Israel Matzav

Too little, too late on al-Dura

Melanie Phillips argues that Israel's suddenly stepping up to the plate and admitting that the Mohamed al-Dura 'killing' was a fake - after the evidence had been available for years - is too little, too late.

Originally, the IDF actually accepted responsibility for the boy's death. After an internal inquiry, it claimed instead that father and son had probably been hit by Palestinian gunfire. But anyone looking at the broadcast footage could see that neither father nor son was wounded in any way. Did no one in the IDF or foreign ministry ask why there was no visible wound on a boy who had allegedly just been killed by snipers, no blood anywhere?

The fact is that at no stage did Israel want to get to the truth. After its gross incompetence in taking responsibility for a killing that never happened, it looked the other way as the facts emerged. The result is that this tale has been suppurating poison for 13 years. France 2 has never been called to account. Untold numbers of Israelis have been murdered as a result of this footage. And Israel has been libelled as a nation of child-killers.

So why did it stay silent until now? The foreign ministry seemed to believe it was all just water under the bridge and no good would come of stirring it up again. This "heads down" attitude is sometimes called "ghetto mentality". What the scandal surely tells is that you can take the people out of the ghetto, but you cannot always take the ghetto out of the people.

And now, 13 years too late, Israel has published the results of a government inquiry, which the rest of the world won't believe. Why now? Why produce this without the all-important independent element to guarantee its credibility? Why do so without even putting on the web for all to see the critical unbroadcast footage showing the child moving?

Why is the Israel government so monumentally incompetent?

It's not that the government is incompetent. It's that the Leftist-dominated (for most of the last 20 years) Foreign Ministry has a kind of death wish - a Samson complex.  Quite simply, Israel's Left would rather self-destruct and take the Jewish state with it than see the Jewish state be 'too Jewish.'

And so, for 13 years, we have pretended that Mohamed al-Dura really died. We took responsibility without investigating first, and then buried our collective heads in the sand so as not admit our incompetence.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Israel's Foreign Ministry, Israel's suicidal Left, Mohamed al-Dura

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:43 AM