Israel and the world are mourning the 6 Israeli detainees who were killed, and their names, pictures, life stories and families are dominating the news, even though they are only the tip of the iceberg of the war in Gaza, and only a small part of its victims.
This is how Gideon Levy began his column in Haaretz, saying sarcastically that Hersh Goldberg, Paulin, and Eden Yerushalmi became celebrities despite themselves during their captivity and after their death, just as the world mourned the dead Israeli prisoners, “How could they not, when they were six beautiful young men who went through the hell of captivity before being brutally executed,” Levy added.
Levy was surprised by the astonishing contradiction between the wide coverage of their lives and deaths, and the ignoring of the similar fate of people of their age who are no less innocent, honest and beautiful, and who represent innocent victims on the Palestinian side.
Although the world is shocked by the fate of Gaza, it has never shown similar respect for the Palestinian victims. US President Joe Biden does not invite relatives of the Palestinians who were martyred, even if they hold American citizenship, like the Goldberg and Pollins families, nor does the United States demand the release of the thousands of kidnapped Palestinians who are being held by Israel without trial.
Strangely enough, a young Israeli woman killed at the Nova Festival arouses more sympathy and pity in the world than a teenage refugee from Jabalia, Levy says, commenting that Israelis are more like “the world.”
They also have names and hopes.
And if everything has been said about ignoring and concealing the suffering of the Palestinians in the Israeli public dialogue, what has been said is not enough – according to Levy – because the Palestinian killed in Gaza had a face, a name and a life story, and because the 17,000 children killed in the Strip since the beginning of the war also had hopes, dreams and families destroyed by their deaths.
However, the death of these people does not represent any interest to the majority of Israelis, and some of them even rejoice in it, while the world outside Israel looks at them as horrible victims who have no names or faces, which is strange and indicates a loss of humanity, according to the writer.
It is not difficult, as Levy says, to imagine how the people of Gaza felt when faced with a world shaken by the death of six Israeli detainees, with no regard for the 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, and no mention of anyone other than the Israeli detainees.
The writer asked, “What about the hundreds and thousands of Palestinian abductees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, what about the administrative detainees who are being held without trial, and what about the ‘illegal combatants’ and innocent workers who were caught and are being held in hellish conditions?”
They too, as Gideon Levy says, have anxious families who do not know what has happened to them for the past 10 months, and they too are denied visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the stories of some of them are no less than the video clip of Eden Yerushalmi that was published by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) this week.