Five months into the first intifada, journalist Larry Derfner recounts, the Israeli public grew inured to the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, and the “peace camp” protests dwindled away as Palestinian deaths attracted less coverage. Then, on April 6, 1988, a 15-year-old girl was killed in the first Israeli civilian death. A group of hiking teenage settlers were attacked by rock-throwing Palestinian villagers from Beita and one of them struck the girl. At her funeral, rightist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir echoed the thousands shouting for revenge: “The heart of the entire nation is boiling.” But an IDF investigation found that one of the hikers’ security guards, a violent ultra-nationalist, got into an argument with a Palestinian and shot him dead, which provoked the townspeople. It was the guard, aiming at Palestinian youth hurling rocks, who killed the Israeli girl. The Palestinians actually came to the defense of the Israeli youth. IDF chief Dan Shomron stated: “It’s a fact — the youngsters, apart from the girl, got out of there alive . . . because some villagers did not allow them to be harmed.” No matter, the “political climate in Israel was such that the army destroyed 14 houses in Beita, bulldozed acres of almond and olive orchards, deported 6 villagers to Lebanon, and killed a Palestinian boy during the action.” The Palestinian death toll surpassed 140 next to 2 Israelis, but, still, “the heart of the nation was boiling.” Derfner’s indicts his adoptive country’s moral failure through this memoir, No Country for Jewish Liberals (Just World Books).
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