I’ve been reading reports from the Israeli Negev about the death of a Bedouin at the funeral over the past day or so. The reports I saw were short on details. Today, Yoav Peled sent me this posting from a Bedouin Google Group which riveted my attention, offering a fuller picture of the police brutality running rampant there:
Police killings in Rahat
Yeela Raanan, January 19 2014
On Wednesday night, Jan 14th, during a drug-related police raid in Rahat (the Arab-Bedouin city in the Negev), a policeman shot and killed a young man that was not involved, and was standing in his own yard. His father took him to the closest clinic, and was arrested there by the police, who claimed that he attacked the police. The police also claim that the 20-year-old young man attacked the police… The father was taken away from his dying son and to an “interrogation” where they handcuffed his hands and ankles and he was beaten.
The funeral was yesterday. The police and the municipality of Rahat agreed to allow the funeral to proceed without any police present. Despite this an armored police car forced its way through two road blocks and into the street of the funeral. This created unrest, and a representative of the municipality approached and requested that the police follow him out of the 30,000 people crowd of funeral goers. The police responded that they have sufficient bullets for everyone present and refused. Instead, the police started to crash into the parked cars. In the very violent events that followed, the police killed another man, a resident of Rahat, and many were injured by rubber bullets: among them a man lost his eye, and another his jaw.
Since 2000, when the Israeli police killed 13 Arab civilians, another 40 have been killed by the Israeli police. These two killings have once more shown the use of the Israeli police as a political-ethnic tool. Despite this, there is no outcry in the Israeli Hebrew media. Please help us promote this overseas, maybe eventually also our media will also have to respond…
MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) was at the funeral and wrote this about the tragic events:
It’s hard to watch a grown man cry over a son who died in his arms after being shot by police. I’m now leaving the house of mourning of the Alja’ar family in Rahat, after participating in the protest vigil together with my friend, MK Muhammed Barakeh.
During the Alja’ar funeral the day before yesterday, another Rahat resident, Sami Zayadne was killed and tens more wounded. The police broke a pledge made to the mayor not to intervene in the funeral.
Why? And how is it possible a funeral procession ends like this?
With the death of over 50 Israeli Palestinians at the hands of police since 2000, it’s no longer possible of speak of them as happenstance. This is a systemic failure.
I appealed today for the creation of an official investigatory committee to call for radical change in the way police relate to “Arab” citizens.
The Israeli mainstream publications that are covering the event, as poorly as they are, call this a “riot.” As if it’s the Bedouin who rioted. This is a lie. The police did a drug raid there and somehow ended up killing a young innocent bystander. Then when residents held a funeral, the police broke their vow when they didn’t like the figure delivering the eulogy. This is outright provocation. This is a pogrom instigated by the Israeli police, one of the most violent, corrupt and racist police forces in the western world.
The Bedouin communities of the Negev have launched a general strike to protest police mass violence. The Maan report linked above says the local residents committee in Rahat called the police attack “state terrorism” (they’re not far off). It also notes that police began their attack on the mourners at the cemetery when Imam Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement began his eulogy.
Now it becomes obvious what happened: the Israeli State has declared him Public Enemy Number 1. They’ve tried everything beginning with harassment and escalating to criminal charges. The charges are always trumped up (cf. Haneen Zoabi). But the State has shown it’s willing to do almost anything (including murder in this case) to stop an Enemy of the State.
This tragedy shows once again the foul and systemic racism which is at the foundation of the Israeli ‘Judaic’ state. Such a regime cannot countenance Palestinian citizens exercising their full and legitimate rights. Instead of seeing this as the free exercise of democratic rights, the State sees it as an existential threat to itself. This is yet another reason the Israeli state must be radically transformed before it can be fully free and democratic for all citizens.
