Shaker Hasouny has become a martyr. He was shot on a Friday afternoon in downtown Hebron, a city torn apart by the Israeli occupation, guarding a settler-hooligans who colonized part of this Palestinian city in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

The city is divided in the Oslo lexicon "H1" and "H2". The status of the largest part of the city, "H1", is similar to the one pertaining to "Area A". Yet, the Israeli occupation forces maintain control over this part of the city, by occasionally establishing checkpoints at entrances to the city, or by closing these points of access. "H1" covers residential sectors as well as the commercial areas of Bab Al-Zawiya and Wadi Al-Tuffah, situated west of Hebron's qasbah, the Old City.

In "H2", the occupation has remained in full force, seriously affecting Palestinian daily life. "H2" covers approximately 20 percent of the municipal territory. It comprises the entire Qasba and areas adjacent to the Jewish settlements. The population in this area is composed of 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinians and approximately 400 settlers.

Last Friday, Israeli occupation forces killed twenty-three year old Shaker, a resident of occupied Jerusalem, who lived in Hebron. Shaker Hasouney was killed brutally, shot in the mouth and the chest during demonstrations against the brutal occupation of Palestine. They dragged him on the ground for 150 meters after he was shot. Medical aid was prevented. This murder took place in downtown Hebron. Israeli occupation forces penetrated the "H1"-area, formally controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

When does the murder and rape of Palestine comes to an end? Why do Palestinians get death when they ask for freedom? Why do Palestinians get deported when they want to return?

All we see is "a bleeding homeland of a bleeding people", as Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish once wrote. Where is this insanity leading us? No rationality can comprehend the rape of our land, our history, the murder of sons, the uprooting of a whole generation.

How many more Palestinians need to be killed before the world opens its eyes? How many more Palestinians need to suffer this horrendous price for freedom? How many more need to be punished by Israel for their existence - through imprisonment, killing, torture, expulsion, loss of property and freedom? When does the world opens its eyes to see that this is all a campaign to exterminate Palestinians as a human presence on the land of their ancestors.

When does the world comes to see that the Palestinians are human beings who just want to continue their daily lives and that of their children on the land they inherited from their ancestors. Those who have been driven out by aggression or by fear thereof, just want to return home and live as human beings on the lands that were owned by their parents and grandparents.

If cruelty is individual, then silence is collective. Cruelty is provate, directed at individual human bodies, it is profoundly personal in its implications for the rest of the martyr's parents, children, family and friends.

Reading through news reports, eye-witness accounts, I get the uncomfortable feeling that there is a willing sadism on the part of the occupier, a perversity filtered down through their commanding officers from Israel's bosses, war criminals, from the smug self-satisfaction of the settlers.

It isn't enough to attack Palestinian men, women, children and the aged, one must also beat up the already injured, the ill, and the handicapped. It isn't enough to close down cities, villages and refugee camps, one must also bar schools and hospitals, one must also desecrate mosques and churches. It isn't enough to physically torture prisoners, one must also destroy them psychologically.

 

Never - not once- is this evil related to the premises upon which the ugly racist Zionist thought is constructed. The standard of judgment is always one-sided. It is always the "purity of Israel's soul," never the illegality much les the immorality of occupation and repression. It is the smudge of Western civilization, never the occupier's sinister claw on an anguished people made scapegoat for the sins of the West. If once Palestinians erred in desperation by aping their conquerors in resorting to violence, they nevertheless clung to the naive hope that justice will out.

 

As long as the Palestinian population's resentment of what it perceives to be the theft of its land is compounded with genuine fear and distrust of Israeli soldiers and settlers, security will never be a viable concept.

 

The Palestinians would need shoes the size of the earth in order to kick this world in the pants - this world that insists that victim and executioner are equal; this world which goes to extremes in its cruelty toward the victim and its sympathy for the executioner in asking the victim to please exercise self-restraint and control his reactions. The West has a mean attitude that cannot be disputed, even meaner are those who demand that we keep quiet and give peace yet another chance.

 

It was easy to make the Palestinians pay for 2,000 years of persecution. the Palestinians have felt the enormous power of this vengeance, were not the historical oppressors of the Jews. They did not put them in ghettoes and did not force them to wear yellow stars. They did not plan holocausts. But they had one fault. They were weak and defenseless in the face of real military might, so they were the ideal victims for an abstract revenge.

The author is a Dutch-Palestinian political scientist, human rights activist and is affiliated to the the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (Al-Awda).