US senator filibusters live coverage of powerful Palestinian testimonies - The Electronic Intifada

The Electronic Intifada

Submitted by Rania Khalek on Tue, 08/05/2014 - 12:00

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CSPAN cut from Tariq Abukhdeir’s live, moving testimony of Israeli abuse in Jerusalem to cover Barbara Boxer’s incoherent pro-Israel rant to a mostly empty Senate chamber. (screenshot)

On Friday, fifteen-year-old Tariq Abukhdeir spoke at a hearing on Capitol Hill about the brutal beating he endured at the hands of Israeli police in early July.
The purpose of the hearing was to address Israeli impunity and US complicity in crimes against Palestinians. Tariq was one of six panelists to address the room, which was overflowing with congressional staffers.
Moderated by author and campaigner Josh Ruebner, other panelists included Tariq’s mother, Suha Abu Abukhdeir; Hassan Shibly of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Florida chapter; Sunjeev Bery from Amnesty International; Brad Parker from Defence for Children International and Palestinian author Laila El-Haddad.
Though he was just one of six speakers, Tariq’s testimony was especially powerful as he relayed to the audience the horrors and discrimination he witnessed and experienced as a Palestinian-American child visiting his ancestral homeland.
But just as Tariq started to detail the Israeli beating that left him unconscious and unrecognizable, CSPAN 2, which was broadcasting the hearing live, cut to the Senate floor.
You can watch the whole thing back on CSPAN’s website. The cut from Tariq to Boxer occurs soon after time code 03:30.

Suppressing Palestinian voices

Tariq began his testimony by describing the widespread violence Israeli soldiers inflicted on his neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem after his cousin and best friend, sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair, was kidnapped and burned alive by Jewish vigilantes who were incited to violence by Israeli leaders following the murder of three Israeli teens hitchhiking from an illegal settlement in the West Bank.
Tariq and several of his cousins watched from an alley, Tariq explained, as Israeli soldiers shot rubber bullets at protesters. Eventually the soldiers were attacking in Tariq’s direction, prompting a terrified Tariq to run. After he jumped a fence and tripped, “the Israeli police grabbed me from behind, slammed my face into the floor, zip-tied my hands behind my back and started to kick me and punch me in the face and in the ribs,” recounted Tariq.
For those tuning into CSPAN, this was the last they heard from Tariq, whose speech was suddenly replaced by Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer from California on the Senate floor agitating for greater support for Israel to a mostly empty room as most most elected representatives had departed that day for a five-week recess.
CSPAN told the The Electronic Intifada that the channel is required to cut to the Senate floor when an elected official is speaking.
Boxer’s office did not respond to calls asking if the senator was aware that the hearing was taking place. However, organizers collecting names of congressional staffers in attendance told The Electronic Intifada that an intern from Boxer’s office tried to get into the hearing but left because there was no space, suggesting Boxer knew she was interrupting the hearing.

Israeli talking points

Boxer spent the next fifteen minutes spewing semi-coherent platitudes about Israeli victimhood. “We all know that our ally Israel is in a fight for its survival because a terrorist group, so named by the United States and Europe, is at war with Israel right now,” Boxer declared.
In what seemed like a transparent attempt to counter Tariq’s narrative, Boxer added, “we remember how it all started with the kidnapping of three Israeli boys and their torture and their death and a mosque praised that. Tragically there was a revenge killing and the Israeli government arrested the Israelis responsible for that and they are going to face justice while Hamas praises, praises what happened.”
As usual, reality tells a much different story.
Even Israeli officials openly admit that Hamas was not responsible for the kidnapping or the murder of the three Israeli teens, whose disappearance was used by the Israeli government as a pretext to rampage through the West Bank, ransacking homes and arresting hundreds of people under the guise of a rescue mission for three boys that authorities knew had been killed hours after they were reported missing.
Boxer also championed the lie that Hamas broke the ceasefire that same Friday morning by capturing an Israeli soldier.
It has since been revealed that the Israelis broke the ceasefire and subsequently carpet bombed Rafah with the stated aim of killing an Israeli soldier because the Israeli army suspected he had been captured — a procedure known as the Hannibal Directive. In an attempt to kill their own soldier, the Israeli army slaughtered more than 150 Palestinians across Rafah, which has sustained incalculable damage.
As Boxer continued to spew Israeli talking points, the reason for her tirade on the Senate floor became increasingly unclear. One moment she was blaming Hamas for violating that morning’s ceasefire and the next she was urging the Senate to allow Israel to participate in the US Visa Waiver Program.
At the end of Boxer’s rant, CSPAN cut back to the hearing in time to catch Suha Abukhdeir’s closing remark: “The life of a Palestinian in Gaza should be valued as much as the life of any human being.”
Next at the podium was CAIR Florida’s Hassan Shibly, who said, “As an American attorney, what happened to Tariq Abukhdeir at the hands of a nation that claims to be a democracy and claims to be an ally of the United States and —” That’s as far as Shibly got before he was replaced by live footage of Boxer once again on the Senate floor. This time Boxer was joined by Democratic Senator Harry Reid from Nevada. The two interrupted the remainder of the hearing discussing various pieces of legislation that can’t even be voted on until the Senate reconvenes in September.
Given the choke-hold pro-Israel lobbying organizations like AIPAC have on US elected officials, it is plausible Boxer’s maneuvering was orchestrated to suppress the reach of an open and honest conversation about Israeli criminality, much like US President Lyndon Johnson called an impromptu press conference to interrupt televised coverage of former sharecropper and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s moving testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Palestinian voices are a threat

