I was born in a tent and I’m living in a tent, but I hope I won’t die in a tent.
I’m a middle-aged journalist and a human rights advocate. My children are grown up and college educated – three of them married with children. I’m far from them though, living with my partner in a desert refugee camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Through friends I managed to get word to my brother to phone me on a borrowed mobile, from a shop in our refugee camp in Gaza last week. I was describing my situation and he told me “you born in a tent and you will die in one”. I don’t know if his prediction will come true. So far I’ve been in Tanaf refugee camp for eight months and have still not received asylum from any state. Hundreds of Palestinian refugees are currently in the same situation, along Iraq’s western borders, living in tents.
I fled Baghdad eight months ago. Palestinian life there had become unbearable and incredibly dangerous. After the arrival of Anglo-American troops, we refugees were stripped of all rights, denied the renewal of refugee travel documents that had been customarily issued to us since the days of the monarchy.
Paperless and unable to leave, we were targeted by the death squads as an unprotected minority, and then a collective execution fatwa was issued against our entire community, some 40,000 strong who have been in Iraq since 1948.
Many of my friends were killed in perverse and cruel ways. My neighbour, Abu Adel, was murdered while trying to pick up the body of his son from the morgue. Others were killed by militia having their heads drilled with electric tools. I had previously tried to leave Iraq, spending 14 months at the Ruwaished camp on the Jordanian border, only to be refused entry.
Upon my return to Baghdad, I found that things had got far worse. One afternoon, the interior ministry’s Saqer force arrested me at a café, along with my 76-year-old neighbour, for the crime of sipping tea while being a Palestinian. Taken to an American-run interrogation centre, we saw young men blindfolded and tied, while others were hanging from the ceiling. Fortunately, the debacle ended after the ranking American officer took pity on my elderly friend and ordered our release. We were thereafter thrown in the street while curfew was on, lucky not to have been shot. This incident, along with a phone call ordering me to evacuate my house, convinced me of the need to leave at whatever cost. Nowadays, a tent shields me from the strong dust-storms of the Khamseen wind, while my house in Baghdad has been converted into a local militia office.
My first displacement occurred in the aftermath of what we call the setback, the naksah, of 1967. I was a 15-year-old teenager when the Israeli occupying forces entered Gaza, their megaphones blasting the order for all males between the ages of 15 and 60 to congregate in designated local schools. A vast campaign of random arrests began, and my family feared I would face the fate of other neighborhood youth and told me to escape. Through the desert and across the river, I fled the occupation to Jordan, separated from my family for ever; up until this day never allowed to return. I joined the ranks of the 400,000 displaced (naziheen), almost half of whom had already been refugees since 1948.
Here I am; six displacements later and four decades into my life. I am not that old, but I feel really tired. Stressed out by the last war, I now have diabetes along with high blood pressure. Everyone around me has been through hard times though, and we all share in the daily struggle for survival. The camp is overcrowded, intolerably hot in the morning and incredibly cold during winter nights, extremely flammable (only last month there was a terrible fire that destroyed some of the camp), and lacks most medical and social services. Nevertheless, a UN water truck arrives every other day and rations are distributed monthly (although they are not ideal for diabetics, consisting mainly of flour and sugar). Palestinian refugee volunteers from Syria also come to support us, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society currently provides me with insulin.
Somehow, incredibly, we are still alive, but we are frozen in time, isolated and abandoned by the governments of the world. I am not a refugee by choice and I will hold forever to the right of return to my home. Nevertheless, until I am able to exercise that right, I want to live in safety and dignity somewhere, anywhere, away from the wretchedness of this desert and the carnage of Iraq. Yes, I was born in a tent but I certainly hope I don’t die in one.
Ahmad Shaheen (Abu Fadi) is a Palestinian refugee from the village of Al-Qubayba near Al Ramleh. In 1948 his family was forced out to Gaza. Since 1967, he has been displaced six times. Before moving to the Tanaf refugee camp on the on the Iraqi-Syrian border, he was a Baghdad based journalist and human rights activist.
