Scottish PSC calls on SUTR to withdraw its invitation to an Israel Apartheid group to join their anti-racist march in Glasgow
I am posting this in solidarity with the statement
put out by Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
At a demonstration organised in Glasgow next Saturday
March 17th amongst those invited to participate in the demonstration
is the Confederation of Friends of
Israel Scotland.There is
absolutely no excuse for marching alongside the supporters of Apartheid and the
invitation must be withdrawn.
There was a
time when people on the Left like the Socialist Workers Party, whose initiative
SUTR is, were ignorant of the racist and apartheid nature of Israel. That is no
longer true.There was a time when ‘socialist’
Zionists formed the main segment of the Zionist movement and were in government
in Israel and people were deceived as to their true record but they spoke the
language of the Left whilst engaging in ethnic cleansing.This is no longer true either.
Support for Israel
today means support for the gaoling of 17 year old Ahed Tamimi.It means support for house demolition,
imprisonment without trial,the theft of
land and water, the use of torture and a Jewish state which inherently and
institutionally discriminates against Palestinians and non-Jews.It means support at this very time for the deportation
of 40,000 Black African refugees from Israel because they are Black and not Jewish.This is unacceptable.
This
invitation by SUTR to a pro-Israeli group is a consequence of the inability of
the SWP to reconcile its anti-racism domestically with support for the Palestinians
and opposition to Zionism.The two exist
in separate and ideologically watertight compartments. They should ask
themselves why groups like the BNPmanage to combine anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial with adulation of Israel
and Zionism. The SWP is out of date.Virtually no fascist groups in Britain bar the National Front now
pretend to support the Palestinians.
Zionism is supported
by the far-Right internationally.Indeed
it is itself increasingly becoming part of that far-Right.It is no accident that far-Right governments
throughout Europe – from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Poland to Austrian
Vice-Chancellor Heinz Christian Strache – combined anti-Semitism and fascism with
support for the Israeli state.We have
the leaders of the alt-Right in the United States, from Steve Bannon to neo-Nazi
Richard Spencer declaring that they are White
Zionists.
Fascists and
racists today love the Israeli state because it is the very ethno-nationalist state
that they want to set up.Britain First, whose two leaders – Paul Golding
and Jayda Franzen – were yesterday gaoled
for racial harassment are overtly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist.Israel is seen by fascist and neo-Nazi groups
in Europe as the ideal anti-Muslim state. After all what is there not to like
about Israel if you are a White Supremacist?
This
decision, as Mick Napier says on the video, to march with this Zionist group is
an outrage. It is utterly shameful. If
SUTR persists in this folly then the Palestine Solidarity groups will be forced
to reconsider their links with them.In Brighton
PSC is affiliated to the group.
The fascist Britain First group combines virulent racism with support for Zionism
What is
particularly shameful is that this march is in commemoration of the massacre of
Black people protesting against the pass system in South Africa in Sharpeville on
March 21st 1960.Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories face a far more sophisticated and obtrusive pass
system operated by Israel with hundreds of checkpoints in the West Bank with
one entrance for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers.As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the winner of the
Nobel Peace Prize stated:
"I
have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children
by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all
black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted
by the security forces of the apartheid government."Jerusalem Post 10 March 2014.
What part of
the above statement does Stand Up to Racism not understand?Or is it only racism in Britain that they are
opposed to?
Tony
Greenstein
On International Women's Day Scottish PSC received
the following message from Nelson Mandela's daughter-in-law, Rayne Rose
Mandela, and her daughter Nodiyala, Nelson Mandela's granddaughter, from
Eastern Cape.
Message, 8
March 2018:
Greetings to those opposing racism in Scotland and around the world. The
worldwide demonstrations on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre should
oppose all racism that blight our planet, especially the brutal apartheid
system that still holds sway in Israel/Palestine.
International solidarity against the racist regime in South Africa played
a part in our struggle for liberation and we have a duty on this anniversary to
build another example of successful international solidarity for the
long-suffering Palestinian people.
"We say that the organisers have no mandate to violate and corrupt
this international commemoration. Scotland must not be the back door for
supporters of Israeli Apartheid to promote their racist segregation and ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian people. Were this effort to be successful it would
shame Scotland internationally and make Mandela Place a meaningless
relic."
