THE REAL success for Israel is not that it can now enter the Gaza Strip anytime and kill at will. Its success is that, after yesterday`s massacre in Rafah, a progresive European president like Zapatero would only dare to describe what happened as “a negative step for peace.” More than thirty dead in 48 hours, many of them children who were taking part in a peaceful demonstration, more than a hundred houses demolished since last weekend... Spanish languaje has rather more precise terms, and surely stronger than those in which Zapatero expressed himself. But he was affraid, affraid os Israel’s friends, affraid of Israel’s rage.

Walls have ears, and at that time Israel’s foreign minister Silvan Shalom was actually in Madrid. Shalom (whose ironic name means “peace” in Hebrew) faked astonishment when journalists asked him about the fallen children of Rafah. “There are terrorists in Rafah” he uttered, and then he left flowers at the altar of Madrid’s Atocha Station, the site of the 11-M bombings. Another success for Israel: to seize the 11-M victims, when those victims should be resting in the same place where the Rafah children are, if there is such a place where all innocent victims go to rest.

In fact, the children of Rafah were resting amid flowers too. Our colleagues there tell us that yesterday there were so many corpses that the hospital’s little morgue was crowded and some of them had to be taken to greenhouses. Rafah, which the last time I saw Gaza was already a ruin in the dust, still produces some flowers in the same spirit that a handicaped child paints with his mouth. Rafah is handicaped too, and is also a child, because all of Palestine is a nation of children (they amount to almost half of the population) and that is why it is not so strange that Israel kills them everytime it intends to kill Palestinians. You only have to take a look at an Israeli newspaper, where you constantly read of the “demografic problem”, to understand that it’s the children whom the Israelis consider the real enemy in this war of the wombs that is fought between Palestinian women and Israeli settler women. It’s children who one day, in fact, will succeed with their mere survival and the strenght of their number were bombs and bullets won’t ever succeed: in puting an end to that sad mistake we know as the Jewish-only ethnic State of Israel.

But, of course, all that is of little comfort now, when we see them bleeding to death in their parent’s arms while rushed to the hospitals after a misile strike, as it happended yesterday. Their blood dyed the yellowish sand of Gaza. Those are the flowers Rafah produces nowadays: the red blossoms of blood clots in the sand.

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 20 May 2004