Mohammed El-Kurd, the young Palestinian poet and activist made famous because his home near Jerusalem was stolen by a guy from Long Island who looks like a slightly more unkempt Captain Caveman, recently found himself in yet another scandal. (Any vocal Palestinian with name recognition is destined to live a scandalous existence.)
During an Israeli Apartheid Week event at Duke University, somebody asked what the slogan “from the river to the sea” means for Israeli Jews. El-Kurd reportedly answered, “I don’t care. I truly, sincerely don’t give a f….” The audience “roared its approval.”
Unsurprisingly, accounts of this exchange (among others) stirred vigorous reaction. Legions of people accused El-Kurd of the usual stuff: terrorism blah blah blah antisemitism yada yada yada promoting violence dum dum dum. Legions of people also came to El-Kurd’s defense, sometimes philosophically, sometimes on principle.
Let’s leave aside the exact wording of the exchange, which is at least partly disputed. I’m not offering a report on events at Duke University that evening and El-Kurd has proved incredibly capable of speaking for himself.
Suppose that El-Kurd did say what was attributed to him. It might seem like a blithe or callous reaction, but in reality a vital sensibility informed his recalcitrance. Many of us who speak to U.S. audiences about Palestine have almost certainly wanted to say something similar during a Q&A. I’ve seen it happen on at least a few occasions.
The question “but what about the Israelis?” presents itself as innocent, perhaps even crucial, but its underlying rhetoric is insidious. Anyone with experience among the colonized will understand why: it transforms discussion of Palestine into a referendum on Israel’s primacy, which again puts the Palestinian in a subordinate position. It informs the audience that Zionism must be affirmed before the Palestinian can speak of liberation.
A dismissive response to that question is less a statement of indifference about the fate of Israeli Jews than an unwillingness to defer analysis of Palestine’s national question. It indicates that the speaker will not prioritize the settler’s comfort at the expense of the native’s well-being. It also refuses to validate the imagined violence of the native. The dismissive response is so controversial in part because it demands a kind of introspection and humility the settler is ill-equipped to practice.
The dismissiveness suggests that no easy answer is on offer. Decolonization isn’t meant to be leisurely. It’s not a riddle with a precise solution. It portends serious changes that beneficiaries of Zionism are loath to acknowledge. It will permanently alter the relationship between Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab. It won’t be “peaceful” as imagined by liberals of the dominant culture. But it does aim to create a world far better than the one brought about by colonization.
The settler’s insecurity is not equivalent to the native’s liberation. The two phenomena needn’t be discussed in tandem, as if a secure colonizer is more apt to good behavior. We cannot arrive at the problem of Palestinian dispossession—never mind a solution—by humoring the same old majoritarian vanity. Certain questions, like the one at Duke, tacitly stipulate that the settler is unwilling to sacrifice any meaningful advantage in order to make the native’s life better.
Palestinians in North America are constantly asked to placate and appease the settler. Even if we wanted to, it’s an impossible task. Nothing we say will satisfy them. Without drawing a clear line, they’ll have us hemming and hawing until we promise to go away altogether.
We shouldn’t overlook the environment in which these exchanges occur. Palestinian speakers regularly suffer hostility in the leadup to their events without a scintilla of concern from those demanding security for Israelis. (You can bet that anyone who asks about the future of Israeli Jews was complaining to university officials a few days earlier.) Local Zionist groups campaign to prevent Palestinian guests from speaking. Their campaigns often go national and so Palestinian speakers will have been defamed across multiple platforms before even hitting the dais. (This is certainly true of El-Kurd.) The power imbalance is severe and so the Palestinian speaker might want to be assured of the Zionist’s good intentions before addressing hypothetical dangers.
We can’t know exactly what El-Kurd meant with his response, but it’s not difficult to understand his motivation: he was there to talk about Palestine, not to validate tired acts of Zionist projection. Maybe he didn’t want to address the topic in that particular moment, in front of that particular audience. Maybe he was upset at being asked to assure the safety of the same people determined to make his life miserable. Maybe he was saying that he truly, sincerely doesn’t give a fuck about the approval of white Americans. And maybe, just maybe, there was an element of requital in his answer: here, have a bit of that anxiety you force us to endure every waking moment.
