Matt Bargainer, and several others, link to Lisa Goldman’s opinion piece on the Israeli schoolgirls who were photographed writing messages on tank shells as an adult smiled triumphantly in the background.
Goldman believes that the girls and their parents, who signed the shells first before handing the markers to their children, neither hated the Lebanese people, nor equated death with the shells. She bases this on information that was told to her by Shelly Paz, a Yedioth Ahronoth reporter who was at the scene and agreed to go on the record. Sebastian Scheiner, “the Israeli photojournalist who took the photo”, refused to do so, but also spoke to Goldman, who writes that Paz said, “The noise was terrifying, people were dying outside, the kids were scared out of their minds and they had been told over and over that some man named Nasrallah was responsible for their having to cower underground for days on end.”
Goldman later concludes, “None of those people was detached or wise enough to think: ‘Hang on, tank shell equals death of human beings.'”
They knew rockets were killing people outside of the bomb shelter where they’d been cowering for days. They’d been told “over and over” they were being attacked by Nasrallah’s rockets and “were scared out of their minds” for their own lives. But they were not wise or engaged enough to know that Israeli shells kill and terrify people?
If Goldman is correct and the children and their parents had no idea that hundreds of people had already been killed, some by shells just like those, that inexplicable ignorance should be corrected, not encouraged by Goldman. She boasts that Israel has never engaged in the propaganda of war and refuses to show its citizens pictures of the dead. Obviously, Israel has very good reasons for hiding evidence of its brutality in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere from its citizens, but that trickery deserves no praise. The omission of facts should be condemned for what it is, propaganda.