Israel/Palestine

One of the heads of Breaking the Silence, Yehuda Shaul said regarding a village in the West Bank—in perfect English—that "it's interesting that they've (the residents) returned, because a few years ago, the settlers poisoned the entire village's water."

I went to Breaking the Silence to try to understand what they meant. They referred me to me an alleged incident that occurred in 2004 wherein several Palestinians lodged a complaint over chicken carcasses thrown into a well.

They wrote about this on the Breaking the Silence website, and they put a short video on their Facebook page showing Shaul attributing the events to the work of hooligans. The fact that there are these hooligans who may or may not have thrown chicken carcasses into the well doesn't make Shaul's words true.

He talked about "the poisoning of the entire water supply." This never happened. He talked about the "entire village being evacuated for a period of several years. This also never happened.

When we take everything that Shaul has said, and combine them with the words of Breaking the Silence activist Avner Gavriyahu—an activist who claims that the IDF shoots at innocent Palestinians as if they are playing a videogame—the result isn't criticism, but demonization.

With this cheap propaganda, people all over the world will come to the conclusion that Israel treats the Palestinians in the same way that the Nazis treated the Jews. This isn't how to bring about the end of the occupation. This is not how to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians. This is how you increase hostility and hatred. This is how you push peace farther away.