The pro-Israel community has every reason to worry about the airing of Palestinian voices like Tariq’s, Suha’s and Laila El-Haddad’s.
Their experiences are undeniable proof of the supremacist ideology that governs Israeli society and subjugates Palestinians, even those who hold American passports. Indeed, it is because Tariq is American that his story is so powerful.
In the United States, he is afforded basic rights that he was violently denied in occupied Palestine simply because he is Palestinian, a paradox that shatters the myth of Israel as a democratic state.

A family under attack

“The Palestinian people, they don’t have rights,” said Tariq at the hearing. “When I visited over there, I actually forgot that I had freedom. And for my cousins, I really wish that they had the same freedoms that I have living in America.”
Tariq later explained to The Electronic Intifada that his cousins and friends who were beaten and arrested alongside him in early July are still languishing in Israeli jails.
One cousin in particular, Mahmoud, is Tariq’s closest friend and was beaten and arrested while trying to help Tariq.
“Mahmoud is 15 and a half like me,” Tariq told The Electronic Intifada. “Him and Muhammad [Abu Khudair], God rest his soul, were my first two friends that I made in Palestine. I hung out with Mahmoud and Muhammad every day.”
Hours after learning that their best friend was forced to drink gasoline and burned alive, Tariq and Mahmoud were chased and tackled by Israeli police as part of the Israeli government’s ongoing war on Muhammad Abu Khudair’s entire extended family in the Shuafat neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem.
“Mahmoud got away but he came back to help me and got grabbed and punched and kicked, just like me,” recounted Tariq.
The arrest and terror campaign inflicted on the extended Abu Khudair family by the Israeli government has denied them an opportunity to truly mourn the loss of Muhammad.
“Tariq was not able to grieve his cousin’s death as a result of the beating Israeli police gave him that same day that his cousin was brutally murdered by Israeli extremists,” said Suha Abukhdeir. “Instead of the police protecting us they taunted us and told us that Muhammad was just the first to be killed and that 300 Palestinians would be killed for the three Israeli teenagers who were killed.”
It appears they made good on that promise in Gaza, where more than 1,800 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, have been mercilessly slaughtered in one Israeli massacre after another.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has intensified its attack on Tariq’s family.
“The day after I left Palestine, they arrested all the males in the house I was staying in, without any charges,” said Tariq, whose family home in occupied East Jerusalem was raided by Israeli police hours after he departed the country.

