Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Gideon Levy: Despite everything, Hebron is still Palestinian, Haaretz, Nov. 23, 2008

The Pachao family was out Saturday for a Sabbath walk. Sarah and Yosef pushed the baby carriage, and the little ones, Ahuva, Gershon, Hananel and Noah, crowded into the carriage or walked behind it. Why did you come to live here, I asked? “Because of the good air.” The Pachaos, who are members of the Bnei Menashe, immigrated from India, near the Myanmar border, 10 years ago.

They were returning from Sabbath prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, along with thousands of other Jews, who walked through the car-free street. This week’s portion was “Life of Sarah.” The Pachaos’ Asian appearance was not the only outstanding thing along the road connecting Kiryat Arba with Hebron, and its “House of Contention.”

A stranger coming to Hebron Saturday would be confused. Border Policemen speaking Amharic with settlers; their Druze friends chattering in Arabic; police, soldiers and settlers praying together in the Abraham hall; American and French Jews armed with machine guns; a sea of tents on the grass in front of the tomb structure. Above all, the surreal look of an abandoned Palestinian quarter, emptied of its inhabitants, a ghost town.

Through the protective wire fence erected to block settlers’ stones, occasionally the face of a terrified old woman, a frightened child or an embittered man would appear, shut up in their cage. It is not difficult to imagine what they felt Saturday on “Life of Sarah” Sabbath, which tells how Abraham purchased the cave for 400 pieces of silver.

The ridiculous visored cap I wore, which covered half my face to prevent the settlers from identifying me, failed in its duty. It is not good to be Gideon Levy on “Life of Sarah” Sabbath in Hebron. “Take your garbage and get out of here now,” thugs threatened here and there. But generally the Jewish quarter was very tranquil, and a “holiday atmosphere” prevailed, as they say. Only toward evening did menacing knots of young boys in their Sabbath white shirts begin to gather.

Gideon Levy, ‘The ebb, the tide, the sighs’ Haaretz, Nov. 13, 2008, Friday Magazine

The young fisherman is now in hospital, feeble and pale, one leg in a cast held in place by iron screws. He is awash with pain. His mother does not leave his bedside. A blind Palestinian physician takes him for a brief physiotherapy session in the corridor. Mohammed Masalah leans on a walker. The blind orthopedist encourages him to take one step and then another, but the pain defeats him and he asks to be taken back to bed.

The sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs, as an Israeli prime minister once said. Only the cease-fire is no longer the same cease-fire. On land and in the air it is generally maintained, but not at sea. There, Israeli forces continue to shoot at fishermen from besieged Gaza, who are trying to wrest from the sea a living that is so difficult to make on land.

Gaza’s 40,000 fishermen have been deprived of their livelihood. Before the siege, they caught 3,000 tons of fish a year; now it is 500 tons. The fishing season begins with the advent of winter, when schools of fish migrate from the Nile Delta and the waters off Turkey toward the Gaza area. But few of them are now entangled in the nets of Gaza’s fishermen. Today, most of the fish can be found about 10 miles offshore, in an area that is off-limits to the fishermen. Israel has restricted them to a six-mile limit, though sometimes navy boats attack at three miles – just to keep the fishermen honest.

The siege makes it hard to obtain fuel for the fishing vessels, and also the sea is polluted with 50 million liters of sewage every day, following the collapse of the sewage infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s fish markets are also closed to merchants from Gaza.

Gideon Levy, Yes, hate – Haaretz, October 26, 2008

My settler colleague, Israel Harel, his community’s champion at rolling his eyes, playing innocent and speaking with a honeyed tongue, is once again grieving and playing the victim. In a column published here last week (”Have we become Sodom?” October 23), he complained that the reason for what he termed destructive criticism of the settlers is hatred. And indeed, Mr. Harel, this time, you’re right: Large segments of Israeli society do indeed hate. But this is not baseless hatred, not hatred for the sake of hatred, to use your words. It is hatred for your enterprise. You have earned this hatred honestly – the only honest thing about your enterprise.

Yes, there are Israelis who do not want to see their countrymen despoiling the vineyards and burning the fields of poor farmers. Yes, there are Israelis who do not want to see troops of masked settlers beating elderly shepherds with clubs. Yes, there are Israelis who do not want to see other Israelis sicking their dogs on and puncturing the tires of the soldiers who protect them. Yes, there are Israelis who are embarrassed by the fact that tens of thousands of their fellow Israelis live on privately owned lands that were robbed, stolen and extorted, both in broad daylight and under cover of darkness.

