Just a few days after B’Tselem video captured masked Israeli settlers brutally beating a Palestinian shepherd and his wife, another Israeli human rights group, Ta’ayush, has captured more evidence of the daily abuse suffered by Palestinians at the hands of these fanatic colonists.
Midhat Abu Karsh, a teacher from the Hebron area, was out with his cousins farming land in the village of Samoa’ when they were attacked by settlers from the illegal settlement of Eshael. Midhat was beaten, then led away and tied to a telephone pole by the hands and neck. The video captures Israeli soldiers surrounding Midhat. With absolutely no danger posed to them by the shackled and beaten man, they still refrained from untying him. A settler (dressed in white) is seen speaking to the soldiers, before another settler walks right through them and kicks Midhat in the face.
That the soldiers did nothing to protect or free Midhat should come as no surprise. Even after being kicked, they still refused to untie him until the Israeli police arrived on the scene.
Last week’s attack on the shepherd family was justified by the Israeli authorities because supposedly the Palestinians had provoked the settlers by not wearing ‘Arab clothes’. I don’t know just what it is the settlers and Israeli authorities smoke when they get together to come up with excuses for their brutality, but its some strong shit. They defended this beating by claiming that Midhat set fire to some fields in the area.
Lemme break it down:
1. Israeli settlers steal Palestinian land and resources and build illegal colonies on said land.
2. Israeli settlers actively engage in the abuse and mistreatment of Palestinians, particularly those who try to defend their land from confiscation or try to farm the land they are left with that lie near the settlements. Burning farmland is not uncommon.
3. I don’t want to say Israeli settlers set fire to the field, but, that’s what they do. Then, apparently deciding they want peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians whose land they have usurped (and burned), they attempt to defend Palestinian lands, beating up a Palestinian farmer burning his own field.
I guess we should commend them for trying though.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD2Ab8OVh48]
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What were you smoking writing the commentary for this video?
With absolutely no danger posed to them by the shackled and beaten man, they still refrained from untying him.
I can’t tell what they’re doing. It looks like a few of them bent over, behind him, where his hands were. It’s possible they didn’t know what the hell he was doing being tied to a pole. The Israeli villagers may have called the army after they captured and tied him to the pole, so the troops had to understand what they were dealing with when they first got on the scene.
If you are saying he was shackled – I don’t know how you gathered that from this video – maybe they just didn’t have a key to undo his handcuffs and needed to get that from the Israeli villagers first.
That the soldiers did nothing to protect or free Midhat should come as no surprise.
They didn’t exactly give the villagers a free hand to kick the crap out of him. As soon as he got kicked they pulled the attacker away. What did you expect them to do, shoot the villager on the spot?
Furthermore, you seem to have lost some basic facts in retelling this story that anyone with internet and google can discover.
1) Midhat was taken to a hospital and treated
2) The villagers in the attack were arrested
3) Settler leaders have criticized the beating
Compare that to a homicide bombing, when Palestinians pass around candy for the children to celebrate the murder of innocents.
Who knows who set fire to what? For you to even wade into that, without any substantiating information, is ridiculous. If I was a farmer and I thought that some prick was burning my crops I would beat the crap out of him too.
I’m sure on these West Bank fault lines between Jews and Arabs things get very personal. Based on several articles, this wasn’t the first time the Arab and the Jews had met.
Posted by Firouz | July 7, 2008, 6:27 pmHow many Palestinian women were honor killed in the time it took you to write this piece?
We’re at 90 a year now? That’s one every four days.
But here come the honor killing fanboys with their “batshit excuses”…
Posted by Anonymous | July 7, 2008, 6:44 pmHello anonymous:
* Every year in Israel an average of 17 women are murdered by their spouses; 1,500 women arrive at the ER annually due to domestic violence disputes.
* In 2004, 20,553 complaints were filed of violence between spouses
– an increase of 0.7% compared to the previous year, a fact which increases continuously.
* There are 14 shelters in Israel for abused women and 10 assistance centers for the sexually abused
– most referrals are due to rape, sexual harassment and adultery. Most acts are committed by those known to the victim.
* 1 in every 3 women goes through sexual harassment in her life. Israeli police report that every 12 hours a woman is raped and every 4 hours sexual harassment is committed.
