It is difficult not to see the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani as yet another attempt to obliterate the Palestinian narrative, to make true the claim, made by the Israeli politician Yigal Allon after 1967, that Palestinians no longer exist, for if they did they would have produced a literature.
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The Israeli National News published an article written by an Israeli soldier, calling it, ‘Letter To Gaza’. The author had chosen to withhold his last name; all we have is ‘Yishai (Reserve Soldier)’. In an Orwellian maneuver, Yishai addresses the Palestinians whose house he had recently ransacked and occupied with a simple and solitary: ‘Hello’. At one point he explains that ‘despite the immense disorder you found in your house … we did our best to treat your possessions with respect… I even covered the computer from dust with a piece of cloth’. Yishai wants his nameless victims to know: ‘I am 100% at peace with what my country did, what my army did, and what I did. However, I feel your pain.’
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The soldier’s letter is there only to serve the soldier. In it he tries to brush away his crimes under a feigned humanity, but in doing so exposes the narcissistic jealousy every oppressor feels: one of the most disturbing qualities of the subjugator is that he is rarely content with dispossessing his victims of their rights and property, but desires to also undermine the private nature of their grief.
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