And yes, there are Israelis who think that you have brought disaster upon us, a tragedy that will last for generations. That via your actions, you have brought wars and bloodshed and the brutalization of society upon us. That if you were not there, none of us would be there any longer, in a land that is not ours. That just as we withdrew from occupied South Lebanon – solely because, fortunately, you were not there – we would also long since have been able to withdraw from the areas you have occupied. Yes, there are Israelis who hate all this.

Harel complains about the fact that Israeli society is angry at the settlers as a collective. Unfortunately, he does not get out enough, for their enterprise is flourishing. Every class and institution of Israeli society defends the settlements, finances them from its own pockets, and is a full partner in the theft, even if some of them are disgusted by it. The collective guilt is justified: Every settler and every settlement is equal. There are no illegal outposts and legal settlements – they are all illegal, according to both international law and universal justice, which have no need of legal sophistries. There are also no moderate and extremist settlements: No one who chooses to live in occupied land is a moderate.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Blindfolded – Haaretz, October 3, 2008

Take a quick look at the photo before you. [Photo not in online English edition.] We took it last fall by chance. In the course of another interminable wait at the Hawara checkpoint, on our way to another story in Nablus, we saw this man being arrested. Bingo, the game of the checkpoint soldiers. We didn’t know his name, why he was arrested or when he’d be released, if ever. But we noticed his proud bearing – solitary, upright. His eyes were already covered by the IDF-issue flannel, the type meant for cleaning guns, and his wrists were about to be bound with plastic handcuffs. We seemed more upset by his sudden arrest than he was. After 41 years, the Palestinians are used to it, that on any ordinary day, on the way to or from work, everything might be abruptly turned upside down.

This was a routine year, another year of the occupation of which no end is in sight. From Rosh Hashana 5768 to Rosh Hashana 5769 our forces killed 584 Palestinians, 95 of them minors. Many fewer than in 2002, when 989 were killed; many more than in 2005, with 190 killed. Eighteen Israelis were also killed in the past year, many more than in the previous year, when just five were killed, and much less than in 2002, when 184 Israelis were killed. All in all, an average year for bloodshed.

All of this was observed by Israeli society with eyes covered. Even the nearly 60 Palestinians who were killed on one black summer day in Gaza barely earned a mention in the newspapers. With eyes covered, Israeli society continued to look at the routine of the occupation, the mothers in labor who lost their babies at checkpoints, the farmers victimized by lawless settlers, the night raids, the unemployment, the poverty and the hope that died long ago.

In the past year we’ve barely heard about life under siege in Gaza. For two years now, we, the handful of Israeli journalists who seek to fulfill their journalistic mission, have been prohibited by Israeli orders from entering Gaza. When I questioned Defense Minister Ehud Barak a few weeks ago he seemed unaware of the ban. He instructed an aide to look into it, but of course we never heard back. us. It’s not all that surprising that Israel’s defense minister hasn’t heard about Israeli journalists being prevented from covering Gaza under orders from his own defense establishment: Gaza doesn’t interest anyone in Israel.

And so another year has passed, and our eyes remain blindfolded.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Dead on arrival, Haaretz, September 19, 2008

Nothing helped. Not the pleas, not the cries of the woman in labor, not the father’s explanations in excellent Hebrew, nor the blood that flowed in the car. The commander of the checkpoint, a fine Israeli who had completed an officers’ course, heard the cries, saw the women writhing in pain in the back seat of the car, listened to the father’s heartrending pleas and was unmoved. The heart of the Israeli officer was indifferent and cruel. For over an hour, he would not let the car with the young woman in labor pass through the Hawara checkpoint on the way to the hospital in Nablus. Not to Tel Aviv; but to Nablus; not for shopping, not for work; but to get to the hospital in an emergency. Nothing helped.

Nahil Abu-Rada is not the first woman to lose her baby this way because of the occupation, and she won’t be the last. At least a half-dozen checkpoint births that ended in death have been documented here over the years, and nothing has changed. No punishments, no lessons, not even a request for forgiveness from parents who lose their children because of the coldheartedness of soldiers.