No place
for organised supporters of apartheid on a demonstration against apartheid and
racism
The
demonstration organised for Glasgow on March 17th is one small part
of a UN International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
established to commemorate the massacre on 21st March 1960 of 69
peaceful demonstrators protesting against apartheid in Sharpeville, South
Africa. The UN states the commemoration is to demonstrate “solidarity with the
peoples struggling against racism and racial discrimination”.
The
Palestinian people suffer under an Israel apartheid system much worse than the
South African version.
Some
organisers of the Glasgow demonstration on March 17th, which is
promoted as part of the UN day of solidarity, are determined to allow onto this
march a group called Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland set up to
defend and support Israel’s apartheid system and its frequent massacres of
Palestinians.
We are
expected to commemorate the heroes and martyrs of the struggle against South African
apartheid by marching alongside the banners and flags of the defenders of
Israeli apartheid. Desmond Tutu and other South Africans have declared that the
horrors of South African apartheid were “a picnic” compared to what Israel is
doing to the Palestinians today.
Ronnie
Kasrils is a Jewish veteran of the ANC and was a Minister in the South African
Government from 2004-2008. At SPSC meetings in Scotland he developed his view
that “Any South African who goes to Palestine today and visits the West Bank
and Gaza, or Palestinians living in the State of Israel, come away shocked and,
shaking their heads saying ‘This is far worse than the apartheid we
knew’."
(Jewish)
co-author of the latest UN-commissioned report identifying Israel as an
apartheid state, Prof. Richard Falk, spoke at the 2017 SUTR demonstration on
behalf of SPSC and was warmly received. Now we are expected to welcome
defenders of the apartheid State on the 2018 demonstration.
We say
that the organisers have no mandate to violate and corrupt this international
commemoration. Scotland must not be the back door for supporters of Israeli
Apartheid to promote their racist segregation and ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian people. Were this effort to be successful it would shame Scotland
internationally and make Mandela Place a meaningless relic.
Statement from Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign on forthcoming
anti-racism demonstration, 19 February 2018 .
The Confederation of Friends of Israel in Scotland (COFIS) joined the 2017
Stand Up to Racism demonstration in Glasgow and a clutch of members marched for
some distance as part of that demonstration. They carried a banner of their
racist organisation and Israeli flags, causing offence and consternation to
many of those on the march.
COFIS works closely with the Israeli Embassy to close down public
discussion of Israeli crimes and to impede organising for the Palestinian-led
BDS movement, the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the
State of Israel until the crimes against the Palestinian people are ended.
COFIS opposes the demands of the Palestinian BDS Call: for Israel to
1. end the occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands and dismantle the Wall
2. recognise the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel
to full equality
3. respect, protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to
their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
COFIS defends and supports every Israeli war crime and crime against
humanity, including Israel's Operation Protective Edge of summer 2014 which
slaughtered over 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza. That indiscrinate mass killing led
the Scottish Government to call for an arms embargo againt Israel.
COFIS works to smear Palestine solidarity activists as racists for
opposition to the apartheid State of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine,
the theft of Palestinian land and water resources, the systematic demolition of
Palestinian homes, mass arrests and the killing of Palestinians purely on the
basis of their nationality.
Yet some continue to defend the right of COFIS to participate in
anti-racist marches despite COFIS' active defence of the state-enforced racism,
i.e. apartheid, under which the Palestinian people suffer.
Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign considers that this policy is
inherently wrong, but also that, if unopposed, it would greatly weaken the
struggle against the racism that blights Scottish society.
On any political demonstration it is never clear how many of those
positioned behind a specific banner are associated with it. Throughout the
world an Israeli flag is seen as a symbol of ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian people and the genocidal siege of the people of Gaza. Flying such a
symbol of apartheid on a demonstration makes it impossible for most
Palestinians and Lebanese, as well as many Scots to participate, for how can
Palestinians be expected to march behind the flag of the settlements which
steal their land, the military outposts which fire on their family and friends,
the checkpoints that creatively make their lives miserable, the symbol of a
government which is openly committed to completing their disposession and
copper-fastening their inferior status throughout the whole of Palestine.
