B'Tselem: views to a kill

A teenager videos the shooting of an unarmed demonstrator; a woman records a mob attacking her house... as the world focuses on Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are filming the reality of occupation – using camcorders provided by sympathetic Israelis.

By Matt Rees

 

16 Jan 2009

 

From the first-floor balcony of her brother's house, Salaam Amira points out where the demonstrators stood, facing the Israeli checkpoint at the entrance to her village, Ni'ilin. Mainly young men, they had gathered among the rocks to protest against the route of a new fence Israel is building on Palestinian farmland. Near Ni'ilin the fence cuts through some old olive groves, including those owned by Salaam's father.

The delicate-featured 17-year-old shows me her Sony Handycam and tells me that, on that day last July, she pressed 'record', directing the lens towards the demonstrators. She focused on a youth with longish, curly hair and a lime-green T-shirt. He held a Palestinian flag in one hand and flashed a victory sign with the other. Soon the Israeli soldiers left their jeeps and moved among the rocks, scattering the protesters. They caught the youth, Ashraf Abu Rahman, brought him back to the checkpoint, handcuffed him and tied a blindfold around his head.

For a while, Salaam remembers, she filmed the young man as he sat in the hot sun beside one of the waist-high concrete blocks the army uses to make a little slalom in the road, slowing down cars for security checks.

Then an Israeli officer, a lieutenant-colonel, took Abu Rahman to the back of his jeep. Salaam continued to film. It appeared that the officer ordered a tall soldier to take aim at the youth, unsuspecting behind his blindfold, while he held his elbow. The soldier fired, the officer and another soldier flinched at the gun's report, and Abu Rahman collapsed.

The youth sat up, grimaced, and went back down, wiggling his foot. He had been shot at point-blank range with a rubber-coated bullet, which army guidelines state ought not to be used at a range of less than 80 ft.

Salaam's brother smuggled a copy of her tape to the Israeli human-rights organisation B'Tselem, which sent it to the Israeli media. It caused a scandal in Israel.

Telling the world about Israeli abuses is what B'Tselem does. A Jewish organisation run by Israelis, it is, nevertheless, one of Israel's most strident critics. Its latest project involves handing out camcorders to 150 Palestinians in the West Bank, people like Salaam, and encouraging them to chronicle the abuse they suffer, either at the hands of Israeli soldiers or Jewish settlers living in the occupied territories.

B'Tselem has also investigated cases of 'extra-judicial executions' and 'negligent homicide' by Israeli soldiers, and campaigned against the torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails.

Since Israel began ground operations in Gaza, the organisation has been posting to its website daily reports on Palestinian casualties and testimony from Gazans. It condemned the army's killing of a leading Hamas figure as 'against the laws of war', because the attack also killed members of the man's family. The group has joined with other Israeli human-rights organisations to post a blog (gazaeng.blogspot.com) with information on events in Gaza which are not covered by the media. That's particularly significant given that there are very few reporters inside the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli government refuses to allow foreign correspondents to enter.

B'Tselem is also the leading opponent of the so-called 'separation barrier' that Israel began constructing in 2002 and is still extending through places such as Ni'ilin.

In fact, the Israelis who work for the organisation seem more concerned with Palestinian rights than the Palestinian Authority does. And for that reason, many in Israel detest them.

'These liberals in B'Tselem are perverted Jews, because they only take the side of the Arabs against their brothers,' says Ron Nachman, mayor of Ariel, the biggest settlement in the northern West Bank, which the Israeli Government calls Samaria. 'When the Jewish state disappears, how will they face themselves and their role in destroying the Jewish people?' And it's not just settlers who hate the organisation. In a recent poll, half of the respondents said they opposed B'Tselem. Only one in four Israelis said they supported its work.

That work, as B'Tselem staff put it, is to insist that Israelis face up to the human-rights violations carried out in their name in the West Bank and Gaza.

With 40 staff and a budget of $2 million, including money from Christian Aid and an anonymous Jewish organisation in Britain, B'Tselem was founded in 1989, during the first Palestinian intifada.

The executive director is a 40-year-old Californian with reddish bobbed hair and plain, square glasses who joined the group in 1995. Jessica Montell's story mirrors that of many other idealistic young Jews who migrate to Israel, only to discover that the place is enmeshed in a much more compromising reality than they were led to believe in their Zionist youth movements at home. For many, that realisation brings disillusion and a return to their country of origin. In Montell's case, it encouraged her to lead the fight 'to make Israel the country I thought it would be when I came here'.

In Israel, B'Tselem isn't alone in campaigning on behalf of the country's supposed enemies. In fact, there's quite an impressive list of Israeli organisations dedicated to combating what they see as the moral toll of being an occupying power. Polite ladies from MachsomWatch can be spotted sweltering at major army checkpoints on the lookout for abuses. Gisha is dedicated to combating what the army calls 'closures', keeping checkpoints and roads open so that Palestinians can move about for business or humanitarian reasons. There's Physicians for Human Rights, Planners for Planning Rights, even Rabbis for Human Rights. It's a measure of Israel's democracy that the most potent human-rights opponents of the occupation are Israelis.

