This is the day that Israel marks as its Memorial Day, or Remembrance Day.
Haaretz reported that “The total number of those who have been remembered by this Memorial Day is 22,570 [n.b., mainly fallen soldiers but also civilian victims of terror attacks]. The dead who are counted date from 1860, when Jews first settled outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem”. Haaretz added that, according to the Defense Ministry, “133 soldiers and civilians died during the past year either in the course of military service or as civilian casualties of hostile activity”. This Haaretz report can be read in full here
In another article published on this day, Haaretz has repprinted a very famous and very striking photo — looking into the eyes of a young Palestinian just moments before his death — with a brief commentary from the photographer who took it.
The photographer, Alex Levac, wrote: “I’m returning here to my infamous Bus 300 photo, in which one sees – obviously alive and well – one of two Palestinian hijackers whom the Shin Bet security service claimed had been killed during a hostage rescue. I wouldn’t think of bringing the subject up again if it hadn’t been for the changes in Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians over the last 25 years. The photo shocked the country in 1984 because it was proof of the lies and criminal acts of the security apparatus. Who would respond these days with the same powerful emotion to the murder of two Palestinian bus hijackers as we did in those innocent times when every injury to a Palestinian, not to mention a killing, led to an investigation? Since then, mutual hatred has only worsened and summary executions have become routine. We have long become insensitive to death, of Jews as well as Palestinians”.
The photographer ended with these words: “A short philosophical remark is in order here about the essence of photographs. The power of this photo lies in what it doesn’t show, the moment after, the moment when skulls were smashed, an act former Shin Bet agent Ehud Yatom later admitted to. The moment of the unbearable lightness of death”.
But, he also wrote in his commentary that “the thought that evokes the greatest sadness is whether we can say with certainty in 2009 that the Israeli media is the watchdog of democracy”. This commentary can be read in full as posted here.
The Palestinian in the photo was one of four accused of participating under the orders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the hijacking on 12 April 1984 of an Israeli bus on the Tel Aviv to Ashkelon route. According to the account in Wikipedia, the bus driver was forced to take the vehicle with 41 passengers on board to Gaza — then a much more open place than it is today — where it was surrounded, south of Gaza City, by Israeli troops and Border Police. According to Wikipedia, “The hijackers demanded the release of some 500 PLO members held in Israeli jails. Just before dawn, an IDF elite unit, led by then-brigadier-general Yitzhak Mordechai, stormed the bus. One young woman soldier was killed and seven passengers were wounded in the course of the operation. Two of the gunmen were killed inside the bus. The other two reportedly were wounded and died en route to a hospital. The Israeli Army stated that all four Palestinians died either during or as a result of the battle for the recapture of the bus and the liberation of the hostages. At the time, the Israeli Military Censor banned publication of pictures taken by two Israeli photographers ([one of them being] Alex Libek, photographer of Haaretz) that purportedly showed that the two ‘mortally wounded terrorists’, cousins Subahi and Majdi Abu Jamahad, walked off the bus … still alive. The Israeli newspaper Hadashot … was closed for four days for not sending the information to the Military Censor (it was cleared of all charges in 1993). A subsequent inquiry revealed the two Palestinians were killed later, and Avraham Shalom, head of Shabak (Shin Bet), was forced to resign … Yediot Aharonot commentator Yeshayahu Ben-Porath subsequently asserted that Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin sided with Yitzhak Shamir, who was Prime Minister when the incident occurred, in protecting the head of Shin Beth from any punishment. They then united to dismiss the Attorney General who wanted to investigate the case, the commentator added, and they arranged pardons for the security officials involved”. The Wikipedia article can be read in full here.