Our solidarity with the Palestinian people and our opposition to the
forces that work to violate them has to extend to the streets of Scotland. A
people who suffer ritual humiliation from a rabble of Israeli soldiery at the
checkpoints that blight their lives should not be further humiliated in
Scotland by asking them to march alongside their violators and the repugnant
symbol of their violators.
Seeing the parallels between their own oppression and that of the
Palestinian people, anti-racist movements around the world such as Black Lives
Matter in the United States have enthusiastically integrated support for the
Palestinian freedom struggle into their official aims. Anti-racists in Scotland
should do no less.
Some few are afraid of being labelled 'anti-semtic' if they bar an
active campaign for Israeli apartheid from an anti-racist march, but this is
itself a racist position because it implies that all Jews are complicit in the
crimes of the State of Israel. SPSC rejects any notion of collective guilt and
insists that Scottish Jews are not to be held responsible for the crimes of the
State of Israel.
In any case, anyone who becomes actively involved in the struggle for
Palestinian freedom understands that malicious and false accusations of anti-semitism
follow as night follows day, and that the only way to avoid such
politically-driven smears is to scale down support for the Palestinian struggle
against Israeli apartheid.
Israeli flags commonly fly in the ranks of fascist marches in Scotland
and elsewhere; are we to have Israeli flags flying on both sides of racist and
anti-racist mobilisations? The proposal would be very strange.
Permitting Israeli flags and an active campaign on behalf of Israeli
apartheid onto anti-racism initiatives will divide and weaken any struggle
against racism.
We call upon SUTR and its affiliates to bar any group that exists to
defend state-enforced racism in Israel/Palestine as having no place among
anti-racist campaigns.
Is it
possible for the Israeli State and Army to Sink Any Lower than kidnapping an
injured child?
Muhammad Fadel Tamimi, 15, with his mother, at his home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Salah on 13 January. A month earlier an Israeli soldier shot at close range with a rubber-coated metal bullet causing serious head injuries. https://youtu.be/13sj8tTAkVk
Heidi LevineSipa Press
It
is a story which is almost unbelievable, not least because of the stupidity of
the Israeli army and the Head of the Occupation, General Yoav Mordechai.
Mohammed
Tamimi was shot at point-blank range with a rubber bullet at the end of the
December.The would be murderers were
the Israeli army.It was this incident
which provoked his cousin, Ahed Tamimi to slap the Israeli soldiers who invaded
the grounds of her house.One of these
soldiers was believed to be the man who nearly killed her cousin.
Fast
forward to Monday of this week and a posse of Israeli soldiers raids Nabi Saleh
and arrest 10 people, of whom 6 are children including Mohammad Tamimi.
Despite
having been severely injured and awaiting surgery, these animals roused
Mohammad from his bed and kidnapped him.Then in accordance with their normal racist routines, Mohammad was
interrogated without, of course a lawyer or parent present.A practice which is never extended to Jewish
children but which the media in this country does not, of course report.
What
happened next is surreal.Frightened,
fearful and no doubt anxious as to when he was going home and anxious about the
fact that he was still very ill, Mohammad was ‘persuaded’ to agree to the
pathetic lie that was put to him that he wasn’t shot but fell off his
bike!The fact that a bullet was taken
from his skull and that there are X-ray photographs to prove it, was
ignored.This pathetic Zio story has
been debunked by Sarit Michaeli of Israel’s human rights group Btselem who
rightly called it Orwellian.
The
idea that Mohammad fell off his bike is easily disprovable with medical evidence.When he was released Mohammad confirmed that
the only reason he agreed with the Zionist version was out of fear.However the reason why Israel’s soldiers engaged in
this macabre game was to ‘prove’ to its far-Right constituency that all the
reasons given for his cousin Ahed’s slapping of a soldier were a lie.And of course Israel’s media, bar Ha’aretz,
played along with this.
The
fact that Israel refuses to record its interrogations of children or indeed
adult prisoners gives the lie to the allegations made by Israeli army
commander, General Mordechai.
