“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” – 2
JVL Introduction
Unlike Dahlia Sheindlin’s account of a collective desire to starve the Palestinians in Gaza to death, this story by Amira Hass highlights what happened to one individual caught in crossfire.
There is no trace of compassion in Israel’s treatment of this woman, 82-year refugee Fahamiya Khalidi suffering from Alzheimer’s, forced from her home, picked up who knows why, denied a lawyer as a illegal combatant, abandoned into the maw of Israel’s insane system of arbitary and punitive administrative detention, and finally released more than 30 days later in the vicinity of the Kerem Shalom Gaza border, left to fend for herself.
No-one admits to knowing anything, no-one to being responsible. There is merely the bland assurance that Khalidi was “held in accordance with the law”.
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Thu 1 Feb 2024. Read the original here.
Israel Held 82-year-old Gaza Woman With Alzheimer's for Two Months as an 'Unlawful Combatant'
Israeli soldiers arrested Fahamiya Khalidi in early December at a school in Gaza after she fled her home due to IDF shelling. She was moved to Damon prison, where she was refused a meeting with an attorney and was only freed after an appeal
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Came across the following youtube video earlier from a couple of years ago which gives an insight into how Israelis are conditioned from an early age to hate and fear Palestinians and regard them with hostility:
Israeli Soldier’s Explosive Tell-All: “Palestinians are Right to Resist”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxJd88xkBU (27mins)
One might make a case, as I regret I did in the past, for Zionism (safe bolthole for world Jewry in case malignant antisemitism blows up again) but must wilful, gratuitous cruelty be a part of that case? It seems necessary when the project is to turn a once non-Jewish-majority country into, not just a predominantly Jewish state, but an exclusively Jewish one, and a supremacist one at that. For such a project, cruelty was probably a necessary ingredient.
Mad, bad and ugly as sin. There is no hope for a people who stoop so low. My husband had dementia and personal knowledge of how helpless such an individual is adds to my utter disgust at the treatment of this frail elderly woman.
There was no compassion in 1948 when 85 percent of the indigenous population were forced out to make a Jewish State possible. Why do we expect compassion now ? Compassion is incompatible with Settler Colonialism. Zionism isn’t a compassionate ideology.
Actually this vulnerable old woman was lucky, many vulnerable women have been simply murdered.