Another American teen in Israeli jail 

One panelist after another reminded the audience that the only exceptional things about Tariq’s beating were that it was caught on film, and he has an American passport. Otherwise, what happened to him is routine for Palestinian children living under Israeli occupation.
Perhaps the lack of video footage can help explain the ongoing imprisonment of fifteen-year-old Mohammed Abu Nie, an American citizen who is still in Israeli jail after he was arrested with Tariq in early July.
Tariq told The Electronic Intifada that he, Abu Nie and his cousin Mahmoud were together watching the protests when they were chased, tackled and arrested by Israeli police.
Abu Nie’s imprisonment was largely unheard of until the daily US State Department press briefing on 28 July.
In response to a question about the status of Abu Nie’s case, US State Department spokesperson Jennifer Psaki revealed that the American teen “was arrested on July 3rd during protests in the Shuafat neighborhood in East Jerusalem” and, like Tariq, stands accused of “rock-throwing, attacking police, carrying a knife, and leading protests,” all of which is untrue, according to Tariq, who insists they were only watching and not participating in the protests.
According to the State Department, Abu Nie has not seen his parents since the night he was detained and there are allegations that he has been beaten while in custody.
Psaki said that the US is “gravely concerned about the detention of an American citizen child” but is “calling for a speedy resolution” rather than Abu Nie’s release.

“My tax dollars killed my family”

Laila El-Haddad, a Gaza City native who lives in Columbia, Maryland, opened her speech with a soul-crushing statement.
“My tax dollars killed eight members of my family this morning,” said El-Haddad. She went on to list the names and ages of her slaughtered relatives, seven members of the El-Farra family. Among them were three children. Two of them were fleeing when they were killed by a second Israeli air strike.
El-Haddad proceeded to deliver a short and damning history lesson about the population that Israel has ghettoized in the Gaza Strip:

The reality is Gaza right now is being bombarded. It is completely blocked out, besieged and blockaded. This is a situation unheard of in modern history for a population that is already largely refugees, that is already besieged, that is already stateless to then be bombarded mercilessly with no intervention.
Gaza is roughly twice the size of Washington, DC, where we all sit today. It has a little over a million and half inhabitants, 1.7 going on 1.8. Most of those inhabitants are under the age of 18. Three-quarters of them are refugees, meaning they are not from the place they are compelled to live. They are from towns and villages, many of them depopulated, destroyed, ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias prior to 1948 and they sought refuge in Gaza and they were besieged in Gaza and they are not allowed to return to their native lands.

Thanks to Senator Boxer’s lengthy tirade, El-Haddad’s testimony did not air.
But at least one lawmaker heard her story.
Democratic Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota — who recently issued a call in The Washington Post for an end to the crippling blockade on Gaza, a rare and risky move for any American politician — was the only elected official to attend the hearing.
Signifying a tiny but important crack in unwavering support for Israeli crimes among US elected officials, Ellison also made an appearance at an event featuring Tariq later that evening at Busboys and Poets, a DC restaurant that often serves as a progressive meeting spot.
“I’m embarrassed we haven’t done more,” he told the crowd that night.

Why do Palestinians continue to support Hamas despite such devastating losses? - By Noam Sheizaf - +972 Magazine

