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.