I’ve been trying to write for some days now, if only for the therapeutic benefits. But knowing, at the same time, that no words can describe the experience.
Part of the difficulty comes from that unbearable feeling of dissonance. A feeling that makes it impossible to really explain what happened there. What the hell happened there..? The playback is disjointed. Single images. Isolated moments.
But since I’m back there’s that horrible weight on my chest, a burst of tears from time to time and a huge feeling of rage and frustration.
Rewind. We have just arrived and we’re getting out of the car. A friend runs towards us. She says hysterical “We need to get out of here. Now. Fast. They are here to kill”. She is crying.
From this point on, it’s just fractions of memory: Someone passes by me. His face covered in blood. Another walks by trying to shelter a young woman whose shirt was completely torn by the mob. Hysteria is everywhere. “Back off”, “Get out of here”. People scream. Cry. Bleed
Hooligans are all around us. Murder in their eyes. Who’s a police officer? Who’s a settler here? They all look the same. What’s going on?
Now we back off. Want to get away. But they are after us and they are not going to stop. “Traitor”. “Whore”. “Arab-anal-fucker”. “Come, come, I’ll fuck ya”. I want to get away but too scared to run. I back off, slowly, my back to the footpath, face to the pack. Too scared to turn my back to them. But then someone shouts at me “turn around” and I instinctively abide. Big mistake. Never turn your back on your enemy. Two kicks to the sheens and I’m face down on the ground. “Fall, you dirty bitch, fall!” The bark jubilantly. I get up quickly and continue to walk. A little faster this time. Still, too scared to run.
How can one even begin to convey this experience? How to explain that there was no one to turn to for help? No one coming to rescue and, worse, no buffer between sanity and its dreadful absence. How can you articulate this boundless hatred? The carnage? The fact that some of the attackers were out of uniform policemen? And the fact that their colleagues, that arrived conveniently late, never came to help us but rather to assist them?
Last Friday I saw fascism in its full glory. Non-apologetic. Kicking. Pushing. Beating and shouting abuse. Something you can’t ignore or confuse. It was there, it was loud and it was clear: “I am Fascism. And you will die!”
Dissonance. So it started and so it ended. We were out of the immediate danger zone. Trying to calm down, counting the injured. Worried about the still missing. Assessing damages – broken cameras, vehicles left behind by the settlements, broken windshield, smashed spectacles, mobiles etc.
A police vehicle arrives. “This is an illegal gathering and you are on army territory” The commander announces. “You have 15 minutes to clear out!”
The media went silent. The version that was released described us as a bunch of violent and bored law breakers. And that was the end of that. No one cares.
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The Anatot mob attacks: a watershed moment for Israeli democracy
Incidents in Anatot, September 30, 2011: updates, videos, and call to action!
The Settlement of Anatot – Background to Last Week’s Mob Attack | By Dror Etkes
Israel police turned a blind eye to a lynching | Eyal Raz
Where Solidarity Ends | Sara Benninga
The Ugly Face of Occupation | Yael Kenan
Police Allow Israeli Settlers To Attack And Beat Israeli And Palestinian Activists
Policeman identified among settlers who attacked activists
23 Israelis and Palestinians injured in settler attack outside Jerusalem