Gaza today -lawless embargo , sanctions and occupation by Dr. Mona El-Farra, 23 May 2007
A few days ago, a ceasefire has been signed again between the two Palestinian fighting parties, Fatah and Hamas. And children are back at school. My daughter started her end of the year exams early. All the schools had to squeeze the schedule of the examination, so they end as soon as possible before new violence erupts.
I believe it is a fragile ceasefire. The armed men are still in the streets of Gaza, some of them occupy the roofs of some of the multi-story buildings. Israel has intensified its air strike attacks against Gaza, north east and some areas in the south. Many people have been killed. Eight members of one family were killed, when airoplanes launched an air strike against the home of a Hamas leaders in Gaza. He wasn’t at home, he escaped the attack. Hospitals, including Al Awda , are overwhelmed with increasing number of casualties, with inadequate medical supplies and medications .
We all fear a large Israeli attack against Gaza.
From my apartment by the seaside, I can clearly hear and see the Israeli gunboats patrolling the sea of Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority armed men in their new base. It used to be a family resort. It is not any more, it is military place for security guards of the president. The smell of the death is strong, stronger than watching the lovely sea, or listening to the singing birds if there are any. Shooting sounds is prevalent, poverty too, and lawlessness.
My friend Mansour, whom I mentioned in one of my previous entries, and who needs urgent cytotoxic treatment , in Israel or abroad, after 45 of long waiting days, he got the referral to one of the hospitals inside Israel. But the Gaza borders are closed both north and south, and he has to wait again for its unpredictable opening. His story is the same daily story of many patients in Gaza, who are dying slowly because of the closure,
Where are we going, I don’t know, but I know very well, that the whole population suffers of the dreadful consequences of the Israeli Occupation, which is fully supported by the USA, I know also very well that women and children suffer the most. And that me and my colleagues, who work in different fields of the Palestinian civil society different fields, work hard to alleviate this suffering.
Setting Sail to Break the Siege of Gaza from Free Gaza, 6 May 2007
This summer – forty years after the Israeli seizure and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – international, Palestinian and Israeli civilians will sail to Gaza to challenge Israeli control and isolation of the 1.4 million Palestinians who live there. The project is intended to awaken the conscience of the nations of the world, who have turned their backs on a people whose human rights, welfare and very existence are being sacrificed to political expediency.
Israel says Gaza is no longer occupied, yet it denies Palestinians access to jobs, travel, visitors, commerce, education, health and medical care. Its military has turned the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison controlled by land, sea and air. As a result of draconian restrictions on access to the outside world, Palestinians live on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. After 40 years of brutal Israeli occupation, it is time for Gaza to be free.
We choose to no longer wait for the United Nations to enforce its resolutions, for the world to do its humanitarian duty, or for Israel to respect human rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention. We choose to act upon those rights as free people, and declare our solidarity with the Palestinian people.
• We will not stand by while Israel besieges Gaza and denies Palestinians control over their own borders.
• We will not accept that the 1.4 million people of Gaza are trapped and starved, surrounded by 27-foot walls.
• We will not stand by as these civilians are daily terrorized by bombings, incursions, and abductions by Israeli armed forces.
We will not wait for Israel to allow Gaza to be free. We therefore choose to sail to this beleaguered territory and challenge Israel for imprisoning Palestinians, while pretending to the world that they are free. We choose nonviolent civil resistance against the unjust policies of occupation in order to show that everyone can participate in resisting injustice.
We therefore ask for your support and participation in this expression of caring and solidarity by joining us or by donating to this trip.
