14 March 2010 By Ramzy Baroud The killing of Palestinian activist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh
on January 19, 2010 was clearly a well-planned,
violent and sadistic act, committed by Israeli
assassins in the supposed safety of a sovereign
country. Yes, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was a Palestinian activist.
We have no reason to believe otherwise. He spent years
of his life in Israeli prison – and one year in an
Egyptian jail – for his political activism. This,
however, gives no credibility to Israel’s accusation
that al-Mabhouh was a killer of Israelis. This
assertion becomes even more problematic when
considering that al-Mabhouh’s assassination was,
according to British media, ordered by accused Israeli
war criminals and rightwing politicians. According to the Sunday Times, Meir Dagan, the
current director of Mossad briefed Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the assassination plan
during a meeting in early January. "The people of
Israel trust you. Good luck," Netanyahu reportedly
said at the end of this meeting. It is disgraceful enough that the assassins used
‘fraudulent’ European passports, as well as credit
cards linked to an American bank to carry out their
plans. But more upsetting is the fact that this cruel
and calculated action has inspired little more than
expressions of ‘outrage’. Have we become this resigned
to Israeli impunity? What about the sanctity of life, the sovereignty of
nations and the respect for international law? Are
these immediately disposable when the victim is
Palestinian and the location of the crime an Arab
country? Al-Mabhouh has also been callously deprived of his
own relevance to the story. We don’t really know much
about the man aside from what Israeli wants us to know
– a senior Hamas operative who was responsible for the
abduction and killings of two Israeli soldiers; one of
the founders of the militant arm of Hamas, Izz al-Din
al-Qassam; the middleman between Hamas in Gaza and al-Quds
Force of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. Who has weaved this fascinatingly reductionist
account of al-Mabhouh’s life in such a short span of
time? His family? Hamas? The Palestinian media? No,
none of these. The creator of this biography is
Israel, the very country that assassinated him. Now
that is truly outrageous: the murderer writes and
convinces the world of the story of the murder victim.
And the media gladly runs with it. Expectedly, a Palestinian would tell al-Mabhouh’s
story in entirely different terms. He was born in
Jabalia, one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded
refugee camps. These key words alone – Gaza, poor,
crowded, refugee - helps to unravel the real story of
al-Mabhouh. It is the story shared by so many people
who still live a life of utter anguish, poverty and
resistance in the Gaza Strip – and elsewhere - which
is under inhumane siege and successive wars by the
world’s fourth strongest army. The story is not about
abducted occupation soldiers, but about millions of
refugees, not about Iran, but about Gaza and
Palestine, not about luxury hotels, but about
horrifyingly desolate refugee camps. But Palestinians – like many oppressed peoples
around the world – have no right to their own
narrative. Their story is negligible, if not wholly
irrelevant. Israel commits the murder, Israel offers
the explanation, and eventually Israel gets away with
both the crime and the lie. Al-Mabhouh’s murder might
eventually inspire several documentaries that
highlight the murderous nature of Palestinian
militants, and the unequalled brilliance of Israeli
retaliation. Another Steven Spielberg’s Munich might
already be in the making. The first scene of this
would not be al-Mabhouh’s family forced to flee their
village in Palestinian after untold butchery by
Zionist militants in 1948. Instead it might show a
dark-skinned, menacing Palestinian slaughtering two
helpless Israeli soldiers pleading for their lives.
We are, more or less, told to forget about al-Mabhouh.
After all, his name is used along with Hamas and Iran
in the same sentence. That should be enough to tell us
that his life is dispensable - just like the lives of
over 1,400 Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli
army in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009.
Israel may well be preparing for yet another attack on
the impoverished Strip. The tunnels that represent the
lifeline for the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza
are being routinely blown up by Israeli warplanes,
detonated by dynamites and blocked by an Egyptian
steel wall. Gazans cannot be allowed any weapons to
defend themselves either. The ‘international
community’ has held many meetings to ensure that no
weapons find their way to Gaza. The US in particular
is utterly firm regarding this issue - although not at
all firm about ensuring that food or medicine reach
the Strip. Al-Mabhouh may have been killed due to
Israel’s belief he was arming the resistance. This
partly explains why the ‘international community’ is
not at all moved by the murder. Al-Mabhouh might have
been involved in breaking the Western consensus on
denying Gaza both food and arms. The EU is only worried about its link to the story,
and not the murder itself. An EU statement issued in
Brussels on February 22 condemned the “fact that those
involved in this action used fraudulent EU
member-states passports.” They didn’t name Israel
though. As the Financial Times resolved, “criticism of
Israel was as strongly worded as the EU could manage,
given that Germany, Italy and several other countries
place great emphasis on close relations with Israel.”
One can only imagine what would happen if Hamas
decides to strike back, expanding the battleground
from Gaza to the rest of the world. Would the EU
express disapproval of Hamas’ use of fraudulent
passport, but then refrain from actually naming the
group - due to a fear, say, of upsetting Muslim
countries? No. But when the victim is a Palestinian and the
murderers are Israelis – 27 of them so far – it’s an
entirely different story, and an entirely different
concept of justice. - Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net)
is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the
editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is "My
Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story"
(Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com. Comments 💬 التعليقات |