As of Tuesday morning, Amazon had more than 100 reviews of the costume, with a lot of them giving the item one star and highlighting their views of Israeli military practices.
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More than 40 Palestinians have died in unrest in Israel and the Palestinian territories this month, many killed carrying out attacks on Israelis.
The costumes are just a few that had drawn criticism this Halloween season.
Though Amazon does include military-themed costumes for girls, they tend to lean into gender stereotypes such as “cutie cadet” or “major flirt”. “The model boy used to promote this costume is probably the age of my niece, whose father Israeli soldiers murdered in Gaza in 2014 when they destroyed our family home”. The outfit has a two-star rating and has attracted a slew of negative remarks on the website branding it “disgusting”. EBay said that it had withdrawn the nose from its listings.
Walmart took down the page for a children’s Israeli soldier Halloween costume after outrage from the Arab American community and Palestinian solidarity activists.
“A children’s costume depicting a symbol of fear, violence and a long history of dispossession is no laughing matter”, the letter reads.
ADC also denounced the sale of “a variety of “Arab” costumes, which it said “can lead to hate crimes against Arab-Americans”.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American- Islamic Relations (CAIR) told AFP that it was an annual problem.
Every year, racist anti-Arab costumes find their way into the marketplace in America that are sold to children to use for the annual holiday celebration of Halloween.
One of those videos, reposted by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, shows Israeli soldiers violently beating and wrongfully arresting a Palestinian youth in the West Bank. “But for whatever group the costume is imitating, it becomes the question of ‘what’s amusing about me being me?'” Manza said.
The controversial costume, which has since been removed from the store’s website, was on sale for $27.44 and included a shirt, belt, hat and trousers.
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The outcry comes amid escalating violence in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians.