Don’t misunderstand the episode at Duke: Palestinians are always up for a good debate. It’s an activity at which we excel. We have no need of defamation and snitching. The facts are at our disposal. We are happy to talk. We are accustomed to telling stories in unfriendly settings. Just don’t ask us to guarantee the settler’s peace of mind when we know damn well that it can be accomplished only by our disappearance.
What’s remarkable about Mohammed El-Kurd is that he is such a beautiful, sensitive poet, despite the fact that settlers have stolen half of his family home, and he has endured a lifetime of abuse from Israeli police, military and settlers — so he can tell it like it is to deluded American Jews, while at the same time retaining his humanity: https://themarkaz.org/poetry-mohammed-el-kurds-rifqa-reviewed/
I never ceased to be amazed at the idiots and trolls the Internet spits out at every turn.
My simple answer to similar questions: “Cf. South Africa today.”
Anti-Palestinians should be commended for their honesty.
Back in the day, say 5-10 years ago, anti-Palestinians disqualified BDS because of some bad actors who also backed BDS. No matter how many times Omar Barghouti denounced those claiming to speak in his name, BDS was in the wrong. (The same standard was never applied by the same people to their own Zionism: even though, Israeli Zionism is dominated by unabashedly racist settlers, the same American liberal Zionists who disqualified BDS on these grounds had no problem holding on to their own Zionism.)
But now, the anti-Palestinians have come out with their honest position: the Palestinians have no voice at all. It doesn’t matter what they say or what they mean. All that is irrelevant. The only relevant question is: “how do the Israelis hear what you say?”
Flippancy, satire, repudiation, ignoring are the only possible responses to such hypocritical attempts at silencing.
Back in the day, pro-Israelis disqualified BDS because it is inherently antisemitic. Omar Barghouti promoted antisemitism. Even Norman Finkelstein, no friend of Israel, condemned BDS as antisemitic, calling for the destruction of Israel as its main goal.
Israel Zionism is dominated by Israeli Jews, many, certainly not most, are those living in the disputed territories. Are they racist? They are as racist as their Palestinian Arab counterparts.
Palestinian Arabs have a voice. One third of them applauded the beheading of a baby because he was a Jew in a crib in the disputed territories.
Who is Rabbi Michael Davis? He is a radical “as a Jew” who pontificates on the website of the antisemitic MondoWeiss propaganda-zine. These are his bitter words:
“The Jewish communal reality is that all the members of Jewish congregations across the world, Zionists and non-Zionists alike, adhere to the uniform code of silencing: “Thou Shalt not oppose Israel’s War on the Palestinians in the Jewish Community”. Jews are allowed to question Israel privately but are required to remain silent in public, Jewish spaces. That’s the price of admittance that even non-Zionists must pay to be included in a Jewish congregation. Self-censorship is not sufficient. In addition to self-censorship, members are required to join in enforcing that censorship on all others.”
Typical BS lying and whining from an “as a Jew.”
fyi: I’ve put Sigman’s comments in the trash and that’s where they’ll continue to go. He long ago crossed the line from trolling to outright racism (which has been getting more and more vicious). Can’t have that around here. Too many Palestinians like to drop in–Steve
Thank you for no longer allowing that grotesque person to take up bandwidth on your site.
This was the right call, as reading Jack’s vicious and racist hasbara is quite cumbersome. However, I will miss the entertainment of reading one of your articles and then seeing Jack’s assholery and general shittiness prove the literal point you just made in said article. Not enough to think he should still have the privilege to comment here, though.
Yeah it had long ago ceased to be any kind of cute and was moving in an extremely ugly direction–Steve
Ignorance at its finest. He’s been indoctrinated to the hilt! No common sense, no knowledge, brainwashed, blind to all facts
I too am glad to see Sigman gone. It was getting to the point there was more of Jack than of Steve!
