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.
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