Khaled Odeh: Jerusalemite researcher

Several days ago, the Zionist court acquitted the policeman who killed the young Jerusalemite, Iyad al-Hallaq, who was executed in 2020, and Iyad, who has special needs and has autism, was on his way to his private school in the Old City. It is not new for the Zionist judiciary to acquit the Zionist killers, which was, ironically, an excuse. Their usual acquittal is “mental illness.” The Zionist does not shed innocent blood unless he is afflicted with some disease that disrupts his moral rationality.

In the case of a Palestinian suffering from a mental or psychological illness, the issue is whether he is a “spilder” of blood or his blood is spilled, as in the case of the barber. Perhaps the reason is due to the embedded modernist conviction that mental illness is a modern disease resulting from the pressures of European societies’ transformation towards modernity, and therefore backward, non-modern peoples such as the Arabs are not afflicted by it?

In fact, the Zionist settlement project in Palestine began with a hostile view of the mentally ill among the Zionists themselves. The Jewish Agency refused to allow those with mental and physical “disabilities” to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine, and in many cases it deported those who succeeded in passing the Zionist medical examination and returned them to Europe. The argument is that the Zionist settlement in Palestine, during that period, needed “strong, fighting” settlers, not “its inability.”

The Zionist project went through many transformations during the past 100 years, and at a later stage the “critical” Zionists exhumed the history of mental illness in Zionism and treated it, and the Zionists established an “advanced” system of services and care for people with special needs from whose services many Arabs benefit...

But in cases of shock/crisis that this project suffers from during periods of intense resistance, the “suppressed” returns, and a Zionist court legalizes the execution of a terrified autistic Arab young man on his way to his private school...