Palestinian and Israeli Activists Demonstrate Together in Bil’in
Joel Beinin has written a thought provoking review of Shlomo Ben-Ami’s Scars of War, Wounds of Peace in the April 17th issue of The Nation. It’s well worth reading in full, and Beinin finishes on an optimistic note:
Where, then, is the hope for a peaceful solution to the conflict? I believe that it lies in the young Palestinians, Jewish Israelis and internationals who have been fighting shoulder to shoulder in weekly battles against the Israeli security forces since late 2003 to halt the construction of the separation wall. This struggle has been led by Palestinian villagers in unheralded places like Budrus and Bil’in, organized in the Popular Committee Against the Wall. Although their successes have so far been minor, these actions have demonstrated that trust is built through joint political action and that whether there will eventually be two states or one, coexistence, not separation, is the foundation for peace.
The family of a British cameraman shot dead by an Israeli soldier claimed yesterday that both the Foreign Office and the Israeli authorities had obstructed their search for justice. James Miller, 34, was killed by a single shot while making a documentary in the Gaza strip about Palestinian children.
At an inquest opening yesterday in London, TV producer Daniel Edge told how he was with Mr Miller on May 2 2003, and described his desperate attempts to save the cameraman. The four-strong TV crew were on their final day of filming. Clutching a white flag with a torch shone on to it, they had approached the Israeli soldiers, calling out: “Hello, we’re British journalists.” Shots were fired, and Mr Miller fell, fatally wounded. Mr Edge told the inquest how he had begged the soldiers for help for his friend.
The jury of five women and five men heard that Mr Miller, reporter Saira Shah, and interpreter Abdul Rahman Abdullah were fired upon as they approached the soldiers on foot to ask to leave the dangerous area where they had been filming. They had spent 16 days in the Gaza Strip on a documentary for US network HBO about Palestinian children in the Rafah refugee camp. It had been the first visit to Palestine for Mr Miller, who came from Braunton in Devon.
On the night, the crew left their equipment in a nearby Palestinian house as the trio walked, in flak jackets and helmets, towards members of the Israeli Defence Force in their armoured personnel carrier, or APC. Mr Edge, from Badby, Northamptonshire, was standing yards away, on the house veranda. Mr Miller was shining a torch on to a white flag held by Mr Abdullah when the IDF opened fire. On the second shot, Mr Miller was hit in the front of his neck; fragments of bullet were later found embedded in his blue flak jacket.
In an emotional state giving evidence at St Pancras coroner’s court, Mr Edge said: “I heard Abdul shouting, it seemed he was crying in pain – I thought he had been shot in the arms or legs. I heard Saira shouting ‘He’s injured, he’s injured, please don’t shoot’. And then I heard Abdul shouting ‘He’s injured’. It was at that point I realised James had been shot, possibly badly injured, because he was silent.”
Following the death, the Miller family were determined any local postmortem should be attended by an independent expert, such as a Home Office pathologist. In written evidence one of Mr Miller’s sisters alleged the British ambassador, Sherrard Cowper-Coles, told her it would be a waste of money to have a British pathologist – even though the family wanted to ascertain the nature of the wound, and gather other forensic evidence. According to a contemporaneous note of the phone conversation made by Anne Waddington, a barrister, he was dismissive: “I asked what was his reluctance … He said it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money.”
Mrs Waddington, whose father-in-law is the former Tory home secretary David Waddington, told the inquest another British official, Piers Cazalet, also asked the family to drop the demand : “He told me it would be obstructive and cause a delay [if I protested].” She went on: “There was extreme pressure on us, and on Sophy [Mr Miller’s widow], within hours of her husband being killed, to agree to a postmortem without any independent observer.” Mrs Miller told the jury Israel had tried to “grind down” the family with delays and broken promises “in the hope that we wouldn’t go on”.
In court Mrs Miller named the soldier she believed killed her husband as a first lieutenant who fired from the APC 100 metres away from Mr Miller.