It
is also clear that the campaign to free Ahed Tamimi has severely embarrassed
the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv.Despite
the attempts to dismiss her as a good actor, as a girl who is older than her ‘official’
age or not part of a proper family, the fact is that the campaign has achieved
massive support.
The
reaction of the Israeli army is an example of the observation that military might
and stupidity exist in inverse ratio to each other.
However you will be pleased to hear that in the case of a 17 year old Jewish settler living in Geulat Zion that matters were entirely different. For being locked up for one night and being placed in handcuffs he was awarded 6,500 shekels (nearly £2,000). Ahed Tamimi and indeed most Palestinian children are handcuffed and indeed shackled.
When Ahed was brought before the military judge and asked how she struck the soldier she replied that if they took handcuffs of she would show them!
It is nice to know that in the Jewish state that Jewish children are given such consideration and preference. Almost heart warming.
Muhammad Fadel Tamimi, 15, with his mother, at his home in the occupied
West Bank village of Nabi Salah on 13 January. A month earlier an Israeli
soldier shot at close range with a rubber-coated metal bullet causing serious
head injuries.
One of the classic warning signs of abuse is when a child shows a
pattern of injuries, but the abuser forces the victim to go along with cover
stories claiming the victim simply had a series of unfortunate accidents.
Israel, as a serial and systematic abuser, is once again demonstrating
how shameless it is in its attempts to cover up its horrifying mistreatment of
Palestinian children and to blame child victims for its own crimes.
On 15 December, in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, an Israeli
occupation soldier shot
Muhammad Fadel Tamimi with a rubber-coated metal bullet at close range,
causing devastating head injuries.
Photos of the 15-year-old have circulated around the world showing the
effect of having one-third of his skull removed during life-saving surgery.
While he awaits restorative surgery he remains very vulnerable, and faces a
long recovery.
His case has been all the more embarrassing to Israel because he is the
cousin of Ahed Tamimi,
the 17-year-old who has been in prison for two months and is being subjected to
a military
trial in an Israeli kangaroo court for slapping and shoving two heavily
armed occupation soldiers shortly after Muhammad was shot.
In the predawn hours of Monday, Israeli occupation forces raided
Nabi Saleh and arrested 10 people, including six children. One of them was
Muhammad Fadel Tamimi.
They took him away for interrogation and released him hours later
leaving observers once again stunned at Israel’s callousness and cruelty.
It was obviously a carefully planned operation, as the newspaper Haaretznoted
that the detention of the severely injured child “was approved by a military physician.”
Yet all became clear Monday night, when Yoav Mordechai,
the general who runs COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military
occupation, posted
on Facebook what he clearly thought would be the revelation to absolve
Israel of its crimes against Muhammad.
And it fit the classic pattern of the serial abuser. According
to Mordechai, the boy had not been shot in the head after all, but had
merely fallen off his bike.
“What is the
truth regarding Muhammad Tamimi?” Mordechai wrote. “Wonder of wonders! Today the boy himself confessed in front of the
police and in front of COGAT representatives that in December his skull was
injured when he was riding his bicycle and fell off it and hit his head on the
handlebars.”
Mordechai followed this up by claiming that the “culture of lies and incitement continues among the children and adults
of the Tamimi family.”
His post was accompanied with a graphic with the words “fake news” emblazoned across it in
Arabic.
Mordechai, it should be noted, works closely with the Palestinian
Authority – collaboration between occupier and occupied that is actively
promoted by UN officials.
“Orwellian”
Human rights defenders and journalists were quick to debunk Mordechai’s
outlandish story.
Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem described
Mordechai’s claim that the boy merely “fell
off his bike” as Orwellian.
What was stunning, she said is “not
how big a lie it is” but that “such
easily debunked lies show the only target audience is [the] Israeli right.”
Along with this denunciation, Michaeli tweeted copies of a medical
report from the hospital that had performed the emergency “bullet removal” surgery from Muhammad Tamimi’s head.
Haaretznoted
that “the version of events described by
Mordechai does not coincide [with] eyewitness accounts obtained by Haaretz, according to which the day
Tamimi was injured, IDF [Israeli army] forces were firing at Palestinians who
were throwing stones, with the aim of dispersing them.”