The occupation kills – never has this slogan sounded so true as on that night, two weeks ago, at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus. No convoluted excuse or explanation from the Israel Defense Forces spokesman (military sources were quoted the day after the incident, making this outrageous comment: “This baby would have died anyway”) can erase the simple, chilling fact that for officers and soldiers in the occupation army we have established, human feeling has become alien, at least when it comes to Palestinians. Or the fact that there are still officers and soldiers in the IDF who behave with such lack of feeling toward a woman in labor who is about to lose her child.

What went through the mind of the officer who refused to let Nahil pass? He saw her in agony, he heard her husband’s desperate pleas, and he surely knows how children come into this world and how they can leave it just as easily, without lifesaving medical treatment.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Caught on camera – Haaretz, August 28, 2008

This is Israeli justice in a nutshell: Lt. Col. Omri Burberg, the battalion commander suspected of giving an utterly illegal order to shoot a bound Palestinian, is wandering free and being considered for a senior training post in the Israel Defense Forces. Meanwhile, Jamal Amira, the father of Salam, the amateur camera operator who filmed the shooting, spent 26 days in an Israeli jail, until a military judge was so kind as to release him on bail last week.

“Although the claim that the IDF sought revenge is weak,” wrote Lt. Col. Yoram Haniel, the military judge, “one cannot overlook the fact that out of all the protestors, only the complainant was arrested.”

Indeed, it can’t be overlooked. Jamal Amira was arrested just after after B’Tselem released the video, filmed by his daughter, of the horrible shooting of the bound Palestinian man. He says that when the Border Police officers arrested him, they called out to one another, “We caught Salam’s father.” Amira, 53, a father of nine, has many Israeli friends, including a senior IDF reserves officer. Amir was thrown into Ofer Prison in what can only be interpreted as an act of revenge by those who presented themselves as “friends of Omri.”

In Na’alin, the village presently embroiled in a resolute and brave civil struggle over the remainder of its land, on which Israel seeks to build the separation fence, celebrated Amira’s release this week.

Gideon Levy / The last of the dreamers of peace – Haaretz, August 28, 2008

It was a Saturday afternoon in the late 1980s. We entered The Voice of Peace’s rickety Subaru truck and drove to Gaza to Mahmoud Zahar’s house. Afternoon coffee with the Hamasnik, just imagine. Imagine that once it was possible to visit Zahar on a Saturday afternoon. Just think  there once was a man here who dreamed of peace.

Picture a pilot who never drove a car. All those things sound like hallucinations now, even more than they used to.

Abie Nathan was perhaps the only Israeli who felt guilty about 1948. As a volunteer pilot from overseas he had bombed Palestinian villages and then wanted to make up for it. He didn’t shoot and whine about it but actually tried to make amends.

Today that sounds like science fiction. Israeli? Very doubtful. He lived among us for decades, but Abie dreamed in English and thought in Hindi. He helped Palestinian children, but also hastened to every disaster area in the world. In that, too, he was perhaps the last Israeli who saw compassion and aid as global notions. Our Mother Teresa.

Like another central figure in the Israeli peace movement, Uri Avneri (may he live long), he was both a bohemian and an ideologist. No party was comparable to Nathan’s roof parties in North Tel Aviv’s Zirelson Street. Nobody could be as treacherous as us, who lived it up at his parties and then abandoned him after he became sick and wheelchair-ridden many years ago. There are dozens of people around town who should feel deeply guilty today for neglecting him so criminally, including this writer.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / ‘Tossed out like a dog’ – Haaretz, August 21, 2008

In the lawless South Hebron Hills, things are wild as usual: The settlers continue to attack shepherd children with clubs and stones, to steal their sheep and to make their lives miserable, while the Israel Police continue to abuse anyone who tries to file a complaint against the settlers.

Mahmoud Abu Kabaita, whose children and flocks were the targets of settlers from Beit Yatir and Susia, was left outside the Kiryat Arba police station in the burning sun for four hours, until they even allowed him to enter. The members of the Abu Awad family, some of whose children suffer from a serious skin disease, have already been victims of a cruel pogrom by the settlers of Asael, as described here three weeks ago. Relatives waited outside the police station for two hours, and left without filing a complaint, after being attacked once again last Shabbat. That is how the Israel Police enforces the law here.

