CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Defiling Statues of Jesus: Israel’s Counterfeit Outrage at Cultural Vandalism

Photograph Source: Globetrotter19 – CC BY-SA 3.0

They have kept their strategy of cultural and institutional vandalism generously broad in recent campaigns against their adversaries.  It therefore came as something of a surprise that much febrile fuss was made about this month’s antics of an IDF soldier photographed attacking a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon on the edge of Debel with a sledgehammer.  Instead of its usual qualifications, haughty denials and coarse justifications, the Israel military accepted the veracity of the image and viewed the act “with great severity and emphasises that the soldier’s conduct is wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops”.

The act even exercised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  He felt wounded at the deviancy of it all, claimingthat “Israel cherishes and upholds the Jewish values of tolerance and mutual respect between Jews and worshippers of all faiths.”  Along with “the overwhelming majority of Israelis, I was stunned and saddened to learn that an IDF soldier damaged a Catholic religious icon in southern Lebanon.”  Such conduct was condemned “in the strongest terms” and military authorities had commenced “a criminal probe of the matter”, with the intention of taking “appropriately harsh disciplinary action against the offender.”

The statement then veers sharply, if revealingly: this act of vandalism had to be condemned since an Israeli soldier had attacked a Christian relic.  The same could hardly be said about conduct against the artefacts or symbols sacred to the followers of Islam, though the Israeli PM was careful not to be so explicit. “While Christians are being slaughtered in Syria and Lebanon by Muslims, the Christian population in Israel thrives unlike elsewhere in the Middle East.”  Israel was the only state in the region where the........

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