Palestinians capture violence of Israeli occupation on video
In a graphic and hard-hitting film Peter Beaumont speaks to Palestinians
filming abuse from settlers and Israeli armed forces
* Peter Beaumont in Ni'ilin
* guardian.co.uk,
* Wednesday July 30 2008
Link to this video
An Israeli child from a far-right settler group in the West Bank city of Hebron
hurls a stone up the stairs of a Palestinian family close to their settlement
and shouts: "I will exterminate you." Another spits towards the same family.
Another settler woman pushes her face up to a window and snarls: "Whore!"
They are shocking images. There is footage of beatings, their aftermath, and
the indifference of Israel's security forces to serious human rights abuses.
There is footage too of those same security forces humiliating Palestinians –
and most seriously – committing abuses themselves.
They are contained in a growing archive of material assembled by the Israeli
human rights organisation B'Tselem in a remarkable project called Shooting Back.
The group has supplied almost 100 video cameras to vulnerable Palestinian
communities in Hebron, the northern West Bank and elsewhere, to document and
gather evidence of assaults and abusive behaviour – largely by settlers.
"We gave the first video camera out in Hebron [in January 2007]," says Diala
Shamas a Jerusalem-based researcher with B'Tselem. But the project took off in
earnest, however, in January this year.
The video is sometimes chaotic, jumpy. Sometimes only the audio is captured and
a pair of soldiers' boots.
But what it documents in all its rough reality is the experience of occupation
on a daily basis for the most vulnerable families and communities – giving a
voice to those who have been voiceless for so long.
"Right now we have about 100 video cameras," adds Shamas. "The largest number
are in the Hebron region where the most frequent complaints of settler attacks
are. And recently in the northern area and the region next to the [building] of
the [separation] wall where there are demonstrations."
She explains the reason for introducing the Shooting Back project.
"The project started as response to the need to gather evidence. We were
constantly filing complaints to no avail on the basis of lack of evidence, or …
we don't know the name of the settler.
"Now we are going back and forth with our video-cassettes to [Israeli] police
station begging them to press rewind, freeze… it is the bulk of our work. The
value of the footage is not only evidential. It also has had a remarkable value
in terms of advocacy and campaigning.
'We quickly realised the media value of this footage. It is maybe an
overstatement but we started bridging this gap between what was happening in
the occupied Palestinian territories and what the Israeli public can see.
"There was a conspiracy of silence surrounding settler violence in particular.
This footage is shocking to Israelis.'
And in particular it has been two pieces of video, shot by Palestinians this
year and released by B'Tselem, that have gained massive international attention
by throwing the issue of human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian
territories back into the spotlight.
The first was footage of a group of four hooded settlers from the settlement of
Susya armed with what look like pickaxe handles brutally beating a group of
Palestinian farmers.
The second – not taken as part of Shooting Back programme – but supplied to
B'Tselem by a 17-year-old schoolgirl from the village of Ni'ilin earlier this
month showed a protester against the building of the West Bank barrier on his
village's land being shot in the foot by an Israeli soldier with a plastic
bullet as he was held blindfold and bound.
The protester was Ashraf Abu Rahma, aged 27. The video was shot by Salam Kanaan
aged 17. A constant presence at the demonstrations in the Palestinian villages
in the rocky hills of the West Bank, Ashraf is employed by the villages as a
watchman on land that is threatened with being taken from the Palestinian
villages for the building of the West Bank barrier.
He says he was unaware of what was happening to him until almost the moment
before he was shot and wounded in the foot.
It is only when he saw the video too that he was able to understand what
happened to him.
Arrested during a demonstration against the West Bank barrier in Ni'ilin on
July 7 he recalled last week being almost immediately blindfolded.
"They had rounded up the foreigners [from the International Solidarity
Movement] and arrested me and another guy separately.
"They put me in a jeep and started cursing me, hitting me and using bad
language in Hebrew and Arabic. It had never occurred to me that they would
shoot.
"They held me in the sun for a long time. Later I heard them discussing what
they were going to do with me.
"I recall hearing a conversation about how to shoot me. What I recall is the
words rubber bullet, rubber bullet... I was blindfolded so I was only aware of
their aggression.
"It was only when I saw Salam's video that I understood what happened to me.
The guy touching me on my right shoulder before I was shot.
"Just before it happened they said they're going to beat me. They said they
were going to send me to hell. They know me because I've been to every protest."
Ashraf claims the abuse continued even when he was on the ground after the shot
was fired. "When I asked for medical attention they said: this is nothing, we
are going to beat you more."
Although the Israeli military's version is that the shooting was a
misunderstanding of the orders given by the lieutenant colonel on the scene —
and that the aim was only to "frighten" Ashraf examination of the footage makes
it hard to credit that version.
Eyad Haddad, B'Tselem's Ramallah-based field researcher who tracked down the
footage of Ashraf's punishment shooting, believes that the project has helped
supply crucial evidence in documenting abuses.
"These events that happen are often so distant, or happen in the middle of the
night, where there is no media.
"Where we've seen there is a lot of violation from the settlers and especially
where there are demonstrations happening and we want to monitor the Israeli
soldier's behaviour we are distributing video cameras.
"It is having a good effect and it will stop the violations."
Haddad says the organisation is now trying to encourage people living in areas
of confrontation to use their own cameras — if they have them – or mobile
phones to film potential abuses that they encounter.
"We want to encourage a mentality to use the cameras. It is the only weapon
that the civilians have."
According to Diala Shamas the recent high international profile of the footage
shot of the settler beating in Susya and the shooting of Ashraf Abu Rahma has
meant that the group has not only been inundated with requests for cameras from
Palestinian communities, but those who already have cameras supplied by
B'Tselem are shooting more footage of their day to day experiences.
"In the beginning we were almost begging people to take the cameras with them
when they went out. They didn't see the use of it. But after the media coverage
over the Susya incident… we've gotten a flood of requests for our video
cameras. And those who have got the cameras are using them much more
frequently."
Commenting on the Ni'ilin footage she said: "It is one of the biggest victories
because it is the troops not the settlers. It is not just a 'rotten apple'
which is usually the response that we get from the government spokespeople. We
didn't give out 100 video cameras to document rotten apples. It was to show
there was something systematic happening and it was structural to the
occupation.
"In this case it was remarkable that it was actually the soldiers themselves.
They did in fact open an investigation.
"They couldn't ignore it."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/30/israelandthepalestinians
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