Dear Avri Gilad, I received your non-apology letter, “A letter to a girl from Gaza,” which was published on your website last week. First of all, permit me to say I was impressed by your uncompromising honesty. It was truly impressive. Not everyone would be willing to admit to himself – much less to a 4-year-old girl whom his country murdered in cold blood when it assassinated her father – that “my conscience is clear, little girl.”
To be clear, everyone knows you aren’t the only Israeli Jew whose conscience isn’t bothered in the slightest by my deliberate, planned assassination. But you went out of your way to tell me this in writing, so that I wouldn’t, heaven forbid, comfort myself with the thought that my death might trouble your sleep.
Granted, I’m only four years old – or more accurately, I was four years old when you “sent a pilot to launch a missile at my bed during the night and destroy me and my dreams,” as you so nicely put it. But I’m already old enough to understand what a conscience is. And you have to be an exceptional person to do something dirty but have your conscience remain clean.
So allow me to tell you, Avri – now that I’m dead, you’ll allow me to call you Avri? – that you, the Jews, are all exceptional. No stain clings to you. Not to you and not to the Israel Defense Forces, which manages to be the most moral army in the world no matter what you do. You aren’t just a light unto the nations; you’re truly bleach unto the nations.
In your letter, you told me that I came to you while you were trying to fall asleep, in the confusion of a dream. In other words, you saw me as a human being – like you, like your daughter. You actually wrote, “I saw her for a moment on the news, holding some kind of school certificate, a proud look on her face, like children the world over, like my daughters.” You wrote that my face was engraved on your heart, and I asked you “laish,” which means “why” in Arabic.
Ostensibly, everything that ought to rouse your conscience was taking place in your heart. But your conscience? It slept the sleep of the just. It isn’t working anymore. It’s broken. Can an entire nation be broken just like an individual can?
From your letter, it’s completely clear that you know this was a deliberate act – that your country didn’t kill me and my mother by accident, but intentionally. It’s clear to you that your country understood my life was the price that had to be paid to assassinate my father, the wanted man, and it decided it was worth it. You clearly know that I’m a child, that I didn’t do anything, that my only crime was being born “to the wrong family, the wrong father.” (Why? Who are you to decide that I was born to the wrong family?).
But then it all collapses into a warped rationalization that frees not just you as an individual, but all of you, from responsibility for your actions. Once upon a time, you still searched for a ticking bomb to justify pinpoint assassinations. Today a ticking watch is enough to justify a non-pinpoint assassination. The explanation that satisfies you, the story you tell yourselves, is all that’s needed for you to justify murdering a 4-year-old girl.
“I view your death as I do the unnecessary death of an Arab child who was killed with his criminal father in a car,” you wrote. It’s “heartrending, but it’s not directly connected to me.” How simple. You put together a few sentences and free yourselves of responsibility. “Your ‘laish’ should be directed at him, after he finishes looking for the virgins that aren’t there,” you write at the end.
Look at yourself. If only my death had at least freed me of you. But to this day, you’re pestering me so I’ll free you of the guilt you don’t feel. “What do you want from my life?” is a question I can no longer ask. So instead I’ll ask, what do you want from my death?
A Letter From a Four-year-old Gazan Girl
17
52
21.05.2023
Dear Avri Gilad, I received your non-apology letter, “A letter to a girl from Gaza,” which was published on your website last week. First of all, permit me to say I was impressed by your uncompromising honesty. It was truly impressive. Not everyone would be willing to admit to himself – much less to a 4-year-old girl whom his country murdered in cold blood when it assassinated her father – that “my conscience is clear, little girl.”
To be clear, everyone knows you aren’t the only Israeli Jew whose conscience isn’t bothered in the slightest by my deliberate, planned assassination. But you went out of your way to tell me this in writing, so that I wouldn’t, heaven forbid, comfort myself with the thought that my death might trouble your sleep.
Granted, I’m only four years old – or more accurately, I was four years old when you “sent a pilot to launch a missile at my bed during the night and destroy me and my dreams,” as you so nicely put........
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