother us again. The attorney also informed the family, with the humanity that so characterizes our enlightened country, that the family can go to the forensic institute to identify what is supposedly the body of their son.
Since then, the family, with the help of Hamoked, the Center for the Defense of the Individual, has been trying to obtain an entry permit to visit the dead person, but so far to no avail. What’s the rush? In the meantime, make do with the slim hope that the body in the freezer is not that of your son. In any case, the family will not receive the body. Israel abducted it, as it has done with hundreds of bodies it has stolen for its own use, dishonoring the dead and abusing the living. It has no intention of returning the body, only graciously agreeing to let the family have a quick peek. Affording dignity to the dead, an important Jewish value, requires bringing the dead to Jewish burial, not to a Palestinian grave.
Anyone wishing for proof of the level to which the dehumanization of Palestinians has sunk, and of how cheap their lives and deaths are, is invited to travel to the Aqabat Jabr camp. There, between the houses of the grieving and the hovels of despair, a new nadir of disrespect for the living and the dead can be seen. They are Palestinians, so what importance is there to whether they are alive or dead? Who was killed and who wounded? After all, they are all terrorists, and that is their and their families’ fate.
When an attorney representing the state writes “apparently” regarding a fatality whose identity can easily be established, demanding that the family not bother him anymore, he is saying what Israel has been saying for a long time: What value is there to Palestinian lives, their dignity, their mourning and the emotions they don’t have? After all, they don’t love their children. The families of the five people killed by the IDF in its recent invasion of this camp are at their wits’ end. The camp’s alleys are awash in rumors and no one knows who is dead and who is alive. In Israel, no one has heard of this.
These are the days preceding our festive, platitude-laden national holidays, days celebrating the cult of death and heroism. Soon we’ll have a procession of clichés, endless pathos about our living and dead sons, about the sacrifices made and the justice of our path; between Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem, we will again assume the victims’ pose ad nauseam, bemoaning our dead; between the President’s Residence and the Knesset, we will retell the stories of their bravery. Less than an hour away by car, families that may or not be grieving families will remain in their uncertainty, possibly forever. “Let Israel remember its loyal and brave sons and daughters,” goes the prayer that will be said. Only ours, exclusively, above and superior to any other nation’s sons.