For online donations, or to send checks or wire transfers, click HERE And click on the SPONSOR A CHILD page
Write BREAKTHESIEGE on your donation. It will be held for the boat action: The Free Gaza Movement
Ei: Bringing the discussion home: The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project Andrew Ford Lyons, 1 May 2007
Possibly noteworthy was that more than 300 people attended the standing-room only public hearing on the project. People waited outside the building to get in to comment and observe. Forty-eight people spoke in support, 24 people expressed opposition. Hundreds of letters and emails flooded the city on the topic. Numerous phone calls also came in, according to council members.
What remains worth exploring, examining and scrutinizing was why the city council vote went as it did, and what was said by citizens during the open hearing on the matter. For anyone seriously studying current American popular opinion on the Middle East, a trove has been collected in Olympia during the last couple of months. Collect it, save it, dissect it with a scalpel.
April has been a punishing month in the U.S. for endeavors that recognize Palestinians as human beings. A sister city request failed in Olympia. Eighteen photographs in an exhibit featuring work by children from the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank were stolen from a Boston public library. Meanwhile, scare tactics and overt intimidation were once again employed, this time in South Florida, to coerce a theater company into canceling the play My Name is Rachel Corrie.
As an active participant in the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project nearly since it began in late 2003, I have my own preference as to how things should have gone in Olympia. The scant headlines run by Olympia’s daily newspaper and picked up by the Associated Press and Reuters paint our attempt at official recognition as a failure. Fair enough. But on the other side of the world, in a battered, cramped town where most the inhabitants remain refugees from some other part of Palestine, Khaled Nasrallah saw it differently. “You really succeeded,” he wrote in an email after watching the digital video with others in Rafah. “It was my pleasure to see all of you in the meeting.”
I have to take Khaled’s view. People who live through the kinds of things that have happened in Rafah know something about recognizing the fleeting instances in our lives where some degree of victory can be found. His family’s home was destroyed by an armored and armed Caterpillar D9 bulldozer for the sole reason that the military it represented wanted to expand a buffer zone and was (in violation of international law) demolishing all the houses in the area. In one attempt by the military to destroy Khaled’s home, Olympia native Rachel Corrie was killed.
When people in Rafah have stood up to demand recognition of their right to exist, let alone their humanity, they’ve historically faced guns, bombs, fighter jets, tanks, sniper towers and bulldozers. Considering that, I think we in the U.S. can take a few wagging tongues, each alloted three minutes of microphone time in a city hall. And if it gives our friends in Rafah some sort of comfort to see us confront and grapple with the creeping phobias and racist stereotypes prevalent in our own communities, then he’s right, we found some measure of success.
After the vote against the sister city project we received a few emails. One was from a Eugene, Oregon, resident who said he’d like to know “what was at play when the City of Olympia voted against it,” and asked, “How can that be: in the home area of Rachel Corrie??!!”
In the end … our critics had fewer people in their ranks, but they were scarier
It’s worth mentioning that a group of people in Madison, Wisconsin, tried to take their sister city project with Rafah official a couple of years previously and were met with even more hostility and ultimately a negative vote from their city council. Why does this happen? In the end, and in both cases, our critics had fewer people in their ranks, but they were scarier.
Rather than recapping the play-by-play here, I’ll just tell you where to find the main criticisms and our responses. You can see them at the project’s website (see link at the end of this article). Members of the sister city project authored a document in the form of a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) in response to letters sent to the city council before the vote. As no one speaking against the proposal that evening offered anything new, these responses stand firm. The city council video (link provided below) also contains numerous articulate rebuttals to the critic’s claims at the meeting.
Instead, I’d like to focus on the general perceptions stated by opponents of the project and the resulting vote. What people in Rafah saw, via the Internet, was nothing new. It was yet another example of how there is really no way allowed for them to connect with the outside world. Palestinians are told that they must follow certain rules before they can be apart of the global community. What these rules are seems to shift depending on the situation. The Israeli military also has rules it’s supposed follow vis-a-vis international law, but these folks don’t seem to pay much mind to that.