Posted by Anonymous | July 7, 2008, 7:57 pmFirouz:
Congratulations on the largest, most comprehensive slice of batshit yet seen on Kabobfest…
“Who knows? I can’t telll… It’s not clear…. what can you really see?”
Just to make it simple for you: Whatever degree the crime, whatever your tortured explanations for it, whether they kicked him, shackled him or danced a fucking tango with him, the crime is their mere presence in the West Bank.
The fascist thuggery that follows is merely the racist icing on the stolen cake.
Clear, batshit?
Posted by Lowfields | July 8, 2008, 12:44 amAnd now we finally get to the truth of the matter…
the crime [of the Jews] is their mere presence in the West Bank
You anti-semitic little bitch. You people dare speak of discrimination of Arabs in Israel, while demanding racial purity for your own failed society.
Jewish villages will expand. Jewish families will continue to pour into the West Bank and build homes, farms, and technology incubators. Jews will continue to thrive in Israel. All of it.
You have been fighting us to the point that your people now eat, sleep and breathe batshit, as you so eloquently put it. So keep fighting. With your violence you nullify your claim to the land.
Posted by Firouz | July 8, 2008, 8:17 amTo the anonymous with all the stats:
What you did not mention is what percentage of those statistics are actually contributed by Israeli Arabs.
-2 of the shelters you mentioned are devoted exclusively to Arab women
-2 of the shelters are for Orthodox Jewish women
-9 shelters are general use
There are over 2000 such shelters for women in the US, one of them run specifically for Arab women in Chicago, in coordination with AAAN.
Furthermore, your insinuation that the presence of shelters for women is a negative mark on the society is outrageously stupid!
Protection of women is a positive sign in society. Just because there are no such shelters in the West Bank does not mean Palestinian women are not getting beaten, raped and killed – it simply means they have no options but to accept their abuse.
Similarly, the Israeli statistics you site have been demanded by Israeli society as a metric for how to deal with the problem. Imagine getting accurate statistics on abuse of women in the West Bank, where they have NO protection under the law – civil or tribal. How many Palestinians even WANT to know what the statistics are in their community for spousal abuse?! In many Palestinian villages, beating your wife is a perfectly natural event that no one would even think twice of.
Here are stats on women murdered in Israel in 2001, from a shelter org.
No. of Victims: 28
Jewish 8 28.57%
Arab 8 28.57%
New Immigrants:
C.I.S. 8 28.57%
Ethiopia 3 10.72%
Foreign laborer: 1 3.57%
Totals 28 100.00%
Later information breaks it down by who the murderers were – husbands, boyfriends, brothers, etc.
Israeli Arabs contribute to nearly 30% of the murders, even though, based on these 2001 statistics, they are only 17.6% of the population.
We can all draw conclusions from this. The point is not that violence does not happen against women, whether in Israel or in the West Bank or in Chicago.
The point is: you don’t care about violence against women in the West Bank and Gaza. You don’t care about this violence because you see nothing particularly wrong with it; at best, it is an inconvenient distraction to your war against the Jews.
Once again, you’ve demonstrated your genuine hypocrisy on human rights. Once again, you have demonstrated a lack of credibility to speak of human rights with authority and moral clarity.
Posted by Firouz | July 8, 2008, 8:53 amIsraeli Arab Porn Video Inflames Community Passions
Amal Kashua, a 38-year-old mother of eight, was set upon by a mob last week in Tira, a prosperous Arab community in central Israel. “Yussuf,” a Palestinian known only as Amir, was beaten too. They went to hospital under police guard, then into hiding.
“The whole town is satisfied and dissatisfied at once,” said local man Fathi Sultan. “Satisfied at what happened, because we tried to protect our honor, but on the other hand dissatisfied because she (Kashua) didn’t die, nor her husband.”
Posted by Anonymous | July 8, 2008, 9:02 amFirouz, stop manipulating what other people say. Its pathetic. Lowfields didn’t say ‘Jews’ have no right to be in the West Bank. He said the settlers have no right. He is backed up by international law.
Posted by Mohammad | July 8, 2008, 2:02 pmFirouz,
Are you too ludicrous to argue with or just too bone-headedly ignorant?
Help me, so I know whether I have have pity for you or just contempt.
