Here is the "next thing" in the war against terror: the war against hairdressers. After Hamas took over half the Palestinian people, in no small measure because of Israel's policies, after we tried to fight Hamas with weapons and siege, destruction and killing, mass arrests and deportations, the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet security service have invented something new: a war on shopping malls, bakeries, schools and orphanages. First in Hebron, now in Nablus. The IDF is closing beauty salons, clothing stores and clinics, and even one dairy farm, all on the pretext that they are connected to Hamas, or the rent they pay is given to a terror organization.
These bizarre pictures of a closure order issued by the general of command, stuck on the window of a cosmetics store or a physiotherapy center, of a confiscation order stuck to a pita oven, show that the Israeli occupation has gone crazy. A few months ago I visited the charity institutions and commercial centers the IDF has begun closing in Hebron; I saw infuriatingly absurd scenes. A modern school, intended for 1,200 students, standing closed on orders of the GOC, and a library for young people about to shut.
Thus the occupation proves once again that there is no place in Palestinians' lives that it cannot reach, and that it has no boundaries: An army that closes a school, library, bakery and boarding school; soldiers who raid a licensed commercial television station, confiscating its equipment and threatening its closure, as happened recently at the Afaq TV station in Nablus. In Israel no voices were raised in protest, of course, either against the closing of the school or the closing of the TV station. According to the Israeli train of thought, if we close a bakery making bagels for orphans, Hamas' power will weaken; if we throw hundreds of needy children into the streets from their boarding school, they and their relatives will become sympathetic to Israel; if we close a crowded shopping mall, its irate owners and customers will become Fatah supporters.
The Israeli occupation has not been seen for a long time in such a ludicrous and inhumane light as in these closure and confiscation operations ordered by GOC Central Command Gadi Shamni, the general of onions and garlic, to judge by the produce his soldiers confiscated from the Hebron food warehouses. Illegal, certainly immoral, but no less shortsighted, these operations broadcast a message loud and clear: The occupation has lost all moral inhibitions and any shred of wisdom. How wretched is an army that empties storerooms of food and clothing for the needy, how ridiculous that the GOC signs orders to close hairdressing salons, how pathetic is a military raid on bakeries and how cruel is an occupation that shuts down clinics on any pretext.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1001358.html
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