Apartheid in a world ruled by one super-power
It was a bullet for every Palestinian child, said one of the officers in that meeting, or at least this is what the Israeli daily Maariv revealed two years ago, when the horrible figures were first leaked. It didn't much change "public opinion", neither here nor in the West, neither two years ago nor 4 months ago when Malka finally opened his mouth. It read as if it had happened somewhere else, or a long time ago, or as if it was just one version, a voice in a polyphony, hiding behind the principle theme: we, the Israelis are right, and they are wrong.
Israeli political society--including the Zionist Left, Labour, Meretz and Peace Now, all currently disappearing because of this war--had been so deeply involved in construction of anti-Palestinian consent during the first months of the Intifada, that none of them -- neither their politicians, nor their intellectuals -- were able to acknowledge such a story and say: "Oops, we're sorry, we were misled."
And it is not only about Major General Malka's bullet figures, of course. It is also about the total dismissal of the Palestinian accusations during those months of autumn 2000: nobody--not even the pro-Palestinians in the West--believed them, when they tried to tell their story, that included the reality of the 1.3 million 5.56 bullets fired at them, when they tried to tell their version of how Israel made every possible effort to turn the unrest of Fall 2000 into a bloodbath, to push the various factions to use arms, to turn this into the final stage of unwriting Oslo. That was the goal of Ehud Barak and his men, General Shaul Mofaz (then Chief of Staff, now minister of defence) and General Moshe Ya'alon, the real mastermind behind the plan -- to "burn onto the Palestinian mind" (his own words) that they cannot beat us.
