latest news on how Israeli settlers and army act

CPTnet
19 October 2008
HEBRON: Israeli settlers beat up Palestinian reporter during olive harvest, punch woman CPTer

On the morning of Saturday 18 October 2008, a group of four Israeli settlers beat up a Palestinian reporter, Abed Hashlamoun, in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. He required hospital treatment for his injuries.

Hashlamoun had been photographing Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals harvesting olives together in an event organized by Tel Rumeida Palestinian ARab landowners. Hashlamoun was walking alone through the olive groves when male settlers knocked him to the ground and began beating and kicking him.

Several of the olive pickers heard his cries and ran to help him. One of the settlers seized Hashlamoun's camera. CPTer Janet Benvie approached the settler and asked him to return the camera, but he did not respond. When Benvie took hold of the camera strap the young man punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground. He then hurled the camera into the rocky field below.

The settlers were still nearby when Israeli soldiers arrived. "I repeatedly asked the soldiers to detain the men who attacked us, but instead they permitted the attackers to leave the scene," said Benvie.

The Israeli military declared the area a closed military zone, ordered an end to the olive picking, and required the Israeli and international olive pickers to leave the area.

Photographs are available at http://cpt.org/gallery/album261

Hashlamoun was taken to hospital for treatment, but released shortly after. Benvie sustained a cut and bruising to her face, but did not require medical treatment.

[[Editorial note: Ir ia fascinating to me that while leaders of Israel are taking a fresh look at the 6 year old Saudi Peace Proposal for ending all angry and too often violent interactions between the Arab nations and Israel, the Israeli settlers, often immigrants from the USA or Russia, the latter often looking simply for subsidized brand new housing, but some US settlers are eager to pick a fight with Palestinians daring to still remain on the land they have lived on and owned legally for generations and even centuries. They are breaking "God's command to allow this to be the Jewish Promised Land forever and ever" even tho the Roman empire took it over in the first century, destroyed the Temple and much of Jerusalem, and Jews have never had any real occupation of any numbers since 2000 years ago.
Most of us live like the Palestinians on land we took away by force from the Native Americans, with the complication that the Palestinians were the Natives of the land that Israel now occupies, part of it legally with UN blessing in 1948 after the Holocaust, but the other half promised to the "natives", the Palestinian inhabitants. So the Israelis are the very recent, 60 year re-occupiers of their ancient homeland, so they are newcomers at what we have done with Native Americans for 5 or 6 centuries, but they are very quickly pushing them into the modern equivalent of Reservations called Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem, all lands that the Saudi proposal proposes be returned fully to the Palestinian owners and inhabitants, and rooting out the Settlers illegally building homes with Israeli government assistance and encouragement. And sometimes using physical violence to keep the "natives" out of "their land of Isreal" -- promised to them by God, of course.
But that is the same line we used in the 1500s and 1600s as we former Europeans invaded and took over the Natives' land we now live on: "this is the land Promised to us by God when we read the Bible in Europe", and as Christians assumed we were the new Chosen People of God. Heaven help us in our various misreadings far too literally of Holy Scriptures, and with muskets in one hand and Bible in the other.]]

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CPT's MISSION: "Getting in the Way." What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war? Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) seeks to enlist the whole church in organized, nonviolent alternatives to war and places teams of trained peacemakers in regions of lethal conflict.

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