Jewish settlers are not coming to the West Bank as neighbours, they’re coming as armed colonising thugs, squatting on stolen land and using an apartheid system to expand their presence.
Of course, you know that already, you racist little bitch.
Posted by Lowfields | July 8, 2008, 11:33 pmJewish settlers are not coming to the West Bank as neighbours, they’re coming as armed colonising thugs, squatting on stolen land and using an apartheid system to expand their presence.
That is patently absurd. The Jews bought every inch of land in which they lived up to 1948. By waging war against them, you have voided your rights to the land, and by continuing to wage war, you continue to do so.
The Jews in the villages are “armed colonising thugs” because after 60 years of being your neighbors, every Jew on a moshav or kibbutz knows someone who was stabbed, beaten, stoned, murdered or raped by an Arab, and they refuse to be your next victim. You expect them to offer you tea and biscuits after six wars and constant threat of Arab violence?
using an apartheid system to expand their presence
Isn’t it fun to play up that double standard? Israel is a free society with a substantial Arab minority, yet they are the Apartheid state. Palestinian society is “pure”, homogeneous and tribal, yet they are the “agents of tolerance”. Whoever framed this issue first was brilliant.
I just want you to know there are many Jewish villages in the West Bank that would rather live under Palestinian rule than evacuate behind ’67 borders. I don’t know where you are, Lo, but Mo, you better get used to them.
Enjoy living with hundreds of thousands of Jews. We’ll see how many rights you extend them, how quickly they will be connected to your failing social services, and how much money you will allocate to them from your national budget.
You haven’t dealt with statehood yet. You think you can do better than Israel? Enjoy.
Posted by Firouz | July 9, 2008, 2:47 am“You think you can do better than Israel?”
I think I can do better than wasting my time arguing with someone so patently absurd.
Still, I’ll take the bait:
“The Jews bought every inch of land in which they lived up to 1948.”
Sadly, that didn’t apply to the land they assumed for themselves in either the UN Partition Plan or the war that expanded their territories. Jews owned approximately 5% of the land that ebcame Israel in 1948.
Look it up.
“The Jews in the villages are “armed colonising thugs” because after 60 years of being your neighbors…”
Er, the settler movement on the West Bank and later Gaza arrived in July 1974. That’s 34 years of being colonising racist thugs, not 60 years of being neighours.
“Israel is a free society with a substantial Arab minority…”
And what about the system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem? That’s not in Israel. It’s occupied by Israel – and they operate a system where the settlers are Israeli citizens, and their Arab “neighbours” are not. Because they’re Arabs. The settlers use roads that the Arabs can’t. Because they’re Arabs. The settlers take 85% of the West bank’s water resources. The Arabs, 80% of the population, get just 15%. Because they’re Arabs…
“Enjoy living with hundreds of thousands of Jews.”
And you enjoy living with millions of Arabs… Jerusalem gets 1% more Arab every year… the birth rates are higher, the percentage within Israel grows every year. Just think, 25 years time: racial parity.
Palestine is coming back, Firouz, it’s only a matter of time.
Tick… tick…. tick….
Posted by Lowfields | July 9, 2008, 10:32 amHahaha!
Orthodox Jewish birthrates exceed that of Palestinians. You better make your peace now. Orthodox Jews are like Arabs – they don’t see individuals, they see communities.
Israel today may tear down the home of a Palestinian terrorist. The Israel of tomorrow, with a majority Orthodox Jewish population, will hold everyone in the village accountable as a community.
If you want a real war, try starting one with Orthodox Jews. They will kill all your men and women and take the children and cattle as servants. Let me rephrase, you should NOT start a war with Orthodox Jews. Jewish Law – Halacha – relating to warfare is very clear as to how Jews must deal with those who threaten Jewish life; there is no mention of mercy or surrender in that context. I pray it never comes to that.
Jews owned approximately 5% of the land that ebcame Israel in 1948.
Yes, Jews owned just 5% of the land, and Arabs could not accept even that 5%. They pogromed Jews in villages and cities on a regular basis, often with support of the British.
The Hagganah was created because the Jewish community was being attacked by Arab gangs, and the British police refused to interfere or protect the Jewish population.
Once Arabs started a war, any territory that Jews captured no longer belonged to its original owners.
