July, 2006

'Civilian' is a word that should not be used any more. Its primary meaning is 'not a soldier', its secondary meaning, therefore, 'one who doesn't deserve to be killed as much as a soldier', implying that choiceless teenage Israeli conscript soldiers, say, deserve more to be killed than clapped out octogenarian politicians like Shimon Peres. I don't see why. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe choiceless young men deserve to be killed because they're eighteen and able-bodied. But I don't see why.

'Civilian' actually means 'baby', 'child', 'young woman', 'old woman', 'old man', 'crippled adolescent', 'blind single woman', 'deaf single man', and a lot of other categories one might simply call 'human'. 'Civilian' usually appears alongside the word 'casualty'. So 'civilian casualty' actually means 'dead baby, killed by gunfire', or 'dead blind single woman, killed by gunfire', and so on. If we merely said 'three hundred human beings, one hundred of them babies and children, have been killed by Israeli shells and bombs and rockets illegally fired across Lebanon's borders' it would be more real in the mind than 'three hundred civilian casualties', which makes them seem like marionettes, who go into a box after a battle and come out, resurrected, in time for the next one.

To show how bad the word is, how much an act of spin, of distancing, of blur, of obfuscation, let's change the word 'civilian' to 'taxpayer'. One hundred taxpayers have been killed by Israeli rocket, shell and mortar fire, not because they'd done anything but they were in the vicinity of the suspected headquarters of 'terrorists'. Because it was thought that terrorists lived nearby, those hundred taxpayers were killed, their children orphaned, their homes destroyed, their family photos burnt, their washing machine wrecked, their pension plan, their retirement plan, their whole life hereafter trashed and meaningless. And why did this happen? Because they lived near, or were thought to live near, some 'bad guys'.

Let us measure what we are countenancing here. It's a new rule that says that you or I could be killed if our neighbour had kidnapped someone, and the murderers who killed us would not be punished because 'they had made an honest mistake'. They genuinely thought a kidnapper lived next door, and a rocket went astray. We have a right to protect our nation, they add, against kidnappers, by blowing to smithereens an adjacent nation, because somewhere in that nation, somewhere in those millions of acres, might be lurking a genuine kidnapper.

There should, I think, be a crime called 'state manslaughter'. It would be punished, as ordinary manslaughter is, by five or seven years in gaol for a general who ordered the killing, the wrongful killing, and the Minister above him. Saying 'I didn't mean it, I made a mistake' should no longer exonerate a killer of a baby, or a woman, or a crippled old man, just as in normal life a road death occasioned by a drunken driver, who didn't mean it either, is not forgiven but punished by years in gaol.

What Israel has done is traumatise thousands of children with their early morning sonic booms, and make hundreds of thousands of human beings leave houses and flats that were dear to them, leave behind things that were precious to them, heirlooms, flower gardens, beloved backyard eucalyptus trees, to looters, squatters and scared young conscript soldiers in helicopter gunships to destroy. They have sent half a million human beings running for their lives, leaving much of the joy of their existence behind. And why? Because two soldiers were 'kidnapped', much as thirty Palestinian politicians, all democratically elected, were kidnapped by Israel without warning, to show how tough Israelis are.

What happens to the houses and the property, the personal belongings left behind? Can Israel be sued for the value of them, or not? Why not? Theft, arson, vandalism are usually punished in our society. How can Israel, or Lebanon, be different? How can they kill human children for any cause, any cause at all, and get away with it? If my two sons were kidnapped, and I heard they were in Woy Woy, would be justified in bombing the entire Central Coast? How then can Israel do an equivalent thing? How can we not soon tell them, and tell them forcefully, how wrong this is? What kind of crazy exceptionalism do they believe in, when they round up thirty members of parliament, then react to a reprisal kidnapping by bombing a country to smithereens? Who do they think they are? The chosen people?