“Tamimi, witnesses said, was
standing on a ladder behind a wall and was hit in the head the moment he raised
it above the ledge,” the newspaper added.
It also published photos of the bullet removed in the surgery and of a
CT scan showing it lodged inside Muhammad’s head.
The boy himself gave a similar account in this video published by Haaretz
in early January:
And Defense for Children International-Palestine reported
days after the shooting, citing an eyewitness, that “Israeli forces shot Muhammad Tamimi, 15, with a rubber-coated metal
bullet shortly after clashes had ended.”
“According to the eyewitness,
Israeli forces appeared to have exited the area around 4 pm when an Israeli
soldier shot Muhammad in the face with a rubber-coated metal bullet at close
range,” the group stated.
“He
[Muhammad] was laying on the ground. His face and clothes were covered in
blood,” the eyewitness said.
The doctor who treated Muhammad told Defense for Children
International-Palestine that the boy “underwent
two operations to remove the rubber-coated metal bullet, which lodged in the
back of his skull and caused severe bleeding in his brain.”
Coercing a frightened boy
A journalist for the French news agency AFP reported on Tuesday that Muhammad
Tamimi “confirmed,” that following
his nighttime arrest he told the army he had had a bike accident, “but said he lied to avoid jail for
protesting.”
Gaby Lasky, a lawyer who defends members of the Tamimi family, accused
COGAT head Mordechai of “cynically
abusing” a “miserable, made-to-order”
investigation that induced “a frightened
child [to] lie during the interrogation.”
Lasky confirmed to The Electronic Intifada that Muhammad was
interrogated without a lawyer or a parent present, one of many
abusive practices Israel uses against detained Palestinian children to
coerce confessions.
B’Tselem’s Michaeli also quipped that Muhammad Tamimi is “the only Palestinian boy in history who
denied throwing stones and was believed [by] the Israeli army.”
Israeli conspiracy theories
All this evidence will not convince the Israeli army, nor Israel’s most
fanatical supporters; the goal of sending soldiers to arrest a badly injured
child in the middle of the night and then having a general post his “confession” on Facebook is not to seek
the truth but to sow doubt.
And this is where the pattern comes in: Israel’s obfuscation, lies and
denials are legion, but it suffices to point to just a few.
B’Tselem’s Michaeli recalled another instance of Israel’s Orwellian
lies: Beitunia, 2014.
Both were shot
dead in cold blood the same day and in circumstances where they posed no
conceivable threat to anyone – killings that were caught on video.
After the shootings, Israel’s spin doctors were out spreading their
Orwellian lies.
Michael Oren, now a deputy minister in the Israeli government, went
on CNN to claim that the two boys shot dead on 15 May 2014 might not even
be dead.
In order to cast doubt, he cited the videotaped shooting of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura
in Gaza in 2000 at the outset of the second intifada, which generated worldwide
outrage.
Oren recycled the far-right conspiracy theory that the shooting
had been staged, even questioning whether the child “was shot at all.”
Israel also first denied live
ammunition had been used in the Nakba Day killings but when the evidence could
not be buried it finally indicted one of its occupation soldiers, Ben Dery,
with manslaughter for killing Nuwara.
Though Dery’s indictment was a rare instance of an Israeli having to
answer for harming a Palestinian, the soldier has been offered a plea which
will reportedly
get him a “light punishment.”
No one has been charged in the killing of Abu al-Thahir.
And it’s hardly surprising to see that Oren quickly took to Twitter to
promote Mordechai’s claim that Muhammad Tamimi just fell off his bike:
Peter Lerner, a former Israeli military spokesperson, also promoted the
claim as an example of “Pallywood” –
a term anti-Palestinian conspiracy theorists use to describe what they imagine
is an an organized Palestinian effort to fake human rights abuses to embarrass
Israel:
Israel won’t listen to words
B’Tselem’s Michaeli made an astute observation that Mordechai’s
fabrications are intended solely for the consumption of the Israeli right.
That’s an indication that Israel understands that it is badly losing
support among international audiences who care about human rights.
