THE HANDSTAND

THE HANDSTAND

FEBRUARY 2004

What price a life?
The Israeli army shot my son, and the toll continues to rise

Jocelyn Hurndall
Saturday January 10, 2004 Saturday January 10, 2004 The Guardian

In the pensive hours of the night, I am struck by the varying values that mankind chooses to allot
to life - as was my son Tom.

Earlier this month, I read with mixed feelings the news that local Palestinian militia had dynamited
an Israeli defence force watchtower in the town of Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. It was from this
watchtower, which has been responsible for untold misery to many innocent families in Rafah,
that Tom was shot in the head last April. At the time he was trying to help Palestinian children
to safety. He now lies in a vegetative state in a hospital in London with no hope of recovery.

This week we learned that the Israeli soldier who has been arrested for the shooting is alleged
to have smoked cannabis with his battalion. As last year was drawing to a close, a phone call
from the British Foreign Office informed me that, under interrogation, this soldier has confessed
to shooting my son, knowing he was an unarmed civilian. He claimed that the shot was meant as
a "deterrent". From what? From rescuing children? Had he been so conditioned that an act of
humanity could only inspire in him such a violent reaction?

I felt no sense of relief then but, for the first time, allowed myself to feel increasing anger.
The IDF's inability to differentiate between friend and foe, truth and untruth, and to see
themselves as they are seen, is clear to all.

I read the observations recorded in Tom's Middle-East journals. They show a young man
determined to be open-minded, to understand and, above all, to make a difference. He had
come to understand, as we do now, the customary illegal, inhuman retribution exacted by the
IDF from this particular watchtower on the local community, little realising how it was to leave
him a thread away from death.

It seems that life is cheap in the occupied territories. Different value attached to life depends
on whether the victim happens to be Israeli, international or Palestinian. This has been
exemplified recently by the reaction of the Israeli public to the shooting of an Israeli peace
activist, fresh out of his three-year military police service, demonstrating against the illegal
"security" fence. Two days later an announcement was made that a military police inquiry
was to be held into the shooting. Questions were raised in the Knesset. This is in stark
contrast to the six months of campaigning that it took for an inquiry to be launched into the
shooting of Tom.

There have been thousands of killings in Palestine since the intifada, with only a handful having
the benefit of an investigation. Now, a three-week occupation of Nablus (the largest city in
Palestine) has left a further 19 people dead and dozens of homes and buildings destroyed,
leaving scores of innocent people homeless, all on a pretext of searching for a terror suspect.

When will those responsible accept that it is illegal to collectively and obsessively punish a
whole community? Has the hard-nosed Sharon government made connections between the
horror of the Holocaust and the current brutal incursions? Countless insightful Israelis,
Palestinians and people the world over have done so. Is it surprising that Israel was voted
the most dangerous threat to world peace in a recent European Union poll?

It hurts me to hear the deafening silence of our own government. How can there have been
no statement of condemnation or condolence for the innocent victims of Israel's mindless
violence from our own prime minister, Tony Blair? The silence was only broken when on
Christmas day the United States president "strongly condemned" the actions of the suicide
bombers responsible for killing four Israeli soldiers at a bus stop just outside Tel Aviv. Does
this double standard not underline the lack of regard in which both the British and US
governments hold Palestinian life?

So I have questions to ask of Tony Blair. Does he regard the children of Palestine as children
of a lesser god? Does he accept that such inaction is tantamount to complicity in the process
of destroying any peace initiative in the Middle East? Mr Blair, you know now that an Israeli
soldier has confessed to shooting in cold blood an unarmed British citizen who was trying to
shepherd children away to safety. When will you be ready to openly condemn these actions?

· Jocelyn Hurndall is on the committee of the Thomas Hurndall Foundation, which campaigns
for justice for the Palestinian people

PALESTINIAN CHILDREN HONOR TOM HURNDALL

[Rafah, GAZA] Today at 11am about 150 children from the Children's
Parliament along side Palestinians and Internationals working with the ISM
and a member of the Madison / Rafah Sister City Project joined together
today to commemorate the life and passing of Thomas Hurndall.