After writing in this column about the Abu Awads, all of whose meager property was destroyed and looted by the rioters from Asael, some readers offered to help the penniless family. One prominent figure, who is well known in the political establishment and not necessarily from the left, and who wanted to remain anonymous, gave the family a personal financial contribution which is considered huge by local standards. There was great joy in the miserable encampment, but it was short-lived: Last Shabbat the children and their sheep were attacked once again by the Asael people. A wonderful way to welcome the “Sabbath bride,” as is customary every week.

The Abu Kabaitas, whom Israel decreed would have to live outside the separation fence, along with and adjacent to Beit Yatir, were not very fortunate either. They were also attacked by rioters from the neighboring settlement. They were also abused by the Israel Police, which are supposed to protect them.

Thus there exists, with a distance of an hour and a half from Tel Aviv, a region with its own rules: The settlers rampage as much as they please, and the police don’t lift a finger and even treat the victims of the violence rudely when they want to complain. In the past weeks, as everyone knows, the rioting has mounted, for some reason, but for the police it’s business as usual.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Free passage, Haaretz, August 7, 2008

She walks from the pool to the stylish portico of the Bethlehem Intercontinental, a bikini showing beneath shorts and a revealing shirt. There’s an anklet on her leg, her hair is dyed a reddish brown, and she’s holding a French Gauloise cigarette and a red cell phone. She has come for a weekend at the Intercontinental, for a wedding: When you drink you don’t drive, so she stayed at the luxurious hotel, five stars at $130 a night, which was bustling with vacationers – Israeli Arabs from Haifa.

She is not allowed to be in Bethlehem, where we met her; she is not allowed to visit Ramallah, where she has been living for years; she is not allowed to travel to the beach in Tel Aviv, as she does several times a week during the summer; and she is not allowed to go to Jerusalem for entertainment or work purposes, yet is there almost every day. She is in the north, but her heart and her family are in the south. A native of Rafah, she arrived 16 years ago to study at Bir Zeit University and has been stuck in Ramallah ever since, far from her loving family. She carries a “Gaza ID card” and despises the whole idea of it. It is supposed to be impossible for her to live in the West Bank and travel in Israel. At any given moment, at any checkpoint, she is liable to find herself expelled back to Rafah. That’s how it’s been for all these years.

Courageous and determined, she has built a full life for herself, between the checkpoints. “Anyone who was born near the sea can’t live without it,” she told me when we sat over coffee in the lobby of the Intercontinental. Her “passport,” she wrote me a few days ago, cost her $300 and was worth it: Elegant and confident, with her Giorgio Armani sunglasses, she passes through all the checkpoints.

Areej Hijazi lives without borders. But her longings for her parents, her siblings and her relatives, and for her childhood landscapes in Rafah, repeatedly arouse in her a sadness that is reflected in her eyes.

A few days ago she sent me an e-mail on behalf of a group of Gazans who are stuck in Ramallah: “As for Gaza, it is a one-way ticket; we can go back there without ever dreaming of coming back to the West Bank! … We missed the opportunity to have a normal life that all people around us simply had and still have, just because we hold [a] so-called Gaza ID (by the way I am sick of this term); to visit your family on holidays and school vacations, to attend your siblings’, cousins’, friends’ weddings or graduations, to welcome new members into your family or bid a warm farewell to those who leave, to grow up around your beloved ones, to have your family around you in your wedding or to make your parents, while getting old, happy to see their grandchildren, to benefit from a scholarship abroad and to advance your career, to enjoy times with your parents that you simply didn’t enjoy as a rebellious teenager before you left your family home … to have your mom around you when you’re heartbroken, to complain to your father about how crazy the world is getting, to share with your sister your love stories or to chat with her about life and men and success and failure, to visit your school or to pass by those places where you had crazy childhood encounters.

“Now comes the fun part. I have what my friends call ‘the checkpoint syndrome’ – you know, those times when you feel helpless and hopeless, and where all becomes meaningless, due to pure personal reasons sometimes. I go to one of the Jerusalem checkpoints and try to pass. Why, I don’t know. It could be that at those times you need to do something crazy to regain some of your internal balance, and in my case the craziest thing ever is to challenge the so-called ‘Israeli security and checkpoints system.’ Success is 100 percent: Each time I tried to pass, I passed not only to Jerusalem, but also to Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa and Nazareth. My passport was my curly hair and the Giorgio Armani sunglasses that I bought only for the checkpoints, and guess what? I believe the $300 investment was worth it. It is so funny that I cannot see my family in Gaza for years, while I spend most of the summer swimming in Tel Aviv or having fun in Jerusalem. What a brilliant security system!