The rules shifted in Olympia on 17 April. For the last year and a half, project participants in Rafah and Olympia have worked to meet both the letter and spirit of the requirements regarding sister city relationships with both Sister Cities International and city regulations. As Olympia City Management Assistant Diamatris Winston and Sister Cities International pointed out, we met those requirements. Some letter writers and public speakers, without offering any sort of findings to the contrary, simply ruled that we didn’t. With its vote, the Olympia City council sided with these people.
A number of speakers in opposition complained that the project lacked an Israeli component, stating that they’d support one that included an Israeli town as well as some “compatible city in the West Bank or in Gaza,” indicating that they would prefer that this were an Israeli sister city project that could, perhaps, include some token recognition of a Palestinian entity. In short: if we changed the name and entire scope of our project and told our participants in Rafah to help us find a better town than theirs, preferably one in Israel, then they would endorse it. The Olympia City Council sided with these people.
There are currently three officially recognized sister city relationships between U.S. and Palestinian communities. In one instance, the partners in a project to bind the West Bank town of Bethlehem with Burlington, Vermont, worked to include a relationship with Arad, Israel. There are about 40 official sister city relationships in all between Israeli and American cities. No one is demanding in these circumstances that a Palestinian component must be required. But in Olympia, critics declared that official recognition of any Palestinian community is entirely dependent trilateral relationship with an Israeli community. We offered to help out and lend our knowledge of the process to anyone interested in organizing a sister city relationship with an Israeli town, and that our projects could work on several joint events once they got up and running. This wasn’t enough. Again, double standards are nothing new for Palestinians who attempt to play by our rules.
Aside from the fact that no one in the entire span of our project’s existence has ever approached us about establishing an Israeli sister city (and no one has since the council meeting), there is an offensive element to this notion. It insinuates that Palestinians must only be considered in light of their Israeli neighbors in every aspect of life, as though they are not deserving of the same rights of identity and self-determination as anyone else. That’s what our critics brought to the table and to which the Oympia City Council agreed.
In the public hearing, speakers used the word “divisive” even more often than they dropped “terrorists” or “Hamas.” After four years of open, public existence in the community, either organizing, sponsoring or cosponsoring events that have attracted hundreds of individuals, the sister city project suddenly became a divisive issue in the last month and a half, mostly by people who hadn’t given our project a single thought one month before, and really won’t one month later.
I’ve been giving this notion of divisiveness some thought in recent days. Like my friend Khaled in Rafah, I wasn’t able to be at the city council meeting in person. I watched it via the little three-by-two-inch video screen on the city’s website. I’m working on a contract with an organization in Morocco that encourages cross-cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Middle East and North African nations. It was weird watching people I knew in my hometown make their cases on that small screen, but it gave me some idea of how the rest of the world would see the debate that took place there.
It’s been a tense couple of weeks here in Morocco. During the weekend before last a suicide bombing shook Casablanca. These bombers — alleged to be loosely tied with an organization calling itself “Al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb” in nearby Algeria — tend to target local community centers, secular organizations, internet cafés, places where men and women and boys and girls of any background can congregate.
Another like-minded group seems to have emerged in Gaza, emboldened by the chaos, increased poverty and isolation that U.S. and Israeli sanctions and the confiscation of public funds have brought. This other group, “The Sword of Islam,” seems to be targeting Palestinian community centers, secular organizations, Internet cafés, places where men and women and boys and girls of any background can congregate. The goal these groups seem to be striving for is isolationism and segregation, to make people fearful of places that connect them to the outside world or to one another. Through fear, it is sometimes said, control can be exerted.
In Rafah, the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project fosters communication and people-to-people bonds among men and women of all faiths in an open manner. Our organization supports the Rachel Corrie Youth and Cultural Center and a number of other community centers in Rafah where men and women and boys and girls of any background can congregate, use the Internet to reach the world outside the prison-like conditions of Gaza, study, create art and connect.