Thanks
So, here’s the thing. Contra the constant rhetoric from the Palestinian resistance factions, most Israeli Jews are living exactly where they were born and raised – they’re not dual nationals or “settlers” unless you define “settler” as some kind of pseudo-racial category. It doesn’t matter how little Mohammed el-Kurd cares about their well-being; they’re not going to “go back to where they came from” because they ARE where they came from. And there’s no evidence that they would be any more amenable to forced displacement/ethnic cleansing than Palestinians are currently.
That’s the fundamental injustice of Palestinian “resistance operations” against Israeli civilians. If you stab a random Jewish woman in Jerusalem, you’re not “resisting” the Israeli state or Israeli oppression; you’re resisting the presence of Jews in Palestine. If Mohammed wants to be an advocate for the Palestinian cause in the West, he’s going to have to address this eventually – and “fuck ’em” is just not a viable response. He’s in a difficult situation re. Hamas et al. because if he condones or justifies their rhetoric or tactics, he looks like a ghoul to his Western audience. If he condemns, though, he’s almost certain to be denounced as a traitor/sellout back home. So far he has adopted a posture of strategic silence regarding the less palatable facets of Palestinian resistance, but I don’t know how long he can keep that up.
Hamas do not represent all Palestinians. You have to bear in mind that they were propped up by Israel to divide and conquer. Yes settlers are East European squatters. Yes, they should go back to Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine where they originally belong. I would like to see some DNA analysis to prove your point sweetheart? It would be useful if you can produce some? FYI I am Palestinian Christian with Jewish roots, does that surprise you?
It does not surprise me that you pontificate BS “as someone with Jewish roots,” as if to shield you from being identified by your obvious antisemitic inclination.
Put a cork in it. Quit sharing your loathsomeness. We get enough from israel.
Keep up the good work. Palestinians need more educated voices like yours to make a difference, bearing in mind that Zionism is based on indoctrination with misconceptions, fables and fairytales. The US population is sadly blinded by such misconceptions
“Over the past year, Israel killed 319 Palestinians. It was a rather quiet year, with no real war and with relatively few terrorist attacks. Some 319 Palestinians were killed, almost all of them for no reason, almost all of their deaths unwarranted, and nearly all of them were unarmed. Few of them endangered anyone.”
EVERY Israeli Jew knows that there is nothing cheaper than Palestinian blood, that Israel swats them like flies and murders them with gusto.
Some Israelis are born without an empathy gene. They only understand their own suffering. Israelis are killed, so it is the end of the world. Palestinians are killed, so what? They do not understand that Palestinians feel those deaths, feel the home demolitions, feel the daily insults, resent the entitled settlers, and will not take it anymore. Until Israelis realize that they have to change course, those deaths will continue.”
Sadly the entire Israeli society has been brainwashed and indoctrinated with hatred from a tender age. They raised them to believe that the ‘Arabs’ whatever..are there to get them and annihilate them. It requires radical psychotherapy to rid them off such misconceptions. They’ve been raised yo hate and kill.
Why do we keep hearing from this troll? and moron to boot? Palestinians are “the most murderous antisemitic society since the demise of Nazi Germany”? Ridiculous and pathetic statement. Please turn off this troll once and for all. Shuqran, habibi.
He keeps commenting, I keep putting those comments in the trash–Steve
To Jack’s query about the most antisemitic society, I would suggest the Republican Party USA.
Given the marketing hype, misrepresentation and intimidation used to support their johnny come lately colonial settler project, nothing could be more antisemitic than the Zionist enclave in Palestine founded on “the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”
There is no Palestine. If Israelis are becoming more “right-wing,” it is due to the Palestinian Authority’s pay to slay program wherein Palestinian Arabs are paid to kill Jews. Talk about your Nazi and Fascist parties Fatah and Hamas! And their neo-Nazi supporters!
