The True Meaning of Humanity

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday April 25, 2002 01:23 by Avi Davis - Freeman Center for Strategic Studies

In newspapers, television programs, and on radio throughout the world Israel is treated as a state that has fallen into the deepest recesses of inhumanity. Yet for all the media abuse heaped on the Jewish state in these desperate days, an abiding truth has survived – the incursions of Israeli troops into Palestinian areas in the past twelve days has revealed a more humane military response than other nation, having suffered similar depredations, would have ever considered.

“Genocide” screams the headline in La Prensa. La Monde describes it as the "March of the Storm Troopers." Fox News' Geraldo Rivera calls Israeli military retaliation the moral equivalent of suicide bombing. Al-Ahram, the leading newspaper in Egypt, states, "Sharon is attempting a Nazi invasion of the Palestinian territories; an invasion similar to that attempted by Hitler…" On March 31, 2002, WAFA, the Palestinian news service ran an editorial claiming: "They have brought back the Tatar, the Mongolians, the Nazis and all the invaders throughout the dark history of mankind." In newspapers, television programs, and on radio throughout the world Israel is treated as a state that has fallen into the deepest recesses of inhumanity.

Yet while the world media and European leaders have a field day excoriating Israel, some fundamental facts seem to have been quietly forgotten.

Israel has one of the most highly equipped and trained armies in the world. But it did not send its F15 and F16 bombers in to Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah to carpet bomb terrorist strongholds as the United States recently did in Afghanistan. It did not level cities and villages as the Russians did in Chechnya in 1998. It did not undertake a campaign of elimination as the 'moderate' King Hussein of Jordan did during his own 'intifada' in September 1970, slaughtering 10,000 Arab PLO supporters and expelling the entire leadership to Lebanon. It did not do what Syria's Hafez al-Assad did in 1982, when faced with a Muslim fundamentalist uprising in the town of Hama, he ordered the massacre of an estimated 22,000 of his own citizens.

On the contrary. Israeli soldiers, at great personal risk, undertook house to house fighting, extraordinarily difficult in the labyrinthine streets of refugee camps. The IDF took careful measures to treat Palestinian casualties equally with its own. One medic reported from Jenin that on one day he had the job of inspecting 300 prisoners. They were all checked for wounds and injuries and if they had sustained any were given immediate treatment and evacuated to field hospitals. Priority was always given to civilian casualties, even over those of the IDF.

The world does indeed seem to have great trouble with Israel's right to defend itself against terror. Yet for all the media abuse heaped on the Jewish state in these desperate days, an abiding truth has survived – the incursions of Israeli troops into Palestinian areas in the past twelve days has revealed a more humane military response than other nation, having suffered similar depredations, would have ever considered. That is because the Israeli army operates under a humanistic code, instructed to protect civilian life at the highest cost, to only fire when being fired upon and not to shoot women, children or the elderly under any circumstances. The injunction against killing children worked against 13 IDF soldier last week when a child suicide bomber unsuspectingly detonated his charge among a group of soldiers, three of whom died instantly and the remainder picked off by snipers as they lay wounded on the street.

But there is a more telling story, one that speaks volumes for the humanity of this country at war. A seven-year-old Palestinian boy, suffering from bone marrow disease, is currently being treated in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Three months ago, his former physician, a world renowned hematologist named Shmuel Gillis, was shot dead on his way home to Karmei Tzur, a West Bank community, by Palestinian terrorists. Dr. Gillis had saved many lives, both Arab and Jew. He did not discriminate among his patients.
Treatment for the boy continued despite Dr.Gillis' murder. But the child's condition began to deteriorate rapidly during Passover and a donor for blood platelets was desperately sought. It was finally discovered that the boys' 13-year-old brother's blood type was a match for the ailing child. The problem was that the brother was in Ramallah, a town in a war zone. Calls were made to the authorities and the IDF. Within hours, in a Red Crescent ambulance, the 13-year-old brother and his parents were brought from their home in Ramallah together with an IDF medic, escorted by IDF soldiers riding jeeps in front of and in the rear of the ambulance.
As they sat in the lobby, the parents shed grateful tears for such salvation. But as they wept, they happened to gaze upon a memorial plaque that had recently been affixed to the lobby wall. It was for Dr. Shmuel Gillis, a man whom they knew so well and the doctor who would have been treating their son today had he not been felled by an indiscriminate Palestinian bullet.