NP - A Brave Newspaper

[David Morris]

An Editorial in the very brave newspaper, Ha'aretz:

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=155181&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices 
taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, 
burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; 
server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and 
broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone 
exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, 
scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed 
furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of 
holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left 
obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but compared to the data that 
was destroyed or taken, the insults read like poetry. Even the overflowing 
toilets look more like human weakness compared to the organized vandalism 
reflected in the piles of smashed computers.

It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The 
loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into 
knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their 
civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that 
would bring a sense of economic stability to their country.

These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions 
like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health 
Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and 
research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern 
agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the 
data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial 
enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the 
targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield.

[...]

the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF translated into the 
field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel 
must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come 
the Palestinian goal for independence, sending all of Palestinian society 
backward. It's so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian 
society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and 
product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has 
been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived 
into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and 
political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the 
occupation.



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