Note above the complaint about the paucity of Israeli media coverage. They don’t assign reporters to cover the Bedouin “beat.” There is no such thing. So coverage of events like this are hit or miss. You might see coverage. The coverage may be decent or it may be cursory. That’s why I’m honoring the request of Yaela Raanan above. Maybe foreign media coverage will sufficiently embarrass the authorities so they will treat Rahat Bedouin with a minimal level of respect which they deserve as citizens of a state which disrespects them in every way it can.
There is perhaps one decent senior Israeli Jewish leader in the midst of all this: Pres. Reuven Rivlin. He had the guts to issue a public statement that, while not condemning the police riot, at least expressed condolences to the families of the victims and the entire Bedouin community. At least it’s something. But everyone knows President’s express little more than wishes. It’s the ministers and prime ministers who do the deeds. The very nasty deeds in this case.
Sami Ziadna, the man who died at the funeral, died of a heart attack. He wasn’t shot to death, as some reported in the media.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/General-strike-called-in-Arab-sector-as-tension-over-pol
@krausen: He died of acute asphyxiation from tear gas. If there was a heart attack it was brought on by the tear gas. You mean a 45 year old man died of a heart attack? What do you take us for? Fools? The same fate befell the Palestinian minister killed by the IDF last week. All you hasbarists hid behind that smokescreen for as long as you could.
The Palestinian MP had a prior heart condition. Sixty-five percent artery blockage, if memory serves.
This unfortunate gentleman from Rahat had a prior heart condition as well, as per the J Post article.
http://www.jpost.com/landedpages/printarticle.aspx?id=388237
Does that change the fact that the Palestinian MP was hit and knocked over by some “IDF”? Or that this Bedouin man died because of the copious amounts of tear gas being used?
Hey, blame anyone but the IDF or the Israeli police, right?
My husband had 90% arterial stenosis at 60 but survived and is in good health. TBH I find your comments obscene. If this was a Jewish gentlemen and someone had made the same comments you would be crying anti-Semitism. Tip : A quick word change can be very enlightening as to how offensive your comments are. As for posting the JPost article as rebuttal – excuse me while I laugh.
@ krausen: Isn’t it convenient that 2 of the most recent IDF/police killings of Palestinians involved men who supposedly had heart conditions. And isn’t it convenient you draw your “facts” from a garbage site like JPost, which wouldn’t know a fact if one bit it in the ass!
Both men were killed by tear gas, which can cause asphyxiation if enough is fired into a small enough space. If someone has another physical condition of course that factors into the situation. But the precipitating cause of death is asphyxiation which then leads to a heart attack. You can’t weasel out of this one, mein hasbara freund!
Why is everyone who disagrees with you a “hasbarist”? Is everyone who supports Israel seen in your eyes as part of some worldwide conspiracy to hide the truth? Why not just respond to the substance of what they say, instead of making assumptions about their motives?
@ Arnold Ziffel: I’ve approved your comment though it violated the comment rules. Read them now if you intend to publish another comment here. Comments must be directly related to the post and they must be substantive, that is, have an original pt of view directly related to subject of the post or another comment someone else has published. Do not digress from those rules.
How is it that those who “support Israel” on this site seem to do so in exactly the same way, almost every time?
When the aforementioned people seemingly do everything that they can to blame anything other then the IDF or the Israel police or the border police when it comes to Palestinians in the West Bank or in Israel or Bedouin being beaten or wounded or dying at the hands of the aforementioned Israeli parties, then of course you’re going to make assumptions about their motives and otherwise not see any substance in what they have to say.
And why don’t YOU stop defending the indefensible? No one NEEDS to “make assumptions” about ANYTHING when it comes to Zionist apartheid israhel. It’s there for all to see, 24 /7 – staring us in the face. Are you blind or just plain stupid?? Do you know what cruelty, torture, humiliation means? Buy a dictionary or ask a Palestinian. They’ve endured it for decades, at the hands of your ‘heroes’. Speaking of ‘hasbara’, what are YOU doing here, on this long standing, PRO HUMANITY blog, if you’re NOT ‘hasbara, with your snarky, pro Israhel comments? You’re wasting your time. Richard will eat YOU for breakfast – & spit you out even quicker! Who could blame him?!
