Return of the Knight
May 23, 2001
Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the Gaza Strip. It is
surrounded by barbed wire, its gates are locked, and even with
the proper documents, one cannot visit the largest high security
prison on earth, home to over one million Palestinians. The
Israeli army, once a fabled fighting force, has become mere
prison guard. The IDFs tactics were formulated back in 1930s,
‘you do not have to kill a million, kill the best, and the rest
will be cowed’. This method was first applied by the British
with the help of their Jewish allies during the Palestinian
uprising of 1936. Since then, thousands of the best sons and
daughters of this land, the potential elite of the Palestinians,
have been exterminated. Once again, the Israeli army is being
used to implement the same master plan, to ‘cool the restive
natives’ by routinely shooting potential rebels.
Their job is easy: the strongest and biggest army in the Middle
East, a major nuclear power, has all the weapons in the world,
while the jailed Palestinians have only stones and light guns.
Recently, Israelis intercepted a boatload of weapons on its way
to Gaza. The Army boasted of a major victory, but expressed
‘concern’. They have a reason for concern. Since 1973, the
Israeli army has rarely had to worry about return fire. The
Jewish soldiers got used to soft jobs. They prefer to shoot
unarmed kids.
Gaza is a sci-fi reality, reminiscent of some Prison Planet
B-movie. Its barbed wire fence guards a secret: the unbroken
will of its people. It is a B-movie set, but its men and women
are first grade.
This secret message came out of Palestine embodied in a 13-years
boy, Farris Ode. He was the youthful Palestinian David we saw
confronting the Jewish Goliath on the outskirts of Gaza in the
immortal photo by AP photographer Laurent Rebours. Farris the
Fearless threw his stones on the armored monster with the grace
of St George, the beloved saint of Palestine. He confronted the
enemy with the nonchalance of a village boy chasing away a
ferocious dog. The picture was taken on the 29th of October, and
a few days later, on 8th of November, a Jewish sniper murdered
him in cold blood.
He leaves behind a picture of a hero, a poster to be placed next
to Che Guevara’s, a name to be spoken in the same breath with
the name of Gavroche, the brave rebel kid from the barricades of
Paris in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, a symbol of the
unvanquished irreducible human spirit. He emerged from a
different time, the time when heroism was not a dirty word, when
men went to war ready to fight and die for a noble cause.
Symbolically, his first name means ‘a Knight’, and the last name
means ‘the Return of’. His image truly evoked the idea of the
return of the gallant knights of yore. This spirit is totally
foreign to the cheap commercial hedonism, the main ideology of
our days, abundantly supplied by American pop-culture. Farris’s
legacy is a sign of the failure of Israel’s master plan. This
young rebel was born under Israeli military occupation and he
died defying the soldiers of the IDF.
This message of hope was not immediately understood by friends
of Palestine, as we have become accustomed to the idea of
Palestinian suffering and martyrdom. In our writing, we
unconsciously copycat the somewhat effeminate approach of
presenting ‘our side’ as unfortunate victims deserving of
compassion and pity. The last thing we should feel towards the
Palestinians is pity. Admiration, love, solidarity,
hero-worship, even envy, but no pity. If you pity them, you
might as well pity the 300 warriors of King Leonidas, who fell
defending Thermopylae, or the Russian soldiers who stopped
Guderian’s tanks with their bodies, or even Gary Cooper in High
Noon. Heroes should not be pitied, they are an uplifting example
for us.
At first, we failed to correctly place the image of Farris. The
narrative of suffering called for the picture of a crouching
Muhammad Dorra, dying in front of our eyes, a child companion to
the little naked Vietnamese girl running out of the fiery hell
of napalm.
The image of the Knight who Came Back, Farris Ode belongs to a
different set of icons: that of a hero. Its place is next to
that of the Marines on Iwo Jima, or in a church next to his
countryman, St George. After all, the warrior saint was martyred
and buried in the Palestinian soil, not far from Farris, in the
crypt of the old Byzantine church in Lydda. [
The adversaries of the Palestinians understood this reality
better than their pals in New York. The American
Jewish-dominated press spared no effort to erase the memory of
Farris, as they were unable to find a hero of their own to
compete with the Gaza boy. MSNBC.com ran a silly contest for the
most important Picture of the Year, with a choice between Dorrah
the Martyr and a picture of dogs. (They always give you the
choice, and it is always wrong one, whatever you choose.) The
dogs were promoted by the Israeli consul in LA and voted for by
many Israeli supporters, while the partisans of Palestine rose
to vote for Dorrah. The really important picture, the icon of
Farris, was not offered to the public.
But that was not enough, and the Washington Post sent its
correspondent in Palestin
e, Lee Hockstader, to debunk the fallen kid’s memory. This AIPAC-run
rag could depend on Hockstader. His reports should be studied in
schools of journalism, in the course on disinformation. When the
Israeli army tanks and gun ships blasted defenseless Bethlehem,
Hockstader wrote: “In the Biblical (he would not mention
Nativity, would he?) town of Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers and
Palestinians fought with tanks, missiles, helicopters,
machineguns and stones[i]”. I suspect that Hockstader’s history
of WWII would narrate a tale where the US and Japan fought with
nuclear bombs, or Jews and Germans killed each other with
concentration camp gas canisters.
