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(reversing and appropriating the biblical story); in mythical and reli–
gious semantics: the innocent victim is once again crucified by the Jews.
And in the mythical and historical semantics: the Palestinian child
replaces the Jewish child as a victim of the Holocaust.
That image, shaped at the beginning of the battles around the heart–
breaking death of Mohammed Dura, who happened into the range of
fire between the Israeli and Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip with his
father, illustrates the process of mythicization, as analyzed by Shmuel
Trigano in
L'Ebranlement d 'Israe/.
The seconds of torment of
Mohammed Dura's death were appropriated as "a spectacle," broad–
cast over and over on French television, outside any context, without
checking the source of the shooting, and affirming Israeli responsibility
for a deliberate attack (which was later proved to be a lie). The horrify–
ing pictures became both a Christian and a Muslim icon and inundated
the Internet for months. A poem composed in his memory by the Pales–
tinian poet Mahmoud Darwish appropriates expressions from the poem
by the national Hebrew poet Bialik, "On the Slaughter," which was
composed in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The Hebrew translation
of the poem, which appeared immediately and without any criticism, in
the literary supplement of
Ha 'aretz,
was an expression of the ideologi–
cal appropriation of death and the internalization of mythic violence
out of an identification with the "Other" and a delegitimation and
rejection of the "I" and its story.
Turning Christian Bethlehem and Beit Jalla into areas from which to
shoot at southern Jerusalem, which brought the expected return fire, was
staged for the Western audience. All it took was the setting of Bethlehem
and the Church of the Nativity to present the return fire as Herod's
"slaughter of the innocents." In July
2001,
the mythic mutation of the
story was "baptized" by the Pope during his visit to the ruined church in
Kuneitra. The host, Assad, President of Syria, called for jihad against
Israel, the "agent of Palestinian suffering and the torments of Jesus." The
Pope did not protest, and the Vatican did not issue any objections. That
August, at the Durban Committee, Israel was singled out in an outburst
of hatred that derailed the entire committee from its objectives, which
revealed that the values of human rights, postcolonialism, and anti-glob–
alization (with their neo-Christian sentiments) are perverted when alloyed
with anti-Semitic characterizations. (That was also a warning sign of the
danger of spreading Western Christian anti-Semitism-including the ris–
ing popularity of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in the third and
Muslim worlds-not only as a threat to Israel and the Jews, but also in
