"Save The Pigs"

When the rules of engagement are "shoot anything that moves." 

It gets harder by the day to cope with the gaping chasm between the stories we're all being told, depending on the source of information, at least among those of us who haven't completely shut off to any kind of news consumption. Listening to NPR yesterday I don't think Gaza was mentioned, except in the context of briefly discussing partisan arguments over whether strings should be attached to the new multi-billion dollar package of military aid to Israel and Ukraine. Otherwise the news of the day was about the upcoming Republican Party primaries in Iowa, some story about a hockey player from Pennsylvania, and one about the final season of a British TV series.

Meanwhile on Planet Earth, the United Nations Secretary-General is warning the world in press conferences ignored completely by NPR that 50% of the population of the Gaza Strip is now starving.  Al-Jazeera is reporting the Jabaliya refugee camp has been bombed once again, this time with 90 people dead.  In the past few days there's been news of unarmed women and children executed point blank by soldiers, dozens of people being buried alive by armored bulldozers, and more people with white flags being unceremoniously gunned down, but this time it made the news a bit in the west because they were Israelis getting killed with the white flags in their hands.

Hearing about the Israeli hostages with white flags up, their hands in the air, no shirts on (showing they weren't wearing suicide vests or hiding weapons), identifying themselves in fluent Hebrew, and getting killed, was reminiscent of the untold numbers of Israelis who died from such "friendly fire" as the Israeli military retook the parts of southern Israel that, last October, were temporarily occupied by Palestinians from Gaza, and did so through their standard method of overwhelming force.

Hearing all this talk from Netanyahu about how the soldiers were violating their normal rules of engagement also reminded me of an encounter I had 24 years ago this month, during my first visit to Israel/Palestine.  

I was in the Israeli village known as Sde Boker.  I don't know how many of the people living there were soldiers, but there were always soldiers around the town center. 

One of the ones I met was a young man with a keen wit and an interest in one of the buttons my girlfriend was wearing.  The soldier thought it was a picture of Bob Marley.  It was actually a picture of Mumia Abu Jamal, and she was trying to explain who he was to the soldier as she gave him the button.

The soldier had a t-shirt on with a picture of a pig, and some writing in Hebrew, which is Greek to me.  I asked him what it said.

"Save the pigs!" he exclaimed.

We were political types, obviously, and immediately interested in whatever this was about.  Why are we saving the pigs?  Which pigs?  Are they endangered?

The soldier explained that in southern Lebanon, which at that time was under Israeli military occupation, the soldiers considered anything that moved to be a potential threat.  If, through their long-distance sniper sights or infrared sensors they saw something around the size of a human on the move somewhere, they would shoot it.  Much of the time, it ended up being wild boar.

"Save the pigs" was a form of dark humor, attempting to make light of the fact that the policy of the Israeli occupation soldiers in that southern strip of Lebanon was to shoot anything that moves.  Those were the rules of engagement.

When the rules of engagement are shoot anything that moves, the white flags are irrelevant.  When your enemy is the people, and you make no differentiation between fighters and civilians, of whatever age or gender, what's a white flag but a bit of cloth.  They'll protect the people of Gaza as well as they protected the Southern Cheyenne people at Sand Creek, who died surrounding their leader, Black Kettle, and his display of a white flag beside an American flag.

The martial law that ruled the lives of the surviving Indians of the area we now call the western United States today dictated that they had to remain on their reservations or be shot on sight.  Without enough food to eat if they didn't hunt, staying on the reservations was impossible without starving, thus guaranteeing the rebellions of the starving Indians, and the genocidal massacres of them.

Perhaps the Colorado Rangers back then might have had t-shirts that said "save the buffalo."  Given that killing off the buffalo was a policy of extermination meant to relieve the people of their main food source, and thus starve them into submission, there might be an extra layer of darkness to the humor in that case.

I long ago lost track of the number of times I've argued with patriotic Israelis who have defended their country's policies on the basis of "we're just doing the same thing you did" -- committing massacres of the indigenous population, driving them onto tiny reservations and then making life impossible for them there, forcing them into an unspeakably horrendous cycle of starving, fighting, and dying, just in the effort to continue to exist.

Give us a break, we're just doing the same thing you did, committing genocide.  It's a bankrupt argument, but at least it's honest.  Nothing like the lying nonsense coming out of the mouths of fascists like Netanyahu about "rules of engagement."