A Palestinian man has drowned in the West Bank after getting entangled in the separation barrier’s barbed wire during flash floods, medical officials and witnesses say.
According to witnesses, heavy rains followed by flash foods washed away two brothers, Eyad and Raad Taher, in the West Bank village of Bil’in early on Sunday morning.
The two men, from the village of Bait Annan in the West Bank, were passing through Bil’in on their way to Ram Allah via an Israeli-built road connecting the two areas, when they were washed away by the flood waters, witnesses said.
They got out of their vehicle, but were swept by the strong current in the direction of the barrier.
Raad Taher was rescued by villagers, but his brother Eyad, 26, was found unconscious, caught in the razor-wire of the barrier that separates Bil’in from nearby Jewish settlements.
Poor roads
Palestinians blamed the Israelis for poor road planning. The road runs through a valley between two mountains.
Palestinians say the road is aimed at serving the expansion of the nearby settlement of Beitar Illit without taking into consideration the possibility of flooding.
The earthworks of the barrier, whose route was ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in July 2004, acted as a dam, flooding the poorly built road between the villages of Bil’in and Safa, west of Ram Allah, villagers said.
“We asked the army to allow us to drain the water, but they refused, saying they were worried the fence would collapse”
Mohammad Khatib, a member of the Popular Committee Against the Separation Fence in Bil’in, said: “Placing the road here in such a low area with no drains caused the water to pile up so high that it covered 15m of our olive trees.”
Villagers also blamed the Israeli army, who they say prevented their search party from using their equipment to try to drain the flooded area.
Residents say they were not allowed to dig a ditch next to the fence in order to drain water.
Khatib, said: “We asked the army to allow us to drain the water, and even the Israeli rescue services agreed but the army refused, saying they were worried the fence would collapse.”
Eido Minkovsky, an Israeli army spokesperson, said: “All the claims that we didn’t allow the forces to act are incorrect.”
Fence at fault
Khatib said: “Because of the planned route of the fence, which is being built according to the expansion plans of nearby Jewish settlements, this man was killed.
“There was a humanitarian situation and lives at stake, and they refused to let us through. So how will it be when the fence is completed? We hold the occupation completely responsible for this.”
Bil’in is a small Palestinian farming village 4km east of the 1949 Armistice Line.
The planned route of the West Bank barrier comes within four metres of the last house in Bil’in and is set to take more than half of the village’s land to make room for settlement expansion.
A report published by human rights group B’tselem recently stated that the wall’s route through the village was not chosen based on correct security claims, but rather was politically motivated and designed to incorporate illegal expansion of nearby settlements.
1) Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, “My Name is Rachel Corrie”, on the controversy over the postponement of her play. Link
2) Debate Between NY Theater Workshop and Katharine Viner. Transcript MP3 Download
3) Democracy Now, Rachel Corrie’s Parents Reaction to postponement. Transcript Mp3 download
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1) Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie
Excerpt:
“There is a particular entry in Rachel Corrie’s diary, probably written some time in 1999, four years before she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes. She is aged 19 or 20. “Had a dream about falling, falling to my death off something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah,” she writes, “but I kept holding on, and when each foothold or handle of rock broke I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything – just react as if I was playing an adrenaline-filled video game. And I heard, ‘I can’t die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.”
2) Democracy Now, Debate Between The New York Theater Workshop, and “My Name is Rachel Corrie” Editor Katharine Viner
Katharine Viner, co-creator of the multiple award winning play, My Name is Rachel Corrie debates the controversy over the postponement of the plays US debut at the New York Theatre Workshop with the 2 theatre directors – James Nicola & Lynn Moffat responsible, in a Democracy Now broadcast hosted by Amy Goodman
The play My Name is Rachel Corrie was due to open recently at the celebrated New York Theatre Workshop but has been indefinitely postponed.
James Nicola said “After Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation…our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn’t want to take.”
Actor Alan Rickman – Katherine’s co-writer – responded by saying, “This is censorship born out of fear”.