Thomas Hurndall at the age of 22 succumbed to his injuries on Tuesday,
January 13 in a London hospital, nine months after he was shot in the head
from an Israeli sniper tower on the border of Rafah, whilst attempting to
remove children from the line of Israeli fire.

Children and Internationals carried signs protesting the war crimes
committed by the Israeli military against unarmed Palestinian civilians and
children. Chants in Arabic celebrated "the life and heroic death of the
martyr Thomas Hurndall".
Mourners then placed flowers on the site where Tom had been shot, beside a
roadblock about 100 meters away from an Israeli military sniper tower on the
occupation wall that divides Rafah Palestine from Rafah Sinai.

Two days ago the Israeli Army invaded this area and demolished the Towhead
Mosque just 20 meters away from the site. This mosque had been rendered
impossible to congregate in for months, due to the sniper fire directed into
it and a tank that was regularly parked next to it, shooting down the
street.

Associated Press photos attached

The Case That
Wouldn't Close,
by Sheila Samples, January 16, 2004

Tom Hurndall in Rafah, Gaza Strip, April 2003

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes
out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from
a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can
sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
~~Robert F. Kennedy (From the Tom Hurndall website)

Tom Hurndall is dead.

Nine months after being shot in the head by an Israeli soldier which left him in a coma, two months
after his 22nd birthday, and one day after his mother knelt at his bedside and whispered the good
news that his assailant had finally been arrested, Tom Hurndall's name was added to a growing, but
mostly unmentioned, unheralded and unknown list of innocents slaughtered by Ariel Sharon's brutal
IDF (Israel Defense Forces).

Sadly, neither the young British photographer's meaningful life nor his meaningless death created
a discernable blip on the world media screen. April 11, 2003 -- the day an IDF sniper atop a
tower in Rafah took careful aim with a telescopic lens and put a bullet into Hurndall's forehead
-- was just another day in Gaza wherein the streets and alleys of its towns are strewn with the
dead, most of whom are guilty of the heinous crime of daring to breathe while Palestinian.

According to Israeli officials, outsiders such as Hurndall, spurred to action by a love of humanity
and by outrage at continuous, brutal, unchallenged attacks upon that humanity, put themselves in
the crossfire. They are to blame for their own demise.

Stuff happens. Case Closed.

Hurndall joined the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) peace organization just a week
prior to the attack. According to his mother, Jocelyn, entries in his journal indicate that it was
obvious from his arrival that it was open season on international peace activists.

"Within his first two hours in Rafah he was shot at repeatedly," she said. " He said they had huge
bulldozers coming at them, sand bombs thrown at them and gas..."

It must be true. Just a week before, on April 5, 2003, Brian Avery, 24, from Albuquerque, New
Mexico, was critically injured in a hail of machine-gun fire in Jenin from an advancing Israeli
armored personnel carrier, although he stood in his orange ISM jacket with arms raised above
his head. Eyewitnesses say after shooting Avery in the face, the driver of the APC rolled on by,
unconcerned that an unarmed civilian lay in the road behind him in a pool of blood. An IDF
investigation revealed it was a regrettable "accident." Case closed.

And earlier, on March 16, 23-year-old peace activist Rachel Corrie, a university student from
Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death in Rafah by an Army bulldozer as she attempted
to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. A mere three months later, after a military police
investigation, Israel's Military Advocate General, Major General Menahem Finkelstein, found
there was no misconduct on the part of the bulldozer driver -- in fact they had been so certain
of his innocence, he was back at work the next day, mindlessly destroying the homes and lives
of Palestinians. Finkelstein found that Corrie and other ISM victims were guilty of "illegal,
irresponsible and dangerous" behavior. Case closed.

What is going on here? Why is there a blanket of silence from countries whose citizens are slain
in broad daylight in defiance of international law, backed up with crime-scene photographs and
legions of eye-witnesses? Since when does the United States government refuse to investigate
the obvious cold-blooded murder of its citizens -- refuse to respond to parents who seek their
help? Why are there no bellows of outrage from the British government, not only for Tom Hurndall,
but for 54-year-old Iain Hook, who headed the UN program to rebuild Jenin and was shot in
the back and killed in November 2002?