IMHO I think you use the word ‘murder’ in many places where it is not applicable. As mentioned in the post above the Bedouin was not murdered.
The Bedouins are a rowdy group and if you remember some 5yrs+ ago there were nightly thefts of expensive machinery from Israeli farmers in the Negev settlements and the police were not doing anything basically because they are afraid of Bedoiuns. So one night someone was guarding the equipment & one of the said thieves came and was shot and died.
The guard/or member of the community was arrested for murder and it took a few years before he was cleared.
In any normal judicial system one is allowed to protect his property by the means necessary in the specific cases. There are many villages esp in the north of Israel which the police will not even go into because the respect for law doesn’t always integrate will the tribal mentality predominant in these places. A good example is the mixed, Moslem, Christian, Druze, village ,Rami, about a 10 minute drive from Carmiel. It is the center for drugs, stolen goods and a variety of other legal transgressions and the police do nothing.
On the other hand it is unfortunate that the Bedouin nomadic culture has been all but obliterated by the state but these are the by products of the modern world.
French policeman forced to use shotgun to escape suburban Paris housing project mob. See video at 3:00.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6qf97_go-fast-connexion-by-kourtrajme_news
Police work is more than tricked out cars and donuts.
What is the purpose of your comment/link?
Really what he wants to engage in is apologia when it comes to the Israeli police services and their conduct towards non-Jewish citizens of the Israeli state.
Apologia, and blatant apologia, seems to be the order of the day when it comes to events like this and certain commenters.
No Kyle. It’s called putting events into the proper context. It’s called taking a measured, dispassionate look at events, as opposed making a rush to judgment.
Suppose that the policeman @3:00 had killed a bystander with his shotgun. Would you call that cop a murderer?
Honestly, Kyle. Would you call him a murderer?
@ krausen:
Is that what hasbarism is now called?
It is apologia, regardless of whatever you want to say about putting things into the proper context or, more hilariously in your case, “taking a measured, dispassionate look at events as opposed to making a rush to judgement”.
The only reason you want to make this comparison is so you can absolve the Israeli police services of killing anyone, or otherwise blame the guy who got shot in the stomach by some trigger-happy jerkoff. As far as I’m concerned the Israeli police services have zero credibility when it comes to any altercations or incidents that end up with Palestinians or Bedouin wounded or dead at their hands.
“Suppose that the policeman @3:00 had killed a bystander with his shotgun. Would you call that cop a murderer?
Honestly, Kyle. Would you call him a murderer?”
If someone grabbed his gun and tried to pull it out of his hands, and he shot someone completely by accident, then no.
If he was just blasting away without a care in the world and some bystander caught a shell in the face, then yes. At the very least he’s guilty of manslaughter.
If he belongs to an organization that’s notorious for lying about specific incidents involving specific ethnic groups whenever it gets the chance, especially when those incidents are deadly, then I see no reason to believe the “it was perfectly accidental and the officer isn’t guilty” line that gets trotted out, as is obviously the case with the Israeli police. I’m going to take the word of the father who doesn’t have a son anymore over the word of those who’ll just make up some half-assed nonsense to absolve the officer in question– if there weren’t eye witnesses to this particular killing, no doubt there’d be some nonsense about “a horde of Bedouin swarming the police, who acted in self defense”.
@Kyle@Richard
The Israeli police went into Rahat to effectuate drug arrests. A riot ensued and a young man was shot and killed by the police. That’s all I know.
In the video I posted, French police entered a housing project to effectuate a drug arrest, a riot ensued and a French policeman was forced, @3:00, to fire his weapon and threaten deadly force.
I added context without apology or excuse.