Literature & Pullitzer Prize winning writer Harold Pinter and others in a letter to the New York Times asked: “What is it about Rachel Corrie’s writings, her thoughts, her feelings, her confusions, her idealism, her courage…that New York audiences must be protected from…Rachel Corrie gave her life standing up against injustice”
3) “Democracy Now”- Rachel Corrie’s Parents Reaction to postponement.
excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined in our studio by Rachel Corrie’s parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie. They have traveled to New York to attend a public reading of Rachel’s writings tonight at Riverside Church. It was supposed to have been the opening night of the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, at the New York Theatre Workshop, as we just discussed. Last year, the Corries initiated lawsuits against the state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces and Caterpillar, the manufacturer of the Israeli military bulldozer that crushed Rachel to death on March 16, 2003, just a few days before the invasion of Iraq. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
CINDY CORRIE: We really defer to the Royal Court Theatre in deciding what the next step should be with the play. It’s actually going to be playing in the West End in London again, starting at the end of this month. I think Katharine, when she talked about the breakdown of trust, I think that’s a real concern. We know that the original intentions of the New York Theatre Workshop were good intentions. They wanted to bring the play here, and we respect that, and we certainly, you know, we don’t wish any ill towards them or towards any of their staff around this, but I think — I have some real concerns about the amount of contextualizing, and so forth, that they wanted to do. Mr. Nicola spoke about wanting to sort of set the stage to get Rachel’s voice out there. And I would just say, in London that happened just by presenting the play, by allowing people to come to see it. And I would say, let Rachel do that. Let her get her words out.
By Amos Harel and Michal Greenberg, Haaretz Correspondents for Haaretz
Several Palestinians and an American volunteer in the West Bank on Sunday filed complaints with the police, accusing settlers of violence toward Palestinians in the Hebron area on Saturday, after three people were wounded in two separate incidents.
In one of the incidents, Palestinians said about 10 masked, Hebrew-speaking youths had raided a tent encampment near the settlement of Sussia, on the border of the Havat Yair outpost on
Saturday night. They allegedly attacked two Palestinian brothers with clubs and knives and then escaped. The brothers, Abdelrahman and Aziz Shanaran, were lightly to moderately wounded and were taken to Alia Hospital in Hebron for treatment.
Another Shanaran relative, who said he had witnessed the incident, filed a police complaint on Sunday.
Also Sunday, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel asked the state prosecution to intervene immediately in an effort to bring the assailants to justice.
Left-wing activists familiar with the area said they thought the assailants were settlers from Sussia, and said settlers had been attacking Palestinian villagers in the area for a long time, in an
attempt to steal their land.
Abdelrahman Shanaran told the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that the assailants had hit him on the head with a sharp object while he was sleeping in his tent. He said they continued to beat him and removed him from the tent.
His brother, Aziz, heard the screams of his wife and children and rushed to his assistance. According to the testimony, some of the assailants then began beating Aziz.
Aziz Shanaran told B’Tselem that the assailants appeared to be young and that some had earlocks and rifles. He said that after the attack, they escaped in the direction of Sussia.
Hospital records show that Abdelrahman Shanaran was treated for three cuts on his head and a leg wound, and that his brother received orthopedic treatment.
In the second incident, which took place Saturday afternoon, an American volunteer assisting Palestinians in Hebron as part of the Tel Rumeida Project said he was attacked by a group of about 20 Israeli children and youths. He said they threw stones at him, kicked him and spat at him. He was taken to a Hebron hospital shortly after the incident and underwent additional tests at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv on Sunday. He was hit in the head and doctors are concerned he may have a concussion.
The volunteer said he ran from his assailants to a nearby Israel Defense Forces post, but charged that the soldiers on duty refused to assist him.
However, IDF sources said the soldiers reached the site of the attack without being summoned and then dispersed the settlers. Police said they showed him mug shots but that the volunteer was unable to identify the people he said had attacked him.
Police said they would continue their inquiry into the attack on the American volunteer, but admitted that they had encountered difficulties.