Environmentalists Against War

Mourning Six Israelis More Than 40,000 Palestinians

September 7th, 2024 - by Gideon Levy / Agence France Press

When Six Israelis Are Mourned
More Than 40,000 Palestinians
Gideon Levy / Agence France Press

(September 3, 2024) — Israel mourns the six hostages who were killed. The world also mourns them. Their names, their pictures, their life stories and their families led news broadcasts in Israel and around the world. Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Eden Yerushalmi became celebrities against their will, in their captivity and in their death. The world cried for them — it’s impossible not to: six beautiful young people, who went through hell in captivity before being brutally executed.

But our six hostages are only the tip of the story, a tiny fraction of the war’s victims. Their becoming a global story is understandable. Less understandable is the unbelievable contrast between the wide coverage of their lives and deaths and the total disregard for the similar fate of people their own age — as blameless and ingenuous and beautiful as them, and just as much innocent victims — on the Palestinian side.

While the world is shocked by the fate of Gaza, it has never paid similar respect to the Palestinian victims. The president of the United States does not call the relatives of fallen Palestinians, not even if they, like the Goldberg-Polins, had American citizenship. The United States has never called for the release of thousands of Palestinian abductees that Israel has detained without trial. A young Israeli woman who was killed at the Nova festival arouses more sympathy and compassion in the world than a female teenage refugee from Jabalya. The Israeli is more similar to “the world.”

Everything has already been said about the overlooking and concealment of Palestinian suffering in the Israeli public conversation, and not enough has yet been said. The Palestinian killed in Gaza who had a face, a name and a life story and whose killing shocked Israel has not yet been born.

The 17,000 children killed in the Strip since the war began also had hopes and dreams and families that were destroyed by their deaths. They hold no interest for a majority of Israelis; a minority even rejoices in their deaths. In the world beyond Israel they are seen as terrible victims, but even there they usually have neither names nor faces.

Israelis’ hearts are with the Israeli victims. Nothing could be more understandable or human. But national lamentation on such a scale for six hostages, amid total disregard for the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims, is sick and immoral: dehumanization without a hint of humanity for the victims — not even for the children who were killed; for children who are displaced, orphaned, sick, starving or had limbs amputated.

There are tens of thousands of such children within an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, and we are entirely indifferent to them. Israel has sent aid missions to the Philippines. The more Israel cries over its hostages and its dead, the more evident the inconceivable gap between its national grief and its complete apathy to the Palestinian victims becomes.

Trying to survive amidst the rubble of collapsed buildings in Khan Yunis.

It’s not difficult to imagine how Gazans feel in the face of the world, which was rocked by six dead Israeli hostages while losing interest with alarming speed in 40,000 dead Palestinians. Also, when they talk about abductees, they only talk about the Israeli hostages.

What about the hundreds and thousands of Palestinian abductees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; the so-called administrative detainees, held without trial; the “unlawful combatants” and the innocent laborers who were captured, and whose number no one even reports? Some of them, at minimum, are held in hellish conditions. They too have worried families who have no idea what has happened to them for 10 months; they too are denied visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This week Sheren Falah Saab did a superlative job telling the story of one Palestinian in Gaza,Mohammad “Medo” Halimy, a 19-year-old TikToker who was killed when he went to charge his phone. The article was a ray of light in the darkness. A dead Palestinian in Gaza with a name and a face, thanks to TikTok and Falah Saab.

The story of Medo causes a lump in the throat, no less than the video of Eden Yerushalmi that Hamas released this week. Is it even permitted to say this in today’s Israel?