Er, the settler movement on the West Bank and later Gaza arrived in July 1974. That’s 34 years of being colonising racist thugs, not 60 years of being neighours.
Jews have been living continuously in the West Bank for 3000 years, until Arab gangs raped, looted and killed them in Hebron, Jerusalem, etc.
Even before the settler movement, it was a common thing for Jordanian or Egyptian or Syrian trained Palestinian terrorists to infiltrate a kibbutz and murder a Jewish family in their sleep. To this day if you visit some of these small communities which were once on the border, they had to build watchtowers and trenches to protect the community from Arab attack.
Regarding your statements about water rights, roads, etc., there was a reason why they were built. The Jews built on a path of least resistance. The other roads in the West Bank lead through Arab villages. When Jews traveled on these roads, they would often be attacked, the army had to be called in, it was very messy. The thought was that building roads around Arab villages instead of through them would reduce the violence by keeping the two sides separate. It was not created for Apartheid; it was designed to reduce tensions between the communities by limiting their interaction.
As you yourself said, any Israeli can travel on these roads, be they Jewish, Druze, Israeli Arab, Muslim or Christian. The point was to stay out of the villages and avoid tensions. You can spin it however way you want, but this was the intent.
As for water and other resources, these problems stem from separate and competing interests for Israel in the West Bank. On the one hand, Jews went to the West Bank and started large communities, and demanded regular government services – sewer, water, electricity, etc. In fact, such migration was encouraged to provide Israel with strategic depth in a future Arab conflict.
On the other hand, Israel never thought it would rule the West Bank and have to provide utility services for the Palestinian population. As with Sinai, it assumed the West Bank would at some point be returned to Jordan, who would then be responsible for dealing with the population. However, in 1985, Jordan explicitly abandoned any rights it had to the West Bank and left Israel holding the bag.
Then the Palestinians demanded independence, and got, in large part. After Oslo, it was assumed that now the Palestinians would be responsible for their own government services. Of course, the PLO and Fatah just stole the billions pumped into the West Bank from abroad and did little to build a public utility infrastructure, much less manage it properly.
Then the Palestinians started yet another war, and now the thinking was… they don’t want to be ruled by us, they don’t want their own state, they don’t want to build a decent society, they just want to fight us. Throw some bombs at them and put up a wall so that we don’t have to deal with them anymore.
The Security Barrier is no more apartheid than the security barrier in Northern Ireland or Cyprus, or now Iraq. It was the path of least resistance – to separate the communities and prevent constant violence. And it works! Violence is down dramatically from its height in 2002-04.
Were Palestinian terrorist organizations to continue being able to attack Israel in a meaningful way, we would continue to see forceful military response on the part of the IDF, leading to more casualties and hostilities on both sides.
The Security Barrier was a pragmatic step to a resumption of normalcy, so that the next generation could try again without a recent biter legacy of violence.
I can see how from a Palestinian activist perspective, it was useful to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of Apartheid and resistance to colonialism. However, this characterization does not represent reality, and has become a hindrance to meaningful dialog on the subject. That is, if anyone still cares about dialog.
Every activist reaches a point where the ultimate, positive resolution of the issue is of secondary importance to the activism itself. They find new reasons to continue “the struggle”, because they have lost their identity and purpose – they are defined by the act of activism itself.
At that point, a peaceful resolution of the conflict doesn’t really matter – what matters is to somehow continue the fight. This may be the case for some on this blog.
Posted by Firouz | July 9, 2008, 1:38 pmExhibit A in why Zionists are fucking crazy.
Posted by NOX | July 9, 2008, 11:29 pmSorry, Firouz, I simply haven’t the time or the energy to pick apart the utter delusions, inventions and distortions of your post, which might rank as the largest slice of nonsense ever posted on Kabobfest.
The worrying part is you probably believe it all.
It’s the weekend here in the Middle East, and I’m off to go and enjoy it.
Posted by Lowfields | July 10, 2008, 8:57 amlowfields and Nox, I admire your ability to stomach that crap. I tuned out as soon as he twisted your point that Palestinian birthrates exceed Jewish birthrates by saying ORTHODOX Jewish birthrates are higher.
Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with the original argument, which he so deftly (not) countered: the illegal and arbitrary detainment and torture of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Zionut forces
Posted by Mohammad | July 12, 2008, 6:26 am