Death as a Way of Life

Boy Killed in Gaza

October 2000

The tragic killing of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy on September 31, 2000, was televised and broadcast live around the world. Muhammad al-Durrah, who died in his wounded father’s arms, became an instant international symbol of the Palestinian uprising. To this day, neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Israeli Army has accepted responsibility for the death of the child in the crossfire between them.

Everyone who lives in this disaster area — the Middle East — has seen many horrific sights. But these pictures, the pictures of Muhammad’s death, are among the most harrowing ever seen here. They signify that even if we eventually have peace in the end, it may arrive too late.

Because war and violence have blinded our eyes, and have turned some of us into killers, and many others of us into tacit collaborators with murderers.

Of course, there is still no way of knowing who shot him, Israelis or Palestinians. In the madness that rages here, anything is possible. But there can be no absolution for such an act — for the execution of a twelve-year-old boy. When I hear Israeli army officers explaining that the father shouldn’t have taken his son to a riot zone, I feel nauseous.

For more than one hundred years we, Israelis and Palestinians, have been giving birth to children in battlefields, bullets shrieking past us. Yet another generation and another generation are thrown into the fire immediately at birth. Our parents did this to us, and we are doing it to our children. Fathers cannot defend their sons, but it also seems that they do not have the strength to rise above this fate for their families, to change this verdict. As if all of us here, Palestinians and Israelis, are doomed to be either murderers or victims.

As if we no longer have any other way.

In the meantime, for the last year and a half, Barak and Arafat have not stopped talking about the need to make peace, for the sake of the children. But they are apparently speaking of some abstract peace, of figurative children.

A twelve-year-old boy now lies between them, a boy with a name and a face, a face contorted with fear. A very tangible dead boy.

Were Barak and Arafat braver, really brave, this boy might still be alive. Now, even if they reach an agreement in the end, we will carry Muhammad al-Durrah’s face in our minds like a curse.

Who knows how many more innocent people will die in the days to come, until the two sides understand that the look that was in the eyes of that boy before he died will be the look we all have, if we continue to sit passively, easy prey for violence.