Yet I still agree with Khaled; a degree of success was achieved.
The people in Olympia speaking out against official status for this sister city relationship chimed in on some familiar themes. They warned against open communications between people and in favor of mistrust, which ultimately leads toward the same path: isolation, segregation and fear. And the Olympia City Council sided with these people.
Over the years I’ve developed a sort of inkling that if the road map to any sort of lasting peace in the Middle East actually did include a detour through the United States, it would find a more suitable route through Olympia, Washington, rather than Washington, D.C. There’s nothing peaceful about the latter. Spend a day on D.C.’s Capitol Hill and another amid dense thickets of pine trees of Olympia’s Capitol Forest and then tell me which one gave you a greater sense of peace.
But the road map should wind through more towns than Olympia. The conversation that took place was too important. It needs to happen elsewhere and it needs to be archived. In readily available public records and video now sits a time capsule from 17 April 2007, of public sentiment in Olympia, Wash., on the Middle East. It’s there for anyone to study one year, five years or fifty years from now. The process should be repeated everywhere. I would encourage people in towns across the United States to find connections with Palestinian communities. Develop the bonds and personal connections. Visit their homes and invite them to yours. Then, when the paperwork and documentation has all been laid out, take it to your city council for official recognition and see who shows up and says what. The results will say far more about the citizens in our country than they will about those in Palestine.
Andrew Ford Lyons is president of the Board of Directors in Olympia for The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project and a former media coordinator for the International Solidarity Movement. His opinions are his own. He maintains a blog and can be reached at andy@orscp.org.
My son lived a worthwhile life from The Guardian March 26, 2007
‘My son lived a worthwhile life’
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three small children. Nine months later, he died, having never recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army accountable for his death and the book she has written in his memory.
It is one of the poignancies of Tom Hurndall’s short life that he had gone to Gaza in search of a story, and ended up becoming it. A 21-year-old photography student at Manchester Metropolitan University, he went to Baghdad in February 2003 to photograph human shields, activists who were trying to protect ordinary Iraqis from the threat of Anglo-American attack. While he was there he heard about Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who had been protecting a Palestinian’s family’s house in Rafah, in the southern Gaza strip, when an Israeli bulldozer crushed her to death. Tom went to Gaza to find out what had happened.
All that is clear from the book his mother, Jocelyn, has written about Tom’s life, and about his family’s battle to bring the Israeli army to account for killing him. It’s not a political book, she stresses, though the anger, frustration and disappointment she feels towards the army, and the Israeli and British governments, is obvious.
Tom was in Rafah, in the Israeli-occupied Gaza strip, on April 11, at an ISM demonstration. Suddenly low shots were fired from an Israeli army watchtower in the direction of children playing on a mound of rubble. Most of them ran – but three froze. Tom, wearing a bright orange ISM jacket, ran to help them. He scooped up a boy and carried him to safety. He ran back for the two girls, bent down to put his arm round one of them and was shot in the head.
Jocelyn was at work, at a school in London where she was head of learning support, when she got a call from her daughter Sophie saying that Tom had been shot. It was the last day of the spring term. She calmly finished photocopying a report she had been working on and distributed it into pigeonholes, before setting off for home. It was as if she was trying to put off discovering the full horror of the story. “I think you do anything to delay the moment of impact,” she says in the bright sitting room of her north London home.
After nearly two months by his hospital bedside in Israel, the family – Hurndall, her former husband, Anthony, and their children Sophie, Billy and Fred – were allowed to bring Tom back to the UK. The brain injury had left him in a coma; his main organs working, but nothing else. Did she accept that Tom would die from the start? “I think I knew,” she says. “The pressure in Tom’s head had damaged other parts of his brain. I knew he would never recover.”
Tom eventually died nine months later on January 13 2004 – Jocelyn’s birthday – in hospital in London. Was it a relief, in a way? “It was, because he wasn’t in pain any more,” says Hurndall. “But it was also impossible when he died.” She is silent for a long time. “I still haven’t accepted it.”