Edward Said (1935-2003), Palestinian-born Columbia professor and intellectual conscience of
the Middle East, has answered that question many times over. In a penetrating piece in the
May 6, 2002 issue of The Nation, Said pointed out, "the monstrous transformation of an entire
people by a formidable and feared propaganda machine into little more than militants and terrorists
has allowed not just Israel's military, but its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible history
of injustice, suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people
with impunity."

The diabolically astute "let's kill the Palestinians and torture everybody else" Alan Dershowitz
seems to back up Said's premise. Dershowitz has come up with a road map to peace he says
is guaranteed to curb terrorism. He says -- now, stay with me here -- there's no reason for
Palestinians to die one at a time by blowing themselves up. Israel should publish a list of all the
villages inhabited by Palestinians -- sort of a "to do" destruction-derby list. Then, any time there's
an "act of terrorism," Israel would just destroy an entire village. The inhabitants would be given
a couple of hours to vacate their property.

Speaking of property, Dershowitz has an even better idea if the first one doesn't fly. He says Israel
could announce in advance that "every act of terrorism will result in an automatic and permanent
decrease of a specific portion of the land mass that eventually would constitute the Palestinian state."
In the event of a terrorist act, Dershowitz says, that land would be immediately annexed to Israel
and become a permanent part of the Jewish state. Neat, huh? Sounds like a plan to me...

With plans like that floating around, is it any wonder that investigations into the deaths of peace
activists are open and closed in such a cavalier fashion? Do we not at least sense why the world
remains shamefully silent? Palestinians -- and those who would protect them -- are, in Said's
words, "nothing but rats and cockroaches that can be attacked and killed...without so much as
a word of compassion or in their defense..."

In May 2003, just four months before he succumbed to lukaemia, Said met with Rachel Corrie's
parents during one of his cross-country lecture jaunts. They told him that, upon returning to
the US with their daughter's body, they immediately sought out their US senators, Democrats
Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, and told them their story. After receiving expressions of
shock, outrage, and anger as well as promises of investigations, the two legislators returned to
Washington. The Corries never heard from them again. The promised investigation simply
didn't materialize.

"As expected," Said explained, "the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both
women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client
state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had
been promised her family."

Yet, the Hurndalls refuse to remain silent. They refused to accept an initial IDF report
exonerating Israeli soldiers from blame. The case of Tom Hurndall became the case that
wouldn't close. After relentless campaigning and exerting pressure upon both Britain
and Israel, and after launching a months-long investigation on their own, which yielded
14 eye-witnesses, photographs and ballistic evidence, Israel arrested Sgt Idier Wahid Taysir just one day before Hurndall died, and charged him with aggravated assault, and promised a "vigorous" investigation.

According to the UK Telegraph, which obtained a copy of the indictment, Taysir first shot Hurndall, radioed his commander for permission to shoot, and then went to great lengths to cover up his crime.

Thus far, the IDF investigation has "discovered" that Taysir was a Bedouin Arab -- a cannabis user and rogue Arab assassin who is certainly not up to the honorable standards of the IDF.

Even with Israel's dismal track record on investigating its own atrocities,and although .Israel has refused the request of Scotland Yard detectives to assist in the investigation, one can always hope that Tom did not die in vain; that he will receive the justice and honor he so richly
deserves. And -- by extension -- so will the valiant Rachel, Iain and Brian.

Only then will the case be closed.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma freelance writer, a former US Army Public Information Officer
and Axis of Logic contributing editor. Contact Ms. Samples at: sheila@axisoflogic.com.

Reprint permission is granted if it includes name of author and
Axis of Logic designation and http://www.axisoflogic.com.

Two young brothers living in the home that Tom Hurndall had chosen to protect,
in a photo taken by Tom on 10 April 2003, one day before he was killed. (Tom Hurndall/ISM)