Hockstader duly justified Israeli raids on civilian population,
writing: “Israeli army spokesmen say that the raids are limited
and essentially defensive. But the Israeli government takes a
broader view, noting that the raids give local military
commanders flexibility against an elusive enemy». If he takes “a
broader view” of Israeli actions, the Palestinians in his
reports are just mad terrorists: “The Palestinians have been
threatening to exact a price for what they regard as a war of
aggression. A representative of the Islamic Resistance Movement
known as Hamas, called for further suicide bombings and mortar
fire against Israel.”
A fellow Hockstader-watcher, Francois Smith, wrote on the Web:
“I am offended that this guy thinks I'm dumb enough to believe
him. Watch out for Lee Hockstader. I think he has an agenda”.
Well, he certainly has; the agenda of enforcing Jewish supremacy
and smearing Palestinians. Debunking Farris fits this agenda
perfectly. Hockstader went to Gaza, and reported, that Farris
was a bad boy who did not obey his mommy and daddy, that he
played truant at school, he was an ‘adolescent daredevil’, who
actually wanted to be killed, and a merciful Jewish sniper just
fulfilled his wish. Hockstader missed nothing: the kid was shot
while lifting a stone, and therefore had to be killed; his
posthumous fame was ‘the hullabaloo over his death’; and anyway,
his mother received ‘a $10,000 check from President Saddam
Hussein of Iraq’.
Hockstader played safe. If he had dared to infer that the
settler parents of the killed infant in Hebron wished their
child dead, if he would refer to the Israeli reaction as
‘hullabaloo’, or just mention a fat check her parents received
from the hands of the butcher of Sabra and Shatila – Hockstader
would not have made it out of Israel alive, and Katherine
Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, would be repenting it to
her last day.
Jews have succeeded in cowering their enemies, and not only by
the magic of words. Lord Moyne, British minister of state in the
Middle East, dozens of British soldiers and officers and
hundreds of Palestinian leaders were assassinated by Jews in
their drive for supremacy in the Holy Land in 1940s, until the
terrorized Brits sailed away from Haifa Bay on May 15, 1948.
Even today, two peace activists and men of the cloth in San
Francisco, a Catholic priest Labib Kobti and a Jewish Rabbi
Michael Lerner, receive death threats from Jewish terrorist
groups and take them very seriously.
The Palestinians are rather peaceful peasants and city folk.
They know how to tend olives and vine, how to make a zir, a jar
that keeps water cool even in the hottest hamsin. Their
beautiful stone masonry adorns every corner of Palestine. They
write poetry and venerate their holy tombs. They are no
warriors, certainly no killers. With astonishment and disbelief
they stare in the mirror of a Jewish dominated press and see
themselves dressed in the mask of a bloody terrorist. But these
peasants are still able give us all a lesson about heroism,
whenever an enemy tries to snatch their land. Palestinians
proved it many centuries ago, in the legendary days of Judges,
when their ancestors battled with overseas invader.
In 1930s, a fervent Russian Jewish nationalist and founder of
Sharon’s political party, Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky wrote (in his
native Russian) a historical novel, Samson, elaborating on the
Bible story of the suicide bomber who killed three thousand men
and women (Judges, 18:27) and died with the enemies. A few years
ago, this novel was published in Israel in a modern Hebrew
translation, and a Davar newspaper reviewer noted an interesting
aberration.
For Jabotinsky, the Brits were the modern Philistines, while the
Israelites became the Jews. But for a modern Israeli reader, the
novel reads as a glorification of the Palestinian fight against
Israeli rule. The highly civilized Philistines with their
superior military technology, invaders from overseas, hedonistic
dwellers of the Coastal Plain and belligerent intruders in the
Highlands reminded the reviewer of modern Israeli Jews. While
Samson’s people, Banu Israel, the natives of the Highlands,
certain of their deep roots, confident of the inevitable victory
of their attachment to the soil over the military might of the
invader, reminded him of modern Palestinian Highlanders.
It makes sense, as the Palestinians are the true descendants of
Biblical Israel, of the indigenous people who embraced the faith
of Christ and Muhammad, and remained in the Holy Land forever.
The Israelis know it. In the genetic labs of Tel Aviv, the
researchers of the ‘Jewish DNA’ proudly produce every result,
tenuously confirming the blood relation of Jews and
Palestinians. They know that our Jewish claim to the proud name
of Israel is at least dubious. Like Richard III, we seized the
title and crown, and, like Richard III, we feel insecure while
the legitimate heirs are still alive. That is the psychological
explanation of our inexplicably cruel treatment of the native
Palestinians.
The Israelis want to be Palestinians. We adopted their cuisine,
and serve their falafel and hummus as our own ethnic food. We
adopted the native cactus, sabra, growing at the site of their
villages, as the name of our local-born sons and daughters. Our
modern Hebrew language came to life with hundreds of Palestinian
words. We just need to ask their forgiveness, embrace them as
long lost brothers and learn from them. That is the one ray of
hope coming out of the present darkness.
As modern Israeli archaeology studies have made clear, three
thousand years ago the Highland tribes (Banu Israel of Bible)
eventually achieved a modus vivendi with the Coastal ‘people of
the sea’, and together, these sons of Samson and Delilah, became
progenitors of the Bible composers, of Christ’s apostles and of
modern Palestinians. The advanced Philistine technology and the
Highlanders’ love of our parched land combined to achieve the
spiritual miracle of ancient Palestine. It is not impossible,
and it is highly desirous, that history will repeat itself, and
the glorious image of young Farris, fighting the tank, will
blend with images of king David and St George in the minds and
schoolbooks of our Palestinian children.
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