The quote that Jack gaslights predates both the PA and Hamas by 46 years. A warning to the Jewish community by way of a letter to the editor of the NYT in 1948. The authors were prominent and respected people, clear sighted sufficiently to know what would bloom if the seed of a new state is both foreign and racist and then fertilized with Nazi ideology. Israel is long past the “more “right-wing,”” having flowered into the State of Terror that Thomas Suarez documents from files in the British National Archives. The Zionist leadership and financial backing was from the first racist and intent on displacing the inhabitants of Palestine to impose their colonial project. Contrary to Jack’s protests it is the Israeli government that is widely known to lie about its murderous activities in Palestine and the legitimacy
of its “legal system”.
#1. Israel was never a “colonial” project. It was a refugee project.
#2. The Nazi Party was full of “prominent and respected people.”
#3. Thomas Suarez is a noted antisemite who skews information to suit his agenda, just as Dale does.
#4. Israel’s militancy was forced by Arab genocidal riots in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-39.
#5. There is no “Palestine.” There is only disputed territory that may become a racist fascist state solely inhabited by Palestinian Arabs.
#6. You doubt the “pay to slay” program exists?
Stephen, you might like this recent article by Gideon Levy.
April 24, 2022
How Israel Uses Radical Islam to Justify the occupation.
The events unfolding over the last few weeks in the occupied territories seem as if they’ve been taken out of the Bible. Everything is immersed in religion and fundamentalism – the Temple Mount, Joseph’s Tomb, the yeshiva at Homesh, the pilgrims, the worshippers, Ramadan, the sacrificial lamb, the Temple. A religious war taken straight out of the biblical stories.
Despite this, make no mistake, religion is only a theatrical prop. The motive driving the settlers and their supporters remains ultra-nationalist, fueled by real estate considerations, including the attendant evil, violence and sadism employed by settlers and the authorities behind them.
The Palestinian aspirations always have been and remain national ones: rights, independence, removal of the occupier. This is what underlies the violent unrest expressed by unbridled young Palestinians. Religion is used by both sides only as an excuse. Despite all the trappings, this is not a war of religion, although it may well become one.
The Israeli right has long branded the war over land and sovereignty in Israel-Palestine as a religious war between Muslims and Jews. It’s much more convenient for ultra-nationalists to present it as such, rather than as a war between colonialists and the dispossessed, which is what it really is. In wars of religion there is no room for compromise. It’s us or them.
And if that’s the case, it’s an eschatological battle of the End Times. Either they throw us into the sea or we expel them to the desert. There is no third way. And if that is the case, not only does anything go, but all means are essential, including the dispossession, the killings, the destruction and oppression.
In a religious war, everything is permitted, since it has no resolution other than a total and violent one. This way, one can portray a nation fighting for what it deserves as a nation trying to impose its religion. The Palestinians as the Islamic State. If so, Israel is waging a war over its very existence, and justice is exclusively on its side. This is of course mendacious propaganda. Most Palestinians don’t want to live in a caliphate, they want freedom and national dignity.
If this is a battle for freedom, another anti-colonial struggle similar to its predecessors, colonialism must respect the national rights of the occupied nation in order to resolve the problem. What does Israel have to do with any of this? How removed settlers are from such a mindset, since that would preclude permitting Israel to do anything it pleases, and Palestinians would deserve the same national rights Jews have, God forbid.
Both nations have undergone a process of increased religiosity and extremism in recent years. This process has swept up Palestinians, who used to be among the most secular of Arab nations, and Israeli Jews, most of whom saw themselves as secular, even if this was always debatable. Palestinian despair has pushed many young people towards religion. The mosque is in most of their communities the only gathering place, and Al-Aqsa is the only location in the occupied territories in which they can have some sense of sovereignty and independence.
With the Jews, the natural growth of the ultra-Orthodox community and the construction of huge Haredi cities in the territories, as well as a further burgeoning of the settler establishment, have contributed to the sense that the struggle over the territories is a religious one. But the die has not been cast. The struggle was and remains a national one.
