Palestinian Joy Stops When They Realize Azazel Dismembers A Goat, Not A Jew (PreOccupied Territory)

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Judean Desert, September 17 - Throngs of area residents streamed toward a jagged cliffside east of Jerusalem today, to cheer on the rending limb from limb of a body thrown from a nearby promontory, only to discover, to their chagrin, that the body in question belonged to an animal symbolically carrying the sins of the Jews, and not, as they had eagerly anticipated, to an actual Jew.

A disorderly mass of motor vehicles jammed the roads leading back to Ramallah and local villages, as well as to various Bedouin encampments, as disappointed Palestinians expressed the letdown inherent in expecting Jew-dismemberment but coming away not only without any organs or limbs as souvenirs, but without even any photos or video footage of such a festive occasion.

"We last had the opportunity around here more than twenty-five years ago," recalled Ramallah resident Mustafa Massikr, 55. "I remember when those two Israelis were taken to the police station, tortured, killed, cut open, and then thrown into the crowd. The atmosphere was electric. We tasted victory."

"This... this is crushing," he lamented.

The Yom Kippur service, described in the Biblical book of Leviticus, involves the "sending away" of a Billy goat over which the High Priest has recited a confession on behalf of the nation. The Mishnah, elaborating on the rite centuries later, describes how a man escorts the goat from Jerusalem's Temple Mount to a spot in the Judean Desert with a severe drop, and pushes the animal over the edge. The Mishnah asserts that the terrain would dismember the goat entirely before it came to a stop.

That technical detail had been enough to fill the wadis with spectators. Men stood on hoods. Boys held up phones. A few had brought bags, the same practical instinct that once sent people into the street below the Ramallah police station in October 2000, and that later sent people hunting through houses and a festival ground on October 7, 2023. Munich in 1972 had offered no cliff and no souvenir limbs either, only dead Jews and a story worth repeating. Today offered a cliff and, it turned out, a goat.

When the animal hit and came apart, the sound was correct. The object was not. A murmur moved through the crowd as someone shouted that it was the Azazel goat — the sins of Israel in livestock form, not an Israeli. Phones lowered. The bags stayed empty. No one rushed the rocks to claim a hoof or a length of hide. The difference, once named, was decisive. A Jew would have been an event. A goat was an errand.

Massikr watched the traffic begin to turn around. “In 2000 we had two,” he said. “On October 7 they had hundreds. What is there to take home?”

Several Palestinians nevertheless stayed behind to pick through the carcass, in case enough of the animal remained to copulate with.

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