Gideon Levy, Neither an officer nor a gentleman – Haaretz, July 31, 2008

Brigadier General Moshe “Chico” Tamir is a devoted and loving father who let his 14-year-old son drive a military all-terrain vehicle. Being the law-abiding organization that it is, the Israel Defense Forces probed the incident, calling it “serious.” As a result, Tamir’s promotion may be put on hold and he may be indicted. Certainly, a brigade commander who tried to cover up his son’s accident by lying deserves to be punished. But the commander of the Gaza Brigade deserves much more for acts considerably more serious – acts that the world defines as war crimes and for which no one has been held accountable.

I would like Tamir, the dedicated father, to meet a girl the same age as his beloved son whose world fell apart when she was 14 years old. I saw her in mourning in November 2006, in the courtyard of her destroyed house in Beit Hanun. Islam Athamneh lost eight family members: Her mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins. They fled their house when it was struck by a shell and were killed by another onslaught. The legs of Abdullah, her three-year-old brother, were blown off. Islam, whose father had died years earlier, became an orphan.

The soldiers who fired the 11 shells at houses in Beit Hanun were under the command of Tamir, the dedicated dad who let his son take a Tomcar for a joyride. Some 22 people were killed in the shelling and another 40 were hurt. Most lost limbs or sustained head wounds.

It was the Gaza Brigade commander, Tamir, who was responsible for that atrocity, but the IDF quickly absolved him of blame. Instead, they placed it on a faulty electronic component in the gun barrel. It was the chip, not Chico, who was to blame. In the seven days before the heinous shelling, which violates international law, Tamir’s troops managed to kill 80 Palestinians, 40 of whom were innocent civilians, as part of Operation Autumn Clouds.

Levy, Twilight Zone / ‘Worse than apartheid’ – Haaretz, July 10, 2008

I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress; at least one of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit.

For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel – without Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, where hardly any official guests go – places that are also shunned by most Israelis.
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On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from Joseph’s Tomb to the monastery of Jacob’s Well. They traveled from Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages that have no access to the main road, and seeing the “roads for the natives,” which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.

MuzzleWatch on Ha’aretz rumors, June 3, 2008

Dear Dr Raymond Leicht and Ronit Beck,

Thank you for your letter. I’ve received five similar letters today. Some of the writers noted with concern that an aggressive campaign is being conducted against the paper based on false information. It may be the case that the disinformation is being spread out by extreme right-wing circles or perhaps it is based on a simple misunderstanding.
The substantive point is that, as part of the printed media crisis, five reporters and editors are leaving the paper in consequence of the elimination of the ‘B’ section of the paper. For the record, at least two of these hold opposite views to Meron Rapoport who is mentioned in your letter. He is indeed a talented writer, but he has been working for us for only three years, since he was sacked by Yediot Acharonot. Newspapers are trying to survive and they have two choices – increase their circulation or cut down on editorial costs. The New York Times has recently sacked 7 per cent of its reporting staff (presumably some of these would have been identified as being on the Left). Closer to home, Ma’ariv has announced that it would be cutting down its stuff by 10 per cent in the course of this year. I hope that our path will take the opposite direction, that we will succeed in convincing more people to join our readers circle. Obviously, cancellation of subscriptions will have the opposite affect and force us into further cutbacks.

The following exchange between Haim Yavin and Gideon Levy occurs in the documentary “Did You See a Green Line?”, the first of the five films in Yavin’s series “The Land of the Settlers: A Journey Log” (Tel Aviv: Telad Rony Production, distributed in the US by Americans for Peace Now). This is my rough transcript based on the English subtitles–which are imperfect. It does not convey the intense outrage we hear in Levy’s voice and see on his face in the film. But it should be enough to explain why many people respect him as much as I do.

[We see Gideon Levy going up stairs in a bombed building with a notebook under his arm]

Yavin: Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy considers his job a calling. I accompany him to one of the demolished buildings near the Muqata while he’s preparing his weekly newspaper column. Few people read his reports, perhaps because of the indifference that wore off on all of us or perhaps in response to his identifying with the Palestinians.

Yavin to Levy: Why don’t you mention the atrocities they do to us?

