http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=52254&mador=4
Sunday, July 25, 1999
The seeds of hate
By Gideon Levy
One night about two weeks ago, Baha Awidah, 35,
set out from Bethlehem to take his sister-in-law
to Ben-Gurion International Airport, where she had
a flight to catch. Also in the car were his wife,
who is Swedish, their two children, aged five and
a half and six and a half, and a relative who is
crippled. His son-in-law followed in a second car.
Like tens of thousands of Israelis who are
accompanying their relatives and friends to the
airport these days, Awidah, who is from the
village of New Anata, north of Jerusalem, where he
sells automobile accessories, thought the trip
would be a matter of routine.The police officer at
the Bethlehem checkpoint asked to see his driver's
license and vehicle registration papers. He asked
Awidah where he got the money to buy the car and
immediately gave him a ticket for not having his
car insurance without giving him a chance to
retrieve the document from the trunk, according to
Awidah. Then came the Border Policeman and the
soldiers. The policeman asked him to sign the
ticket and Awidah refused, because he doesn't read
Hebrew. Then came the beating.
In testimony he gave to B'Tselem, the Israeli
Information Center for Human Rights in the
Occupied Territories, Awidah stated that the
policeman pushed him, tore his shirt, punched him
in the eye, cursed him and threatened to arrest
him. The soldiers, or perhaps the Border
Policemen, took him aside to continue the
thrashing. One of the soldiers pushed Awidah's
little boy, knocking him to the ground. The
soldiers beat the father of the family on the back
with their rifle butts, kicked him in the ribs as
he lay on the ground, and choked him. The other
soldiers stood around chuckling, Awidah says.
Ibrahim and Amin, the two children, watched as
their father was brutalized and humiliated. Awidah
says he was taken to the police station in the
south Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, where the
blows continued to rain down on him. The children
waited until daylight on the steps outside with
their mother, after they returned from Hadassah
Hospital, where Amin's leg, which was hurt when he
was knocked to the ground, was bandaged. Awidah
was released in the morning and went to Hadassah
himself for treatment. He submitted a complaint to
the Justice Ministry department that investigates
policemen. It is difficult to believe that he
simply made up the story. He provided the name of
the policeman who beat him and the name of an
eyewitness; a B'Tselem staff member saw the
bruises around Awidah's eye.
The wound around Awidah's eye will heal quickly,
and it's unlikely that he will carry psychological
scars as a result of the events of that night.
Perhaps he was already beaten before, certainly he
was humiliated more than once in the past, like
every other Palestinian. The resilience and
acceptance with which the Palestinians get on with
their lives after events like this, and some that
are far worse, never ceases to amaze. Palestinians
who have been tortured by the Shin Bet security
service, for example, almost always relate their
hair-raising experiences with the greatest
equanimity, as though they were talking about
their neighbors.
But it is the children, Amin and Ibrahim, who will
never forget the events of that night. Last week
Osama Barham, who was released on July 18 from
administrative detention (arrest without trial)
after almost six years, told me that the seeds of
the desire to take revenge on Israelis were
planted in him when he was 15 years old and
soldiers asked to see his ID card. When he told
them that he was still a minor and therefore had
not yet been issued a card, they struck him and
knocked him to the floor. Then they reviled his
father with curses.
Barham's father was a school principal and was
revered by his son. The humiliation he endured at
the hands of the soldiers was insufferable for the
boy, and he never forgot it. The imprecations
hurled at his father hurt him more deeply than the
blows he sustained, Barham says. That night he
decided to run up the forbidden Palestinian flag
on a pole in his village. That was his private
revenge. Soldiers removed it in the morning, but
the 15-year-old boy saw the fluttering flag as a
small victory over the soldiers who had injured
his father. That was the start of his battle
against the occupation, which went on for years.
The memory of the day when his father, the
esteemed school principal, was humiliated, has
never left him.
Nor will the children of Yusuf al Atrash ever
forget the day that soldiers beat their mother,
after the family's house was demolished for the
third time by the Israeli authorities. I myself
saw the mother dragged across the floor and
struck. The children were also witnesses. A
daughter, Manal, tried to take revenge on the spot
and attacked the soldiers with a fury that is
reserved for those who want to save their mother's
honor. Manal was beaten badly and arrested. For
her, too, the memory of her humiliated mother is
stronger than the physical pain she endured.
Last week the children Amin and Ibrahim Awidah
joined this circle of fury. They are still small
children, but like thousands of other Palestinian
children who have seen their fathers beaten, the
sight will be engraved in their minds for as long
as they live. The soldiers and policemen who
insult and strike Palestinians are perhaps unaware
of the seeds of violence they are planting. Maybe
they are too young, or too insensitive. But it's
high time their commanding officers understood
that every time the soldiers under them pummel and
humiliate a Palestinian mother or father they are
sowing the wind and we will all reap the whirlwind
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