The settlers, most of them religious, have used religion for their needs from the outset. The Park Hotel in Hebron was in our forefathers’ territory, which made it theirs. The Cave of the Patriarchs belongs only to them, as does every clod of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
This is not a religious war but a war for dominion under a religious mantle. Their battle for expelling Palestinians from the territories – which is their true aim – is a territorial and national battle. They simply want the whole country for themselves. Just like they made cynical and dishonest use of security as a motive for their settlement, they tell themselves and others biblical stories in order to prove their sovereignty. This is not a religious war.
The Palestinians fighting for Al-Aqsa or Gaza are not doing so in the name of imposing their religion. There are such elements among them, getting stronger in the absence of an alternative savior, but most of them still aspire to what all other secular nations want for themselves – equal national rights or a state of their own.
A refugee in Jenin does not want an Islamic state. He wants a free state. He may yet change his preference. Israel will most likely do all it can to push him in that direction.
Radical Islam was created by the colonial Brits, revived again by Uncle Sam to divide, conquer…also go regress third world countries…remember Al Qaeda and ISIS? These are Uncle Sam’s protégés…bearing in mind that Israel was treating their members in their hospitals during Syrian wars. Hamas was propped up by Israel
https://m.jpost.com/middle-east/report-israel-treating-al-qaida-fighters-wounded-in-syria-civil-war-393862/amp
Steve, you’re readers might like to read this heartbreaking article by Gideon Levy & Alex Levac.
She Was Born Amid a Second Intifada Lockdown. She Died 19 Years Later Amid Israeli-Palestinian Clashes
When Hanan Khadour was born, Jenin was under Israeli army lockdown due to Operation Defensive Shield, and her father had to carry her to the hospital in his arms. Three weeks ago she boarded a shared taxi in the same city, which was teeming with Israeli soldiers and snipers. A single bullet pierced her body.
Gideon Levy & Alex Levac
30th April, 2022
Hanan Khadour was born on December 1, 2002. Her mother, Abir, was in her eighth month when the contractions started. The nearest hospital was in Jenin, 12 kilometers from her home in the village of Faqua, but there was no way to get there because of the roadblocks. It was the period after Operation Defensive Shield in the second intifada, and the Jenin refugee camp was still under lockdown. Abir gave birth in the clinic of the village doctor; Hanan was born a preemie. She needed an incubator urgently, but none was available locally. The doctor told the family that the newborn’s survival depended on her being taken to a hospital urgently. Her father, Mahmoud, decided that he must do everything to give his daughter a chance to live, as he puts it now.
Mahmoud called the Red Crescent emergency ambulance service just after she was born, only to be told that they couldn’t get to Faqua; the army wouldn’t let them through. He then drove with the tiny infant to the earthen berm the army had created in order to cut off the village from Jenin. He got out of the car, his daughter in his arms. Soldiers on the other side of the barrier threatened to shoot him if he took another step.
“You can shoot me,” he told them, “but I am taking my daughter to the hospital.”
“What’s the problem with your daughter?” a soldier asked.
“She was just born, and she is about to die,” he replied.
Finally, Mahmoud ended up crossing the barrier on foot. A Red Crescent ambulance was waiting for him and rushed Hanan to the hospital in Jenin, where she was placed in an incubator, in which she spent the next month. But that was not the end of her ordeal. When she was a year old and had started to walk, a congenital abnormality was discovered in her hip and she was hospitalized for 21 days, this time in Mukassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, where the abnormality was corrected. Her father was not allowed to be with her, denied access on security grounds.
So began the short life of Hanan Khadour – one that ended last week.
During the second week of April, 19-year-old Hanan boarded a shared taxi from Jenin to Faqua. All the passengers in the vehicle were women. Israeli soldiers were around, the driver would later recall, and snipers were positioned on rooftops. A short while into the drive, gunfire pierced Hanan’s body. A single shot had been fired; no one else was injured. For two weeks she fought for her life. She died just when it seemed that she was starting to recover from her serious injuries.
