Wrong priorities

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, October 7:

The concern Israel demonstrates for the fate of one Palestinian boy touches the heart: Again, note what a fuss is being made about the case of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Our heart is impervious to the fate of other children who have been killed. Just little Mohammed continues to haunt us. But the question of who killed al-Dura is not important. And maybe he is even alive, as some eccentrics claim. Perhaps he committed suicide, as the strange investigations are liable to suggest.

All of these are tasteless questions designed to divert attention from the truly important issues: According to data collected by human rights group B’Tselem, Israel is responsible for killing more than 850 Palestinian children and teenagers since al-Dura was killed, including 92 in the past year alone. Last October, we killed 31 children in Gaza. This is what should have raised a storm and not the measurements by the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Command, Yom Tov Samiyeh, aimed at proving that his soldiers did not kill al-Dura, or the “investigations” by the physicist Nahum Shahaf. In an eccentric obsession, Shahaf has devoted the past years to this affair, after previously having also obtained “amazing material” on the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.

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