In the Gaza Strip, reality parodies Monty Python. [3]
Avid surfers from several Gush Katif communities are threatening to take their boards out to sea on evacuation day and commit mass suicide by drowning. Settlement secretariats, psychologists and social workers have known about the plans of these young men, aged 16-21, for several weeks.
It's a little metaphor for everything.
On the one side, Palestinian children grow with almost universal trauma of seeing their parents beaten and abused by soldiers. They learn to dodge bullets on the way to school, their after school child play is hide & seek with tanks and border patrol jeeps. And some of them dream of becoming martyrs.
On the other side, spoiled adolescents who grew up in a subsidized, patrolled, barbwired and watchtowered yuppie paradise, believing they belong by God's decree to the master race, can't handle parting with their favorite surfing beach.
Masada redux: first the tragedy, now the farce.
Other settlers tattoo their ID numbers on their arms [4] and threaten to wear concentration camp uniforms on evacuation day [5]. The Yad-Vashem Museum, operating as the central bank of holocaust symbolism, disapproves of this samizdat devaluation of its currency.
This debate happens in a country that legally discriminates against mixed couples and claims the Geneva Convention isn't binding on its soldiers. Just don't mention Nuremberg, either of them.
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