Faqua lies at the northeastern corner of the West Bank, near the separation barrier, at the foot of Mount Gilboa. The village takes its name from a mushroom that grows in the region, and is famed for the lovely Gilboa iris, which adorns the area. People come from all over the West Bank to see the flower blossom. Faqua’s 3,000 residents enjoy a beautiful landscape, which is at its most magnificent when viewed from the home of the Khadour family, at the village’s edge. It’s their new home, built exactly a year ago, small and modest but tasteful, with a well-cultivated garden and that view of the green valley, Jenin and the mountains. The beauty is enhanced by the fact that there isn’t even one settlement in the area, following the evacuation of Kadim and Ganim, the West Bank settlement evacuated at the same time as Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Mahmoud, the 54-year-old bereaved father, is a construction worker and left-wing activist who also occasionally commits the sin of writing. He was arrested six times by Israeli authorities in his younger days because of his activity. He also speaks good English thanks to his ties with Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization based in California. This week, he looked broken and haggard. Abir, 44, a handsome woman in black, remained cloistered inside as we sat in their small yard, enjoying a pleasant breeze from the valley. The couple have three sons; Hanan was their only daughter. She was in the 12th grade, in the management track at a Jenin high school, having repeated a year in primary school. She blossomed in high school, Mahmoud says, receiving excellent grades. In the past few weeks, as she prepped for her matriculation exams, she took private lessons in mathematics on Saturdays at school. She had cut herself off from everything else due to the approaching exams.
On the morning of Saturday, April 9, she went to Jenin for a math lesson. She was always afraid of the army, her father says. Because of their home’s proximity to the separation barrier, there is army movement nearby; sometimes soldiers come up from the nearby wadi and order the family to get inside the house. The troops also occasionally aim the red laser sights of their rifles at them, adds 12-year-old Mohammed, the youngest son, and that frightens him. The checkpoints along the way to the high school terrified Hanan, who often saw soldiers humiliating local inhabitants. A routine event.
On that Saturday, Mahmoud left early for the clinic run by UNRWA – the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees – in Jenin in order to collect his medications; his vision is impaired due to diabetes and he also has high blood pressure. In Jenin, he noticed a large presence of Israeli soldiers who were engaged in confrontations with residents. The clinic in the refugee camp was closed because of the disturbances.
That morning, in a raid on the camp, soldiers killed Ahmed al-Sa’di, who was affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, in the wake of the terrorist attack on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv two days earlier. The atmosphere was volatile. Mahmoud immediately called his daughter to warn her not to go to her lesson. He wanted to tell her that it was dangerous in the city, but he wasn’t able to reach her. At 9:30 A.M., Hanan left home for Jenin in one of the shared taxis that ply the Faqua-Jenin route. Her father consoled himself with the thought that the driver would surely warn the passengers about the clashes in the refugee camp.
Mahmoud bought vegetables in the camp’s market and left them at the taxi stand while he went back to buy drip-irrigation gear for the garden. Just then, Hanan arrived in Jenin. She walked to her school, not far from the taxi stand, and discovered that it was closed because of the disturbances. Hurrying back, she got into a yellow cab, a Volkswagen Caravelle, driven by Mahmoud Malah, 56, a regular driver on the route and a resident of Beit Qad, a village near Faqua. He set out around 10:30 in his taxi. After examining the possibilities, Malah decided to go through the Al-Baider neighborhood, in the eastern part of Jenin. He hoped he would be able to get through safely.
In the meantime, Mahmoud was about to travel home, not knowing that his daughter had been at the same taxi stand a few minutes earlier and was on her way home – for what would be the last time. While he was waiting for his taxi to fill up with passengers, a niece, also from Faqua, arrived. She told him fearfully that she just heard that Hanan had been seriously wounded and taken to hospital. Terrified, Mahmoud rushed to the government hospital nearby, but Hanan wasn’t there. He then hurried to Ibn Sina Hospital, a private facility, where he found his daughter in the intensive care ward. He was allowed in for only two minutes – Hanan was still conscious. She spoke only the words, “Forgive me,” from which he inferred that she thought she was about to die.
