What Marya Could Teach Goldstone

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
04 December '10

Israel has spent the past year producing voluminous rebuttals of the Goldstone report, which accused it of deliberately targeting civilians during last year’s war in Gaza. But nothing better illustrates the inanity of this accusation than a single report in last week’s New York Times.

The report describes a friendship between two eight-year-olds who have spent long months together in Jerusalem’s Alyn Hospital for children with severe disabilities. Orel is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. Marya is a Palestinian from Gaza severely wounded by an Israeli missile. Seemingly, complete symmetry — a point the report underscores with its concluding quote from Orel’s mother: “Do we need to suffer in order to learn that there is no difference between Jews and Arabs?”

But despite the Times’ efforts, the symmetry breaks down as Marya’s story proceeds. She was wounded three years ago, when a missile targeting a Hamas terrorist hit her family’s car instead. Her mother, grandmother, and older brother were killed; she was paralyzed from the neck down.

The Israeli government brought her to Israel for medical care that she couldn’t receive in Gaza. It also brought her father, Hamdi Aman, to be with her, and her younger brother, Momen, so he wouldn’t be separated from his surviving parent.

When Marya’s condition stabilized, the government proposed returning her to Gaza, or else the West Bank. Aman objected, fearing his daughter’s care would suffer. The Israeli media and “a bevy of volunteers” mobilized “to fight on his behalf,” and the government “backed off.”

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