You'd have to lack all sense of compassion not to be happy for Gilad Shalit, whatever your politics. It seems the IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas terrorists in June 2006 is finally to be freed, in return for 1000 Palestinians jailed for terror offences.
If you read that last sentence without spotting two major errors, you've been seriously misled. Because Shalit wasn't 'kidnapped', and neither his captors nor most of the prisoners due for release are 'terrorists'.
In the weeks before Shalit's capture on the Gaza Strip border, Israeli bombardment killed 14 Palestinian civilians. When you're attacked by a foreign army you have a legal and moral right to defend yourself; one common way of doing so is taking prisoners of war. This has nothing to do with whether Israel was right to attack Gaza: you can't 'kidnap' a soldier on the battlefield. Nobody had even heard of a 'kidnapped' combat soldier before Shalit. But if the concept was novel, its meaning was clear: 'kidnapping' is what criminals do. As though he'd been dragged from his bed after football practice, rather than taken in army uniform, performing exactly the kind of mission he'd signed up for.
The second misnomer – 'terrorist' – applies either to the Palestinians set to be freed or Shalit's 'kidnappers' themselves. Now let me be clear: blowing up a bus full of innocent people is terrorism, pure and simple. The usual culprit, Hamas, has done incalculable harm to ordinary Palestinians and defiled their honourable cause. And I have no time for soi-disant 'radicals' who call such mindless slaughter 'resistance'. But proper usage cuts both ways: capturing a soldier during wartime isn't terrorism – it's self-defence.
In fairness, this error has been more common in Israeli media than in the west. But almost everyone (see here, here and here) seems to agree that the Palestinians due for release are 'terrorists', even though Israel makes no effort to distinguish terror from self-defence. Anyone it suspects of hostile activity is liable to be detained, quite possibly tortured, and convicted by a closed military court, often on the flimsiest of grounds. And hundreds of Palestinians are 'administrative detainees' – held indefinitely without charge or trial. Palestinians are never 'kidnapped' or even 'captured', but always 'arrested': as though Israel is the policeman of all Palestine. Dare to defy the proper authorities and you're simply a criminal.
Israeli propaganda – so slick there's a word, hasbara, for it – has programmed Israel's viewpoint into the very words we use to discuss the Shalit affair. And the supposedly neutral western media has marched in lockstep, reducing a complex issue to a one-sided narrative. In this way Israel not only legitimises its occupation – it even strips its victims of the right to fight back.
So good luck, Gilad Shalit. But listen carefully to how his story is told, and remember: when powerful interests commit crimes against language, you can be sure crimes against people aren't far behind.
ok, let's say you're right and Hamas has the right to self-defence against IDF units attacking gaza. i'm still not sure this action falls under the definition of legitimate self-defence.
ReplyDeletei think on liberal conspiracy you define self defence as 'violence against someone who's attacking you'. it's not a bad definition, but i'd add one condition: 'violence against someone who's attacking you, with the aim of obstructing the attack'.
with that proviso attached, the capture of gilad shalit may not count as self-defence, since hamas's intention was probably to gain leverage for an eventual prisoner swap, rather than obstruct the attack on gaza. capturing shalit was never going to prevent israel from bombing gaza, and in fact was only likely to increase the ferocity of the assault. so perhaps "kidnapped" is apt after all.