To sustain the level of oppression that Palestinians face, Israel needs
to constantly convince its “home front” that it is in the right, that its
soldiers are doing good and that Palestinians are uncivilized beasts who never
really suffer, but only lie and fabricate to harm the image of Israel’s “most
moral army in the world.”
And on the world stage, Israel is ever more reliant on alliances
with a global far-right that is eager to lap up such lies, just as it
shares Israel’s rampant Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia.
The message for anyone who cares about human rights is very clear: an
Israel this unhinged and brazen doesn’t care about what human rights groups say
in their meticulous reports, and is not bothered by the timid bleatings of
European Union and UN officials.
Israel only cares what people do, so the answer to this outrage must be
more efforts to isolate this regime and make it pay a price through boycotts,
divestment and sanctions.
The teen, who spent a night behind
bars after he was detained at a West Bank outpost that had been closed off by
the military, will receive $1,869 in compensation
The illegal West Bank outpost of Geulat Zion where the teen in question was detained after reportedly trespassing on a closed-off military area.\ Moti Milrod
The
Judea and Samaria Police were ordered to pay 6,500 shekels ($1,869) to a 17-year-old settler who was kept in a lockup overnight and brought
to court in handcuffs unnecessarily.
The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court criticized the police for letting the
youth sleep in the police lock-up and noted that bringing the youth to court in
handcuffs was unlawful.
The teenager was arrested in June 2016 at the Geulat Zion outpost, considered to be one of the most extreme
in the West Bank, on grounds he had violated a military order closing off the
area. Geulat Zion is not a permanent community, as the authorities periodically
remove the small groups of settlers who set up camp on the hill. The outpost is
now located near the site where the new settlement of Amihai is being built for
the families evacuated from Amona last year.
Police planned to release the youth with restrictions the day after his
arrest, and left him to sleep in the jail cell. Police also planned to ask the
court to keep him away from Geulat Zion for 180 days. The following day, he was
brought to the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court in handcuffs.
Court registrar Judge Ofir Yehezkel wrote in his ruling that the arrest
itself was legal. “The dispute is over whether it was possible to release the
plaintiff when his questioning was over at night, or whether the defendant
acted properly by keeping him detained. Regarding this dispute, I accept the
plaintiff’s position.”
The court explained, “Based on case law, it is not proper to delay the
release of a detainee that the police believe should be released with
conditions, simply because the conditions at issue are the type that must be
determined by a judge. In such cases, imposing the restrictions that are within
the authority of a police officer is sufficient and after the release, if
needed, there can be a request to impose more stringent conditions that will be
discussed before a judge.” With regard to the police intention to ask that the
youth stay away from the area for half a year, the court said this wasn’t
sufficient grounds for leaving him in the cell.
The judge also expressed annoyance that the officer who made the
decision to keep the youth overnight hadn’t even testified
in court. “There was reason to expect him to appear to give testimony, to
explain his considerations and be questioned about them,” the judge wrote.
The court was also critical of the decision to bring the youth to court
in handcuffs. “People who constitute part of the general public circulate in
the halls of the courthouse and are liable to see the prisoner while he is
handcuffed,” Yehezkel wrote. “The courthouse is defined as a public place in
various pieces of legislation. I believe that the court should also be seen as
a public place for the purposes of the Youth Law and the Detention Law, and police
procedures cannot contradict this.
“Moreover, the police’s own regulations state that in general one does
not restrain minors while in detention unless they are acting wildly,” he
added. As a result, the judge ordered police to pay the youth 6,500 shekels.
The youth’s attorney, Menashe Yado of the right-wing legal aid
organization Honenu, said he hoped the ruling “will penetrate and lead to an
internalization of norms of fair police conduct toward Jewish youths in Judea
and Samaria.” There was no comment from the police
COGAT chief Yoav Mordechai wants us to believe that friends, relatives,
doctors and left-wing activists cooked up a huge lie about Mohammed Tamimi. But
he was just telling investigators what they wanted to hear
Mohammed Tamimi, at home in Nabi Saleh, January 2018.\ Alex Levac
Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the coordinator of government activities in
the territories, expects us to believe that tens of Palestinians and a few
Israelis conspired to concoct a huge lie in order to slander the Israel
Defense Forces.
