No Room For Comparison

In Judea and Samaria Palestinians are aggressors, Jews are victims
Hagai Segal
Ynet/Israel Opinion
08.07.09

Natural growth among settlers took place Saturday night near the Hizme roadblock north of Jerusalem. A young mother who lives in Rimonim gave birth on the road. She was en route to hospital, but the chronic traffic jam on that route forced her to give birth in the car. Considering the pace traffic commonly crawls at near Hizme, it wouldn’t take much for the newborn girl to celebrate her bat mitzvah on the road as well.

The next day, the father of the child was interviewed on the radio. He was overjoyed more than he was bitter, but he did complain of the suffering endured by tens of thousands of settlers, who regularly get stuck at the same roadblock.

The interviewer couldn’t hold back and uttered a biting remark: Well, now you understand your Palestinian neighbors, who are stuck at roadblocks all the time?

As a radio listener who spends plenty of time at Hizme, I would like to offer a response. Indeed, our neighbors are also stuck at roadblocks. On occasion they even give birth there. We certainly understand their suffering, yet we see no room for comparison between us and them.

Their suffering is the misery of aggressors, while our suffering is the anguish of victims. Just like there is no moral symmetry between the distress in Sderot during Operation Cast Lead and the distress in Gaza, there is no symmetry between the distress suffered by Jewish motorists in Judea and Samaria to the suffering of Palestinian motorists.

Twisted logic

When the air-conditioner breaks down at court, everyone suffers; both the man accused of rape as well as the rape victim there to testify against him. Yet it would be amusing if the accused turned to the woman and asked her whether now she understands the suffering he must endure as result of the legal proceedings against him.

Only people who possess twisted logic can think like that, seeing any kind of justice in the rapist’s provocation, but this is apparently the kind of logic that reigns supreme on our radio stations when a settler is being interviewed.

Pregnant Jewish women from Rimonim are not suspected of smuggling explosive devices through roadblocks. Yet pregnant Palestinian woman are suspected of doing so. A few years ago, a pregnant Palestinian woman from Gaza was nabbed at the Erez crossing en route to exploding at her doctor’s in Beersheba.

Indeed, it is true that most Palestinian women do not smuggle bombs, and even most of the men do not act that way, yet everyone who smuggles an explosive device is a Palestinian, and this is why we need the checkpoints.

Given what we saw at the Fatah Congress this past week, it’s hard to believe we’ll be able to make do without these roadblocks anytime soon.
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