Hurndall is softly spoken with gentle, pale blue eyes. She seems fragile but with an intense strength. She’s a battler but seems surprised by it. She tells of the time she met Tony Blair at a dinner. “I remember saying to him, ‘You’ve hurt me’. I couldn’t imagine saying that to anybody five years ago.” She laughs at this. “This middle-class mother coming out with these strident things.” Tom’s death has changed her. “You develop this language when there’s this anger. I’m not usually a strident person, I’ve never needed to be.”
Her book is called Defy the Stars, words Tom had tattooed on his wrist. They come from Romeo’s cry “Then I defy you, stars!” in Romeo and Juliet, and seemed to say a lot about his attitude to life. Hurndall says she finds herself carrying her book around the house, “because it’s what’s left of Tom. It’s my gift to Tom, it’s my gift from Tom.”
Apart from the anger and the love and the pain, one of the strongest senses in the book is that of discovering Tom, as his mother has since his death. She read his journals and pored over his photographs. Tom was young and idealistic, but he also knew how dangerous it would be to go to Iraq and Gaza. “He was very mature in many senses,” says Hurndall. “He was aware of the risks, but his desire to see and question and be curious was greater. People are surprised to read that Tom considered the possibility of being shot. I gulp when I read it, but I understand that of course he would consider it. If you’re there, it’s on your mind all the time.”
She didn’t want him to go to Baghdad but she knew she couldn’t stop him. “I couldn’t condone it. I felt angry with Tom and a terrible worry that weighed me down and affected me every minute he was away. I was numb, anaesthetised, blank. I kept expecting him to come home. I think he would have left Rafah within 48 hours of his final entry in his journal.” His final entry was on the morning of the day he was shot.
From the beginning, the Hurndalls worried that there could be a cover-up. The first news reports, heard by an Israeli friend on the radio station Kol-Israel, said a man wearing military fatigues had been shooting at a watchtower. “Even days later no one from the Israeli army or Israeli government had been in touch with us,” says Hurndall. “So that in itself spoke volumes. We really felt this draught of silence.” At the hospital, one doctor suggested that Tom’s head injury “was commensurate with a blow from a baseball bat”, even though on his notes it clearly said “gunshot wound”, with an entry point and exit point – as though someone was suggesting that the injury had been caused at close range and so not from the watchtower.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, held Tom up as a hero. Hurndall received a letter from Yasser Arafat praising her son. “I do understand something of the mentality of the need to make Tom an icon, a martyr,” she says. “Having seen the level of Palestinian desperation myself, you would grasp at people who seemingly have taken up your cause and suffered because of it, and you idolise them because they represent hope.”
It was shortly after seeing Tom in hospital for the first time that she took her first trip into Rafah. “I remember the faces of the women and the men and the grandfathers, which spoke of such a worn kind of loss. Life was very, very hard. I definitely had a feeling that they were thinking, ‘Here’s this shocked western family. Do they know that this happens to us every day and we live under the threat of it happening every minute?’ I remember really wanting to find a way of saying ‘I understand’.”
Tom’s father, Anthony, a lawyer, set about collecting witness statements and writing his own report into his son’s death, an attempt to get the Israeli army to accept accountability. It was intensely frustrating. The report the Israeli army produced was amateurish, the incident itself reduced to simplistic scenarios including the idea that Tom was hit by a Palestinian gunman, or that he was even the gunman himself. Little of what they said tallied with the many witness statements that Anthony had collected. The map they produced to show where it had happened was out of date, and they had got the location of where Tom had been shot wrong. The Israeli army said they had fired a single shot; witnesses stated there had been at least five shots, maybe as many as eight.