@ krausen: “All you know” is very little apparently. An innocent 20 yr old Bedouin minding his own business on the patio of his home was killed by errant police firing. That’s what I know & it’s not surprising that it’s a helluva lot more than you “know.”
As for what happens in France, that is OFF-TOPIC. If you introduce off topic material in future you may be moderated.
Whoa. Richard.
First your say that Israel murdered two Bedouin, now your saying that the police killed one Bedouin with an errant shot! How’s that murder?
http://dictionary.law.com/default.aspx?selected=1303
How does a guy dying after inhaling tear gas fired into a rioting crowd rise to murder?
@ krausen: When the police have a history of murdering Bedouin & Israeli Palestinians in precisely the same way they did that day by using indiscriminate live fire when it isn’t needed, and the police refuse to change their operational rules to prohibit such use, then it becomes murder. The police are refusing to protect civilian lives by banning live fire, and know they’ve killed under such circumstances in the past. So then it becomes murder, or at the very least negligent homicide (which is a form of murder).
@ Elisabeth: Krausen wants to prove that ‘Ay-rabs’ are a howling mob of brutes & savages. Why else would he post such garbage?
Police helicopter footage of the incident
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4617157,00.html
It looks to me like one police vehicle was attacked at the funeral and that the police than forcefully acted to extricate the police caught in their vehicle. Why that vehicle was there in the first place remains a question.
@ krausen: “Remains a question?” What’s the question? THere is no question it was there because the police decided to abrogate their agreement with the mayor not to be present. Likely, when the Shabak saw Sheikh Raed was speaking they ordered the police to break up the funeral at any cost since he represents an “existential threat” to the State.
@ krausen
There is no doubt, from decades of past incidents, that Israeli forces are going to do a sudden turn around, and start acknowledging their crimes. They are used to impunity and rely on it.
It is one of the most common excuses to claim someone had a pre-existing condition.. and exploit it, to deny responsibility for killing innocents.
The rhetoric changes nothing. It is, still, murder.
If they had been left alone, no tear gas, etc., would they be alive, today? I am sure, they would be.
If someone, who had a ‘pre-existing’ condition, were pushed onto the tracks of an oncoming train, which resulted in death, the ‘pre-condition’ did NOT cause death. The action of pushing the person onto the tracks, did. No pushing, no death.
No Israeli forces, using excessive force, choking people, using tear gas at close range, bullets, no deaths from suffocation and bullets, ‘rubber’ or live.
This is abuse of ‘authority’. Full stop.
Correction – There is no doubt, from decades of past incidents, that Israeli forces are NOT going to do a sudden turn around, and start acknowledging their crimes.
“Since 2000, when the Israeli police killed 13 Arab civilians”
The use of snipers ensures that people die.
In the third world country I am presently living it recently transpired that a group of policemen had organised a peculiar kind of fun. They had devised a sort of “wheel of fortune” which prisoners were forced to turn after which they were meted out the sort of punishment/torture specified at the point where the wheel had stopped. This was entirely gratuitous “fun”. It didn’t even serve any purposes of collecting information or extracting confessions.
Can this kind of fun be explained by the specific ethnic identity of the perpetrators ? No. The explanation lies in the fact that they belong to “homo sapiens:, a misnamed ferocious species that has the oldest part of its brain in common with crocodiles, that is only with difficulty kept within the “bounds of civilisation” and escapes from it whenever there seems to be a risk free opportunity. In the last twenty five years, not to go further back, we have seen plenty of instances.
A small group of countries in the Western world has managed to create a democratic tradition, with respect for the law as one of its highest values, wherein this kind of ferocity has little chance to be expressed.
The great danger of Israel is that it pretends to belong to this group of nations and that some nations, foremost the US, Canada and Australia, reinforce this pretence by the hypocritical cant about “shared values” etc (read, for instance, the nauseating platitudes by the Canadian FM during his present visit to Israel). In this way this turbulent little country is allowed to function as the proverbial bad apple. Things like police brutality, racist discrimination, arbitrary administrative detention and illegal executions are passed off as normal practices that one can expect in an “advanced democracy”. On this score the US and Israel are partners in crime.