According to him, the liar is not only 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi. The
liars are also his parents, members of his extended family in the village of
Nabi Saleh, and friends – including Israeli leftist activist Jonathan Pollak.
The latter were with Tamimi when he climbed a ladder on December 15 to see what the soldiers,
ensconced in an empty house in his village, were up to. The teen was shot in
the head and fell to the ground in a puddle of his own blood.
In his Facebook post on Tuesday, Mordechai claims, in
effect, that the Palestinians are stupid because so many of them collaborated
in creating a lie that is so very easy to expose. If indeed there was a lie.
Maj. Gen. Mordechai. Claims, in effect, that the Palestinians are stupid because so many of them collaborated in creating a lie that is so very easy to expose. IDF Spokesman's Office
He is relying on things Tamimi told his police interrogators on Monday,
just hours after a large military force burst into Nabi Saleh and into his
home, before dawn, rousing him from his sleep and arresting him. Five other
minors and five adults were arrested along with him, under similar conditions.
Still in the dark, half asleep and shaken, surrounded by rifles pointing
at him, with air reeking of tear gas and the disgusting smell of the
skunk-water sprayed by the troops – Mohammed Tamimi was taken in for
interrogation. It is easy to guess what went through the mind of the wounded
boy, who is slated to undergo yet another operation to reconstruct his skull in
the coming weeks.
He must have been thinking: Perhaps I'll be held under arrest for many
weeks. Perhaps my medical condition will get worse. Perhaps I won't even be
released before going into surgery.
Tamimi told the investigators and representatives of the Civil
Administration Coordination and Liaison Office, who for some reason made a
point of being present, what they wanted to hear: that he was injured when he
fell off his bike.
The security forces carry out hundreds of arrests and interrogations every week in Jerusalem and the
West Bank. No one disputes the fact that one of their aims is to expose those
who plan or carry out armed attacks. A second aim is to gather information,
even of the most innocent sort, about as many people as possible and about
social and political activities. Very banal, sometimes even embarrassing,
information is extracted – even years later and under unexpected circumstances:
when a person travels abroad, or when someone applies for an entry permit into
Israel or for a residency permit for non-Palestinian spouse.
A third aim (though not necessarily the third most important) is to
quash popular activity against the occupation, of which the village of Nabi
Saleh has become a symbol. Palestinians are forbidden to demonstrate their
resistance to the occupation, in any manner.
One of the ways of deterring individuals who may be potential
participants in popular struggles is to wreak serious harm on people who are
already taking part in them – by means ranging from injuring to killing; to
detention under conditions harsher than those encountered by graft suspect Nir
Hefetz; sleep deprivation; painful handcuffing; humiliating interrogations;
ridiculous accusations like those based on "evidence" like empty
tear-gas cannisters or visits to book exhibitions; administrative detentions
(arrest without charges being filed); arrest until the conclusion of
proceedings; and exorbitant fines.
Mass arrests, interrogations and collecting of information – these are
an integral part of the control Israel wields over the Palestinians. Many of
the arrests are another means whereby Israel attempts, systematically, to
undermine and unravel the Palestinian social fabric in order to weaken its
ability to withstand and defy the occupation.
When the detainees are minors, their jailers have a greater ability –
with the help of a few slaps, painful positions during questioning and
psychological pressure – to extract false incriminations and exaggerated,
boastful descriptions of events from them. It is easy to manipulate and break
them.
Among themselves the Palestinians are debating participation of minors
in protest activities against the occupation. The ethos of the struggle is dear
to them, and the loathing of the occupation runs too deep for this debate to be
conducted in public, but the high price that is being paid by minors and their
families is clear to everyone.
It is too early to say if a post like Yoav Mordechai’s will encourage
the debate and whether it will be taken into the public domain or strengthen
the position of those who say that Israel stops at nothing in order to oppress
and therefore youngsters should not be denied their right to revolt.
In the middle of the night on Monday, around 3 a.m., the
Israeli military raided the central occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh in
full force, a common occurrence for the village’s internationally-recognized
residents, the Tamimi family, who have seen several family members — a large
portion of them minors — arrested from the village in the past few months.