The Hurndalls’ requests for a meeting with Israeli officials went unanswered until, on the day they were due to fly Tom home, they were granted a meeting at the ministry of foreign affairs. Major Biton, the Israeli soldier in charge of the inquiry, insisted that the army couldn’t have seen Tom from the watchtower, saying buildings were in the way of the window where the soldier was standing. Anthony calmly pointed out that there was a surveillance platform on the top of the tower, and that visibility would have been perfect. When he asked for CCTV footage to prove it, he was told there was no footage, although a camera could clearly be seen on the photographs of the tower Tom had taken. Anthony raised the shootings of two young Palestinian men who had been shot within 48 hours of Tom’s shooting, in the same area. “It was clear that Anthony had mentioned the unmentionable,” writes Hurndall. “The shooting of a young Englishman was one thing, but to mention the shooting of young Palestinians was quite another.”
The Israeli government eventually sent a cheque to pay for the repatriation (though it covered only a fraction of the cost), but they did not admit liability. The cheque, for £8,370, bounced. Compensation and damages are still an issue.
When the Hurndalls met Rachel Corrie’s parents, their experience was painfully familiar. The Corries said the doctor who did the autopsy had claimed that her death had been caused by tripping over, though as her father pointed out, “I would like to ask the doctor how many times he’s seen somebody with broken ribs, breaks in her spinal column, crushed shoulder blades and cut lungs just from tripping.”
The British government wasn’t much help. Despite assertions that it had “repeatedly pressed the Israeli government for a full and transparent inquiry”, the Hurndalls felt this was hollow. When the Hurndalls met Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, they found him remote and cold. Blair never publicly condemned the shooting. On top of all this, she received anonymous phone calls and letters calling her a “Nazi-lover” for questioning the Israeli authorities.
With a son in hospital wasting away, and three grieving children at home, how did she cope? “I don’t think I did. I made sure there was food in the fridge and I didn’t crack up. As a mother, you’re used to getting in there if there’s a problem and suddenly I couldn’t get in there. Suddenly motherhood seemed distanced and that is terrible. Grief is such that you do have to do it on your own. The only way that I could grieve for Tom was to uncover who he was and to think about my relationship with him. And to untangle this complex bundle of tragedy.”
The fight still isn’t over. Taysir Walid Heib, a soldier in the Israeli army, was put on trial for shooting Tom, and it was unbearable. A medical witness called by the Israeli army suggested that Tom’s death had nothing to do with the shooting and had been a result of negligence by the British hospital. He even implied that the family had been complicit in Tom’s death. Another medical witness agreed – he claimed Tom’s death had not been caused by pneumonia, but by an overdose of morphine and that this was the fault of British doctors. It was so ludicrous that it strengthened the prosecution.
In June 2005, Taysir, a Bedouin sergeant, was convicted of manslaughter and, in August, was sentenced to eight years, the longest sentence an Israeli soldier has been given for killing a civilian since the start of the second intifada. “It was limited justice,” says Hurndall. “He did break the so-called rules of engagement. On the other hand, he was in a culture where there are very loose rules of engagement and their senior commanders turn a blind eye.” An Arab, Taysir could neither read nor write Hebrew, and had a learning disability. Although the Bedouins are marginalised in Israel, some do volunteer for the army, although they tend to be sent to the most dangerous zones and career progression is rare. “I was convinced that Tom was the victim of a victim,” Hurndall writes. “That it was the policy-makers who had put Taysir in this position, who should be on trial.” The family are hoping there will be further arrests up the chain of command and they have yet to receive a public apology.
But is it getting easier? “It is less mad, less chaotic, less muddled. There are fewer distractions. It feels like coming to the edge of a cliff. I went to Fred’s school to watch him playing football and I was in heaven. I don’t mean because Tom had been at the same school and also played football in the same way, had the same long legs. I mean that I’ve come to value those moments so much more. What happened really put a focus on every minute of life, so in some ways it has made our lives more vibrant. It seems terrible that it has taken that. But life matters even more than it did”.