Shortly thereafter, Abir arrived together with other relatives from the village, but Hanan had already lost consciousness. The bullet had struck her in the right arm and then entered her stomach, where it wrought havoc in her internal organs, before lodging in her left arm. A photograph of the taxi shows a fairly large hole in the door. Hanan was sitting in the back, next to the door, on the right side of the vehicle. Her father thinks she bent over and covered her head with her arms, and so took the bullet there. She underwent surgery to stop the bleeding, but remained unconscious. On the following Tuesday and Wednesday, she woke up briefly before relapsing again. After a week she was moved from the ICU to a regular ward; the physicians said her condition had stabilized. Hanan stood up and even took a few steps in the room. Psychologically, however, she was in dire straits. She suspected that the drain tube that had been inserted in her body was a bomb the Israelis had implanted. She wouldn’t let her father leave the room, for fear Israeli soldiers would kill him.
Don’t move, they’ll shoot you,” she cautioned him, apparently suffering from post-traumatic stress.
The next day, the eighth of her hospitalization, Mahmoud bought her a few books in Jenin, thinking she would be able to read them, new clothes ahead of her discharge, and a notebook and pen so she could record her experiences from the incident. He stayed with her until 4 P.M. that afternoon and then went home; Abir remained with their daughter.
At 7 that evening, Abir called her husband: “Hanan is in critical condition. Come fast.” By the time he arrived, she was in a coma. Massive hemorrhaging had erupted in her stomach. She died at 11 P.M.
During all those days between despair and hope, Mahmoud did not consider the possibility of transferring Hanan to a hospital in Israel, he says in reply to a question. He has bad memories from when his son Ahmed was hospitalized in Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, after being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 6. Ahmed was cured completely and today is a healthy 22-year-old, but the humiliating treatment his father endured at checkpoints and in the hospital left indelible scars. Ibn Sina is considered a state-of-the-art, modern hospital, and the doctors had told him that Hanan’s condition was stable.
The taxi driver, Malah, was also traumatized by the event. He visited the family every day during the four days of mourning, sitting there silently. Mahmoud says the driver feels a deep sense of guilt for not having protected the life of his passenger. A few days later, Malah related the incident to Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, who wrote a report on the killing. Malah recalled that a few minutes after the taxi had filled up, and he had chosen to go through the eastern neighborhoods, he suddenly heard horrible shouting from the back. He stopped and leaped out, and then saw that the backseat was drenched in blood. He said he experienced a mental blackout and went into a state of shock. A few passersby pulled Hanan from the taxi and rushed her to the hospital. Before that, all the driver remembers is seeing a military jeep on the street, snipers on the rooftops and a few soldiers on foot. Nothing more.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit made do with a brief and especially laconic response in reply to a query from Haaretz this week: “The circumstances of the case are being clarified.” Not even an investigation this time.
Mahmoud is now writing a book about his daughter’s life – he refuses to let her remain only a name and a number. He wrote a long post on his Facebook page this week, titled “Written by Her Father.” To his dead daughter, he wrote:
“Hanan, I’m being asked so much about you now, and I feel so inadequate in the face of all the questions. I feel that I was not a good father, and that I didn’t think in depth about your talents. There are people who asked me: Who is Hanan? And what is Hanan, in your dream? It’s all mixed up inside me.
“We are a simple Palestinian family. We didn’t celebrate birthdays, because we felt we were born every day anew. We were born in these hard times in a place that doesn’t fulfill even a single one of our dreams… And when I see the army attacking women and we can’t come to their defense, I am shattered. Hanan told me with her eyes: Enough, Dad. I see her eyes. Hanan always spoke through her eyes.”
A couple of comments by John de Clef Pineiro
1. Armed oppression is always a fearsome incitement and cause of negative emotions and a heightened sense of menace and danger. But the ongoing presence of the oppressor under the tyrannical military dictatorship called the “occupation” is also a toxic conditioning influence on the agents of such oppression. Such a willfully inhumane, non-stop state of oppression can destroy any humanistic impulse on the part of the enforcers of such oppression. So, they too are victims of the perverted indoctrination that has turned them into moral cripples, and has brainwashed and misshapen them into beasts of violence. We can see what they do as wanton heartless destroyers, killers, and maimers, of an unarmed, non-combatant civilian population of indigenous Semitic-speaking people. And the decades-long history that they are writing with the blood of others will be as appallingly heinous and memorable as the atrocities of other barbarians of the last century.