On Monday alone, Israeli forces detained 10 members of the
extended Tamimi family, including five minors between the ages of 14-17, a
19-year-old, and the rest between the rest between 21 and 29 years of age,
according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
Among the detainees was 15-year-old
Muhammad Tamimi, who is scheduled to have reconstructive surgery on his
skull on March 5th. Muhammad was released later Monday afternoon.
Israeli soldiers had shot Muhammad in the face with a
rubber-coated steel bullet in December, during demonstrations in Nabi Saleh
against US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel.
Moments after Muhammad was shot, his then 16-year-old cousin
Ahed learned of his injury as Israeli soldiers continued to surround the
village, including her family home.
It was then that Ahed was filmed kicking and slapping an
armed Israeli soldier who had encroached on her family’s property — an incident
she would be detained for days later, along with her mother and cousin.
Ahed, who spent her 17th birthday in Israeli prison, is now
being prosecuted behind closed doors in an Israeli military court that has a
conviction rate of over 99 percent.
After spending days in a coma and undergoing several
life-saving surgeries, Muhammad — who has been injured by Israeli forces
before, and was previously detained when he was 13 — was released back home to
Nabi Saleh with half of his skull missing.
Over the course of the two months since Muhammad’s injury and
Ahed’s detention, the extended Tamimi family of Nabi Saleh and its twin village
Deir Nitham have seen over a dozen of their relatives arrested, at least three
put on trial in military court, and one — 16-year-old Musaab Tamimi of Deir
Nitham — shot and killed by Israeli forces.
Campaign of Vengeance
By Monday afternoon, Muhammad had been released, while the
nine others who were arrested remained in Israeli custody, according to Bassem
Tamimi, the father of Ahed Tamimi.
Despite being released, Bassem told Mondoweiss that
the fact that Muhammad was even arrested in the first place is indicative of
Israel’s disregard for basic human rights.
“Muhammad is critically
injured because of the occupation, and they put his life in even more danger
last night,” Bassem said, adding “this
just proves they don’t care about any international opinion, human rights or
international law.”
“Every international
institution that deals with the Palestinians and human rights issues are
responsible for the lives of our children and for the suffering of the Tamimi
family and Nabi Saleh village,” Bassem said.
The Tamimi’s relatives in Deir Nitham expressed
similar sentiments following the killing of their son Musaab in January,
saying that days after Ahed’s arrest, the people of the village were threatened
by Israeli soldiers who told them “The
day will come when you wish you are not a Tamimi.”
“We have become a
symbol of nonviolent resistance, and they [Israel] don’t want the voice of
Palestine to be heard from anywhere or anyone,” Bassem said, “who knows what
they will do next.”
International campaign for Ahed’s release continues
The Tamimi family of Nabi Saleh is well known internationally
for their activism against the Israeli occupation, which maintains a heavy,
near-constant presence in their village.
Ahed is famous across Palestine and the Arab world for videos
of her, since her childhood, defiantly resisting Israeli soldiers who clash
with Palestinians in her village nearly every week.
Two years ago, her family made headlines when an Israeli
soldier violently attempted to arrest her younger brother, who had one arm in a
cast at the time. Ahed and her mother manager to pull the soldier of her
brother and free him.
Since her arrest in December, Ahed has become the subject of
dozens of solidarity campaigns across the world demanding her release from
Israeli prison, and an end to Israeli detention of Palestinian children.
As Ahed and her mother Nariman — who was arrested after her
daughter — are being prosecuted behind closed doors, international rights
groups such as Amnesty International have called
for their immediate release, saying that Ahed’s detention “is a desperate attempt to intimidate
Palestinian children who dare to stand up to repression by occupying forces.”
The group highlighted that under the Convention on the Rights
of the Child, to which Israel is a state party, “the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child must be used only as
a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time,”
adding that Ahed is currently facing up to 10 years in prison
According to prisoners rights group Addameer, as of January
2018, there were 330 Palestinian children being held in Israeli prison.
Meanwhile, Bassem, who has been denied permission to visit
Ahed in prison, waits until the next court date to catch a glimpse of his
daughter.
