An Islamic Jihad Rocket Killed Palestinian laborer

On Saturday, Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired a rocket into Israel that landed in a field near the Gaza border, killing a Palestinian laborer named Abdullah Abu Jaba and seriously injuring his brother Hamad, who was working alongside him. Stephen Daisley comments:

You haven’t heard of Abu Jaba because he was an inconvenient Palestinian, one who cannot be held up as the latest victim of Zionist aggression. Pictures of his weeping widow and confused children will not fill your social-media timeline. Major media outlets will not compete to tell human-interest stories about how he played with his children or how his family will cope without him. No U.S. congressmen or British MPs will demand justice for him.

Palestinians are killed in Israeli air strikes, too. These Palestinians are also parents and children, and while there is no moral equivalence between lawful self-defense and terrorism, death is death. The difference is that Palestinians inadvertently killed by Israel quickly become faces of the conflict while you have to turn to page 27 and scan another dozen paragraphs to learn about Palestinians killed by Palestinian terrorism. The practitioners of this double standard want the world to see the Palestinians but they themselves can see only symbols, and Palestinians who lack symbolic value are of lesser interest to them. Some Palestinians just aren’t Palestinian enough for pro-Palestinians.

Western progressives aren’t alone in seeing Palestinians as symbols. To their political and paramilitary leaders, the Palestinians are archetypes, emblems of resistance and emblems of victimhood, their deaths peddled as martyrdom for the domestic audience and ethnic oppression for gullible CNN producers. Palestinians who fit into neither category lack instrumental value and may even prompt unhelpful questions about a leadership which has consistently failed its people.

Source » mosaicmagazine