By Noam Sheizaf

|Published July 22, 2014  +972 Magazine 

I know of many Palestinians who do not like Hamas. Yet for them, the Gaza war is about the siege – part of their own war of independence. Israelis refuse to get that.
In The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ excellent documentary, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara speaks about a certain inability to understand the enemy – one that stems from a lack of empathy.
In the film, McNamara, a brilliant systems analyst, who is today associated more than anything with the Vietnam War, says that part of President Kennedy’s successful management of the Cuban Missile Crisis was his administration’s ability to put itself in the shoes of the Soviets and understand their point of view. “In the case of Vietnam,” he says, “we didn’t know them well enough to empathize.” As a result, each side had a completely different understanding of what the war was about.
This understanding came to McNamara only in 1991, when he visited Vietnam and met with the country’s foreign minister. McNamara asked the foreign minister whether he thought it was possible to reach the same results of the war (independence and uniting the south with the north) without the heavy losses. Between one and three million people died in the war, most of them Vietnamese civilians. This does not include the hundreds of thousands of casualties in the war against the French, which took place shortly before. Approximately 58,000 American soldiers were also killed in the Vietnam War.
“You were fighting to enslave us,” yelled the foreign minister at McNamara, who in turn replied that that is an absurd notion. The two nearly came to blows. But as time passed McNamara understood. “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says, whereas what the foreign minister was trying to tell him was that for the Vietnamese it was a war of independence. Communism was not the heart of the matter for the Vietnamese. They were willing to make the worst sacrifices because they were fighting for their freedom – not for Marx or Brezhnev.
Nations will make inconceivable sacrifices in these kinds of struggles. An entire one percent of the Jewish population was killed in the 1948 war. The public accepted it painfully and with a stiff upper lip because they felt, just like the Vietnamese, that they were fighting for their lives and for their freedom. We have become so much more susceptible to loss, not because we went soft, but because we have a deeper understanding that despite all the “we’re fighting for our future” slogans, 2014 is not 1948.
Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed in all three military operations in Gaza, not including the Second Intifada. Most of them were civilians. I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamentalist ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it.
+972′s full coverage of the war in Gaza
The demand that the people of Gaza protest against Hamas, often heard in Israel today, is absurd. Even if we disregard the fact that Israelis themselves hate protests in times of war, they still expect the Palestinians to conduct a civil uprising under fire. The people of Gaza support Hamas in its war against Israel because they perceive it to be part of their war of independence. A Hamas warrior who swears by the Quran is no different from a Vietcong reciting The Internationale before leaving for battle. These kind of rituals leave a strong impression, but they are not the real story.
Israelis, both left and right, are wrong to assume that Hamas is a dictatorship fighting Israel against its people’s will. Hamas is indeed a dictatorship, and there are many Palestinians who would gladly see it fall, but not at this moment in time. Right now I have no doubt that most Palestinians support the attacks on IDF soldiers entering Gaza; they support kidnapping as means to release their prisoners (whom they see as prisoners of war) and the unpleasant fact is that most of them, I believe, support firing rockets at Israel.
“If we had planes and tanks to fight the IDF, we wouldn’t need to fire rockets,” is a sentence I have heard more than once. As an Israeli, it is unpleasant for me to hear, but one needs to at least try and understand what lies behind such a position. What is certain is that bombing Gaza will not change their minds. On the contrary.

A Palestinian crying near rubbles of his home after the latest round of Israeli attacks against Al Shaja’ia, Gaza City, July 20, 2014. (Anne Paq/Activestills.org)

“But if they didn’t fire rockets or launch terror attacks there would be no siege. So what do they want?” the Israeli public asks. After all, we already left Gaza.
Back to McNamara and The Fog of War. If the citizens of Vietnam would have abandoned Communism, McNamara told the Vietnamese foreign minister 1991, the U.S. wouldn’t have even cared about them. They could have had both their independence and their unity. But in the eyes of the Vietnamese, things looked completely different. As soon as they managed to drive out the French, in marched the Americans. Colonialism simply never stopped. The choice was between a corrupt U.S.-sponsored regime in the south and a horrific war with the north.
For the Palestinians, the choice is between occupation by proxy in the West Bank and a war in Gaza. Both offer no hope, and neither are forms of freedom. The Israeli promise — that an end to armed struggle will bring freedom — is not trustworthy, as the experiences of past years has shown. It simply never happens. The quiet years in the West Bank have not brought the Palestinians any closer to an independent state, while the truce in between wars in Gaza has not brought about a relief from the siege. One can debate the reasons for why this happened, but one cannot debate reality.
Hamas tells the Palestinians the simple truth: freedom comes at the cost of blood. The tragedy is that we usually provide the evidence. After all, the evacuation of settlements in Gaza came after the Second Intifada, not as a result of negotiations. The Oslo Accords came after the First Intifada; before that, Israel turned down even the convenient London Agreement between Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein.
Israelis are convinced they are fighting a terror organization driven by a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Palestinians are convinced Israelis are looking to enslave them, and that as soon as the war is over the siege will be reinforced. Since this is exactly what Israel intends to do, as our government has repeatedly stated, they have no reason to stop fighting.
Hamas may accept a ceasefire soon. Its regime might collapse. Either way, it is only a matter of time before the next round of violence. Human lives are not cheaper for Palestinians than they are for us. But nations fighting for their freedom will endure the worst sacrifices. Like in Shujaiyeh.
***
An excerpt from The Fog of War. The part I refer to starts at 11:46 minutes:
Originally posted in Hebrew on Local Call.

I am an independent journalist and editor. I have worked for Tel Aviv’s Ha-ir local paper, for Ynet.co.il and for the Maariv daily, where my last post was deputy editor of the weekend magazine. My work has recently been published in Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, The Nation and other newspapers and magazines. More…

I was born in Ramat-Gan and today live and work in Tel Aviv. Before working as a journalist, I served four and a half years in the IDF.