Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Under the Ramallah Sun

There are always moments in time that stand out from the crowd of ordinary and mundane ones. September 11, 2001 is one. October 13, 2000 is a personal one for me. I was returning home with my children just as night fell. At the corner of Church and Gerrard Streets I glanced into the newspapers boxes while waiting for the light to change. The front picture of all the newspapers in the boxes showed this:





I was stopped in my tracks, literally rooted to the spot in disbelief to what I was seeing and reading. Two Israeli reservists' took a wrong turn on the highway and were lost October 12, 2000. They were stopped by the Palestinian Authority and taken to a police station in Ramallah. There they were interrogated and beaten.




A crowd gathered outside the police station chanting "Allah Akbur" and "Kill the Jews". The Palestinian Authority allowed one of the reservists to be thrown out of a two storey window to the chanting crowd below.




His body was stabbed countless times, eyes were gouged from his sockets, and his face was crushed by feet, fists and stones. The crowd literally disemboweled and dismembered his body. He was set on fire and dragged along the street as the crowd danced and cheered in the slaughter of this helpless man.

The Palestinian Authority managed to remove the other Israeli reservist to a nearby Jewish settlement where he died shortly after arrival. He too was stabbed, beaten and mutilated.

The reservists were not the only ones endangered that day. Photographers and journalists who had rushed to the scene were threatened and in at least one case beaten. The Palestinian Authority did not want pictures of what goes on under the Ramallah sun to ever see the light of day in the rest of the world.

The lynching of two Israeli reservists inside a Palestinian police station in October 2000 would change the rules of Western news reporting on Palestinian violence. Nasser Atta, a Palestinian producer with ABC, recalled on Ted Koppel's "Nightline" how his cameraman was beaten and his crew prevented from filming the grisly lynchings.(17)According to first-hand reports, Palestinian security forces also surrounded a Polish TV crew who were beaten and relieved of their tapes.(18) A foreign correspondent noted that in "post-Ramallah where all good will was lost, he would be a lot more sensitive about going places in the territories.

It was then, at that moment when I realized that Palestinian society had reached a rabid stage and there could be no peace, for how can there be peace when even the civil authority was guilty of participation in such barbarism? That day was a window into the Palestinian soul.

Ask yourself this: would you sleep safely and soundly in your bed at night knowing that your neighbors had participated in the stabbing, mutilating, gouging, disemboweling of a man because he was born to a different religion? Dreams of peace between these two distinct people can not be possible until the Palestinians decide to join the human race and acknowledge the humanity of their neighbors.

Yesef Avrahami
Vadim Novesche

In my house I will give them a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name which shall not perish.

Isaiah 56:5

3 comments:

The Tiger said...

Kate --

Sounds an awful lot like an incident in 1988, in Andersontown, Northern Ireland: two off-duty British soldiers got lost and drove into the way of a funeral procession. The crowd dragged them out of the car, beat them up, and killed them on the spot.

Apparently there was footage taken, and one of the soldiers had broken down and was crying for his mother as the crowd did that to him.

Crowds can do horrible things. (I think you can see where my sympathies lie, though, with the various ensigns I've flown on my website...)

K. Shoshana said...

Ben, I do see where you are going and I understand where your sympathies lie. No doubt the deaths in Northern Ireland were horrific (just the image of that poor solider crying out for his mother has my eye twitching) but I think the lynching of those IDF soldiers passed a bar - remember it was the civilian authority that first brutualized those soldiers before the PA gave only one of them up to the mercies of the crowd - one was saved for the PA's exclusive butchery and the PA is a heavily armed force. Their police stations function mostly as mini-armories.

The Tiger said...

True. The Republic of Ireland did not, for instance, kidnap British soldiers and turn them over to the Provos.