Lisa Goldman has written a lengthy post that attempts to put the infamous photos of the Israeli girls writing on IDF shells “in perspective.” You should read it, though I don’t think it adds much in the way of factual context that you couldn’t figure out on your own: Israelis have been under fire from Hezbollah, and they’re pissed off. Obvious, but fair enough. Some of Goldman’s larger points about demonization are certainly worth your time, yet the following portion of her post displays some startling naivete:
I’ve been thinking for the last two days about this photo and the storm of reaction it set off. I worry about the climate of hate that would lead people to look at it and automatically assume the absolute worst – and then use the photo to dehumanize and victimize. I wonder why so many people seem to take satisfaction in believing that little Israeli girls with felt markers in their hands – not weapons, but felt markers – are evil, or spawned by an evil society. I wonder how those people would feel if Israelis were to look at a photo of a Palestinian child wearing a mock suicide belt in a Hamas demonstration and conclude that all Palestinians – nay, all Arabs – are evil.
Is she kidding? We’re constantly shown images of Arab kids dressed up as militants, holding real or toy weapons, as evidence of their genetic predisposition for evil. (See this post by Jonathan Schwarz for more on that.) A couple of months ago, I blogged on this post by popular commentator Michelle Malkin, who actually argued that such photos of Palestinian children justified a shoot-first-ask-questions-later stance toward children in Iraq. Really. If some pro-Arab bloggers used the photos of the Israeli girls in the same way, that’s horrible, but they’re playing catch-up at this point.
A personal note: I blogged one of the photos myself in frustration over the one-sidedness of the American coverage I was watching at the time. I did not juxtapose it with the worst images of Lebanese suffering accessible to anyone on the Web. Each photo I chose – all girls: two Lebanese, one American, and two Israeli, all beautiful – struck me not as infuriating or nauseating, but heartbreaking. The brief introductory captions I gave the Lebanese and American girls were bitter and ironic, a comment on mainstream attitudes toward Arabs and critics of Israel in my country, but the caption for the Israeli girls was bitter and sincere. They were adorable, or at least that’s the word that would cross my mind if I saw them at the grocery store or the library (a feeling of familiarity only underscored by the fact that some of the messages on the shells were in English). Yet there they were in a scene that even in militaristic, violence-crazed, imperial America would be unthinkable, if for no other reason than that their parents would be in jail on child-endangerment charges within hours of such photos’ publication.
Surreally sad.
Those Israeli children are no more evil than the Palestinian tots the warbloggers splash across their pages, and anyone who saw in my post support for their own reverse-Malkinism can f*ck off. What those photos – and the hundreds of news stories we run every day – say to me is that U.S. involvement in the Middle East is a tragedy. It has emboldened the worst in all of us – Arabs, Israelis, and Americans – and empowered the worst among us. Don’t blather on and on about the horrors American disengagement would entail until you have honestly faced the horrors of the present.