Gideon Levy: The world mourns 6 dead and ignores 40,000 dead

Israel and the whole world express their deep sorrow for 6 Israeli detainees who were killed, and their names, pictures, life stories and families dominate the news bulletins, even though they are only the tip of the iceberg of the story of the war in Gaza, and only a small part of its victims.

This is how Gideon Levy began his column in Haaretz newspaper, saying sarcastically that Hersh Goldberg Polin 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 it not be when they are 6 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, compared to 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. Neither has US President Joe Biden invited relatives of the Palestinians who were killed, even if they were US citizens, like the Goldberg and Pullins families, nor has the United States demanded the release of the thousands of Palestinian abductees held by Israel without trial.

It is strange that a young Israeli woman killed at the Nova Festival arouses more sympathy and pity in the world than a teenage refugee from Jabalia, as Levy says, commenting that Israelis are more like “the world.”

They also have names and hopes

If everything has been said about the neglect and concealment of Palestinian suffering in Israeli public discourse, 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 deaths of these people do not matter to most Israelis, and some even rejoice in them, while the world outside Israel views 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 the feelings of the people of Gaza in the face of a world shaken by the death of six Israeli detainees, without any interest in the 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, and without any talk about non-Israeli detainees.

The writer asked, "What about the hundreds and thousands of Palestinian kidnapped 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 are also denied visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and some of their stories are no less than the video of Eden Yerushalmi that Hamas released this week. 

Source: Haaretz