Bilal Barakat 🍉You may have seen the viral video of the Israeli soldier bragging openly about killing Palestinian children and babies in #Gaza, to the merry amusement of the people he was speaking to.
Neither the attitude nor the action is new or rare and it's certainly not a post-traumatic response to Oct 7.
More than twenty years ago, I spent some time on a teaching English certification course together with an American evangelical couple. I was probably the only Palestinian they'd ever met. After a couple of weeks they worked up the courage to ask me about something that had been bothering them. They told me how an American-Israeli acquaintance of theirs back home had told them casually about having killed a young child when he was in the IDF “but so what, he was only an Arab".
This couple were decent people who clearly suffered from the cognitive dissonance that encounter had triggered. I guess they were hoping to hear something from me that would help them make sense of it. But I'm not sure it helped when they saw that I was not even the slightest bit shocked or surprised to hear about their friend’s admission, because of course he did.
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