Levy: You want to know why? Because some things simply aren’t done. Period. Without “however” or “but.” And we do things in the Territories that shouldn’t be done. Period. And all the context and relevance…. They always say I take things out of context…. It’s not relevant. Because some things simply aren’t done. And we do things that shouldn’t be done.

Yavin: But you disregard the connection.

Levy: I don’t disregard the connection. I’m telling you [pause] that part of the connection was born right here in this rubble. And some of the terror was born here. You see? Amidst these stones. Children who see and grow up with these stones are the future suicide bombers.

Yavin: I don’t understand it Gideon. I don’t understand it. Only you are righteous? Only you have a conscience? Only you walk around the Occupied Territories? There’s an equation here that says: Wait a minute, the man is detached from his own people and he only sees the suffering of the Palestinians.

Levy: I’m here because I’m an Israeli patriot who doesn’t write about the Palestinian suffering. Absolutely not. That’s a mistake. I don’t write about Palestinian suffering. I write about the Israeli occupation, about what we do to them. But since we, with our own hands, in our name, cause this atrocity, and I have no other word for it except “atrocity”….

Yavin: Aren’t you exaggerating?

Levy: I’m not exaggerating. I think the IDF is exaggerating. Israel is exaggerating.

Yavin: When you say “atrocity”….

Levy: That’s the word.

Yavin: What do you mean exactly? Be concrete.

Levy: Concrete?

Yavin: Because it’s easy to throw a word in the air.

Levy: Easy?

Yavin: What atrocity?

Levy: By the way, I wouldn’t have used the word “atrocity” five years ago. I never used those words. And I wouldn’t have said “war crime” so easily five years ago. My pen would quiver before I would write it. But today, 3.5 years after we imprison an entire nation, an entire nation cannot live a normal life for a single day, an iota of a normal life, that has to ask permission to give birth in a hospital. That has to ask permission to meet a friend. That has to ask permission to get to a funeral. A nation caged for the sole purpose of being caged. There’s no connection between these checkpoints and security. No connection.

Yavin: We’re at war.

Levy: We’re at war? Against whom? Against the entire Palestinian nation?

I hope this story is inaccurate. Levy, Hass,  Rapaport, and Eldar are great journalists.

PURGE AT HaARETZ NEWS :: www.uruknet.info, June  1, 2008

A new German owner has purchased Haaretz and a “Putsch is being carried out among reporting staff,” in the most important and liberal Zionist paper in Israel. According to inside sources, the new owner has carried out a rough, sittingroom survey that revealed that “the occupation doesn’t sell newspapers” and they are therefore concentrating on the business world ie. The Marker. Twilight Zone, Gideon Levy’s regular Friday column, has been scrapped, Amira Hass has been degraded to freelance on half salary, Meron Rapaport has been fired and Akiva Eldar has lost at least one half page a week.

Gideon Levy: Twilight Zone / Deer hunters – Haaretz, December 28, 2007

According to the IDF, “the incident was investigated at all levels of command, and the lessons will be learned and applied. The findings of the investigation will be conveyed to the Military Advocate General’s Office.”

Antigona Ashkar, from the human rights organization B’Tselem, who also investigated the event, wrote to the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Liron Liebman, saying: “The soldiers opened fire at Jamil, Baha and Firas suddenly, with no prior warning. The three were sitting on a boulder and looking at the view, and did not endanger anyone. They were surprised by the emergence of the soldiers from between the trees and remained where they were until the soldiers started shooting at them.” B’Tselem requested a Military Police investigation of the circumstances of the killing.

The B’Tselem field-worker in the Ramallah region, Iyad Hadad, said this week at the site of the killing: “It was a hunt. Those soldiers went on a hunting expedition. They killed Firas the way you hunt a deer or a stag. They couldn’t have had any other reason for shooting him.”

Jamil added: “What did the soldiers see in his hand? What did we do? Did they see a weapon in his hand? Was there a demonstration going on? Did we throw stones at anyone? They just shot us without batting an eyelash.”

In the village of Batir, Firas’ widow, Majida, in black mourning clothes, sits in her small, simple home. She is holding her infant daughter Sadil. At three months, Sadil’s father has been taken from her. The other two girls – Latifa, four, and Naama, two and a half – wander restlessly about their meager living room, blowing soap bubbles, until the whole room is filled with them.