Israeli Army - Brown Shirts

I once read a memorable quote by Carl Jung that said ‘you become the object of your hatred,’ and in the case of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, this maxim would appear to be apropos.

An analogy of this quote is the little boy who grows up in a violent home and is a witness to his mother being beaten by his father. The little boy grows up hating his father and vowing never to be like him. He eventually gets married but then one day, in a pique of anger, he beats his new wife. And then he beats her again. Not having understood the harm which occurred in his psychological make-up as a result of his childhood memories, he partakes in the same negative behavior as his father, thereby becoming just like him and replicating his behavior. The little boy has become the object of his hatred – his father.

We all know about the slaughter during the Second World War – the concentration camps, the ovens, the gassings, the gunning down of innocent people into mass graves by the German army. Events like this should never be forgotten. However, the Israelis now seem to be suffering from some kind of memory loss, and collectively don’t recognize that their hatred for the events of the past has now been transferred to a Palestinian population held hostage in an ever-shrinking land mass. The West Bank and the security fence that surrounds it has already been likened to the Warsaw ghetto – a horrifying place, where the use of dogs was a familiar tactic of the German army to terrorize and control the Jewish population during the occupation of Poland. Jews were not allowed to work, and they were starved, beaten, humiliated and killed. This same treatment is now being inflicted on the Palestinian people.

The Israeli army has been using attack dogs to ward off the threat of terrorists infiltrating the country, but many innocent Palestinians are now being bitten and terrorized by beasts, so vicious in some cases, the military have to use stun guns to pull them off their victims. The army argues that ‘the use of dogs limits bodily injuries and obviates the use of other measures.’ However, Palestinian laborers who illegally cross into Israel, refute these claims. Several of them have been bitten and required hospitalization. Sarit Michaeli, from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, says that ‘the Israeli military knows full well that the vast majority of people who enter are laborers and not terrorists. If they indeed are terrorists, they should arrest them and question them and bring them to trial rather than set dogs on them, which is completely unacceptable.’

For the Palestinians who run the risk of getting attacked and bitten by these dogs, they have no choice, because they have no other way of making an income to support their families. ‘This is my livelihood,’ says Qaeud, a Palestinian laborer. ‘I don’t have a job here and the Israelis do not give us work permits. I don’t have any other source of income, so as the sole breadwinner of the family, what else can I do?’