2. Regardless of all the dust kicked up by the deniers and apologists for the murderous military tyranny that is being inflicted upon the Palestinian people, the reality is undeniable and cannot be refuted that the most militarily-equipped, U.S.-backed country with the most sophisticated state-of-the-art weapons and armaments, and with a standing navy, air force, army, and intelligence apparatus without equal in the Middle East has been waging a decades-long campaign of elimination against a predominantly unarmed, non-combatant, population of stateless civilians.
To pretend otherwise is the delusion and propaganda of the incumbent morally-bankrupt apartheid regime.
Steve, Israel’s plan has always been to steal as much Palestinian land with as few Palestinians living on it. They do this by ethnic cleansing, and by brutalising the Palestinians on a daily basis for at least the last 55 years. I can’t explain it better than John de Clef Pineiro‘s comments on Gideon Levy’s article.
Absolutely. Thank you
Steve, you hit it on the nail.
Listening to Zionists is a pitiful experience.
Steve, a recent press release by B’Tselem.
“ After more than 20 years of legal proceedings, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled May 4th that the forcible transfer of hundreds of Palestinians from their homes and the destruction of their communities – for the clear purpose of taking over their lands in the service of Jewish interests – is legal. The justices have thus proved once again that the occupied cannot expect justice from the occupier’s court.
The decision, weaving baseless legal interpretation with decontextualized facts, makes it clear that there is no crime which the high court justices will not find a way to legitimize. Employing sugarcoated language, hypocrisy, and lies, the justices once again fulfilled their role in Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy and paved the way for the crime of forcible transfer to be committed, while reversing reality: the ruling cast Palestinian victims as the “unlawful” offenders, while portraying the apartheid regime as the victim.
The international community must prevent Israel from forcibly transferring the Masafer Yatta communities and make sure, should this crime be committed, that those responsible for it – including government ministers, the military top echelons, and the supreme court justices – will be held accountable.”
UN “Human Rights Experts” mistake Israeli courts as being typical Arab courts, forgetting about the meticulous rule of law:
“UN human rights experts* today denounced Israel for abusing counter-terrorism laws to target and silence human rights defenders, after an Israeli court found Gaza aid worker, Mohammed el-Halabi, guilty of financing terrorism.” As the popular song goes “ABCDEFU.”
Reality? On June 15, 2022, Mohammad El-Halabi was convicted in the Beersheva District Court of diverting funds and materials to Hamas for terror purposes. At the time of his arrest in 2016, El-Halabi was the head of World Vision – an international, church-based aid organization – in Gaza.
Beyond the accusations leveled against El-Halabi, the verdict highlights World Vision’s failure to properly supervise its operations in Hamas-controlled areas and protect its humanitarian aid from abuse. The judges criticized the NGO for its belief that internal processes could adequately identify embezzlement of the type that was proven to be done by El-Halabi – confirming NGO Monitor’s analysis from 2015 that World Vision was susceptible to aid diversion due to its willingness to negotiate and coordinate with armed groups.
In 2015, a Gaza-based accountant for World Vision informed his employers that he suspected El-Halabi of diverting funds to assist Hamas. He was fired and then interrogated by Hamas. Damningly, El-Halabi had a copy of the interrogation on his personal computer.
“…the complaint of Mohammed Mehdi, a WV (World Vision) accountant during the period relevant for the indictment, [who] alleged to the organization, inter alia, that the defendant used the organization’s money to assist Hamas. Mohammed Mehdi described the operative mechanisms that the defendant used, which were consistent with the operative mechanisms that were detailed by the defendant in his indictment.”
“Furthermore, the circumstances of Mohammed Mehdi’s firing from the WV (World Vision) organization, his interrogation by Hamas and the discovery of his interrogation on the defendant’s personal computer that was seized by the Shabak also constitute a significant evidential addition to the defendant’s confession.”