B'Tselem is the rights group with the highest profile. It issues reports, but also focuses on translating its research into court judgments and reform of military regulations in the occupied territories.

Its most famous victory came in 1999, when the Israeli High Court barred the Shin Bet security service from torturing Palestinians. Earlier that decade, when B'Tselem first reported on torture in Israeli detention, its use had been widely denied by security officials and politicians.

Now, B'Tselem is making a nuisance of itself again with its camera project in the West Bank.

And there is a lot of trouble. While many settlers see themselves as suburbanites fleeing expensive Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for affordable family housing, the settlers here are often extremists driven by religious fervour, and many are prone to violent confrontation with local Palestinians.

When the tape arrives back at B'Tselem's Jerusalem office, one of three staff on the video project will have the time-consuming task of logging the events recorded on the tape. Then, it'll be loaded onto a digital archive. The B'Tselem video staff are careful not to edit the footage very much, so as to avoid accusations that they cut out exculpatory elements to make soldiers or settlers look bad. Some of the more important clips are highlighted on www.btselem.org, and those showing the more flagrant wrongdoing are distributed to Israeli media and international television stations with offices in Jerusalem.

Abu al-Rob explains the settlers' tactics. Whenever the Israeli government threatens to remove a remote hilltop outpost, he says, settlers all over the West Bank cause trouble with local Palestinians.

The intention, as stated by settler leaders, is to overwhelm the army and to persuade the politicians that halting settlement expansion is just too much of a headache. (The resolve of even centre-Left Israeli politicians to rein in the settlements has been questioned. The Israeli establishment appears to ply an ambiguous course between its international commitment to prevent the expansion of settlements and a domestic blind eye rooted in sentimental associations between today's settlers and the early Zionist pioneers in Palestine.)

B'Tselem's workers are threatened constantly. Each week the office switchboard receives insulting phone calls (normally accusations of anti-Semitism) and, about once a year, a credible enough threat of violence against the group that a complaint must be filed with the police.

But there are signs that, as the settlers become more violent and scornful of the law, the threats against B'Tselem workers are increasing. In December, after police evicted a group of hardline, mostly youthful settlers from a squat in Hebron, Montell received a series of threatening calls at her home. When the first call came, a young man's voice told her: 'You and your kids will pay for what your organisation is doing.' He continued to call for several days. It was the first time the calls had come to Montell's home and she was shaken.

Even so, Montell will not be cowed. 'Self-righteousness goes a long way,' she says, exhibiting a much better sense of humour than most earnest activist types. 'I know I'm doing the right thing.'

It is this kind of confidence that sustains Montell in the face of frequent bureaucratic obstacles thrown up by the government or setbacks in court. Very few of B'Tselem's cases – even those that accuse soldiers of unlawful killings – ever result in criminal proceedings.

Even when officials do investigate, the case normally fizzles out within six months or a year. 'Just getting a criminal case opened seems like a victory, but it so rarely goes anywhere,' Montell says. 'It can be quite discouraging.'

Even when there is evidence like the video shot by Salaam Amira, Israeli justice is often lenient. The army's judge advocate general charged the officer and the soldier who shot the Palestinian youth at close range with nothing more than 'conduct unbecoming'. B'Tselem has appealed against the charge, urging a punishment it views as more appropriate to the abuse.

Torture sneaked back into use during the second intifada without any real public protest, as Israelis, under attack from suicide bombers, swung to the Right. And last March, after a long B'Tselem campaign against the army's tactic of blowing up the homes of suicide bombers' parents – army chiefs say it deters others by showing them that their mothers and fathers would suffer for their actions.  

It is frustration with the seemingly inequitable administration of justice in the West Bank that stands behind B'Tselem's camera project. Without Salaam's footage, there wouldn't have been a charge against the soldiers in Ni'ilin. The evidence gathered by the 150 cameras B'Tselem has distributed among Palestinians makes it just a little harder for police and public prosecutors to ignore abuses.

During my visit to the West Bank, just before returning home, I met the Soufan family. As his sisters served tea, Ahmed Soufan sat in his freezing living room with the hood of his sweatshirt over his head for warmth.

When he led me outside to view the patches of grey dust where settlers burnt his olive trees before the October harvest, the sun seared out of a cloudless sky to bake his thick, craggy features.

'We have a conflict with the Israelis,' says the 24-year-old. 'But, of course, B'Tselem is Israeli. That makes me feel that Israelis are just people like us, too.'

Click here for the full article.

Tel Rumeida is a small Palestinian neighbourhood deep in the West Bank city of Hebron. Palestinian families, from whom these Zionist Jewish settlers occupied lands, live directly next to these Jewish settlers and are often virtual prisoners in their homes, subject to the settlers' violent attacks and destruction of property.  

The man with the camera is a BBC reporter. The setting is a Christian family's property in occupied Palestine (Israel).

 

In a year or two these young, angry, violent and racist “men” will more than likely become members of the Israeli Defence Force under Israel's policy of compulsory service.  Think about it .............