The great sociologist Max Weber warned many years ago that democracy was a fragile plant only occurring in small parts of the world and the flourishing of which could not be taken for granted (events in his own country, not long after his death, confirmed this warning). I think that the greatest risk it is presently exposed to is the pretence that current US and Israeli practices are, in democracies, par for the course.
@Arie
What, if anything, have you done to make things better in the Third World country in which you now reside?
@ Figg: What gives you the friggin’ right to ask such an obnoxious question? What have you done in your own country to make it a more just, tolerant and democratic place?
If Arie is going online to castigate Israel’s security forces, than I’d hope he would be castigating his host country’s security forces with equal vigour. To do less suggests hypocrisy. It’s not as if his third world host country doesn’t have a problem with it’s security forces. It does.
What have I done to make my country a better place? Honestly, nothing. But than again, I haven’t inserted myself into an entirely different nation’s domestic problems.
@ Figg: This is utter nonsense. If you try this sort of crap again I will refuse to publish the comment. No one owes you anything in the way of explanations about anything. Nor do I have any interest in your allegations of hypocrisy.
You admit you’ve done nothing to make your country (presumably Israel) a better place but insist on lecturing us on the subject. Talk about HYPOCRISY!!
Again, the subject of this blog is Israel. So that’s what we talk about here. If this “insertion into an entirely different nation’s domestic problems” disturbs you I invite you to migrate elsewhere on the web. If you decide to continue commenting here, drop the objection or I’ll get even more tough on you than I have been.
Pres. Rivlin impressed me after I read an article about him in The New Yorker of Nov 17, 2014 (“One State Reality”). Now, if the rest of Israelis also start to accept such a reality with equality of all faiths, then I believe Israel can be a most admired nation instead of being one of the most reviled one.
[comment deleted: read the comment rules. There are strict limitations here about use of the term “Nazi.”]
Figg you just didn’t get my point. The country I am staying in doesn’t pretend to be an example of advanced democracy neither is it assured by any other country that it is, Israel, by contrast, does and is flattered by some other countries into believing that it is (the “shared values” and “only democracy in the middle east” mantras). It is thus lowering the benchmark for that type of democracy. That is what I was on about. Why do these things have to be spelled out for you?
[comment deleted: off topic.]
Richard, it’s strange to see you defend Raed Salah, especially considering how often you point out and condemn Israeli racism and anti-Muslims statements. Salah owns some of the most vile antisemitism around.
@: For all you budding hasbarists out there, this comment offers a perfect illustration of how the system works. First, you take a statement by someone you seek to discredit. Then you seize on one small element and magnify or distort it by claiming the opponent said something about this which he never said. Et voila, you’ve made a perfect mess of hasbara porridge.
Now to clean up his mess: I never praised Sheikh Salah. I never criticized him either. I merely said that a community in mourning for a member the State murdered has a right to hear the speaker of their choice without the State engaging in a 2nd act of murder to prevent it.
Second, Sheikh Salah has been blown all out of proportion in multiple ways. Whatever unpalatable things he’s said have been outdone in volume & quantity by State-financed rabbis. So when you’re willing to throw these “men of God” in prison where they belong, come to me & we’ll talk about the good Sheikh. Till then, go blow steam elsewhere.
Your consistent need to respond to every post with some commentary about my motive is tiresome. Read what I wrote. I never said you praised Salah, but that you defended him, which you did (“The charges are always trumped up”), As for your comparison to “State-financed rabbis”, why do you assume I support their various offensive statements about Palestinians or Muslims? You assume I’m a “hasbarist”, so I must never condemn Israelis, so if I condemn a Palestinian, it must be because I’m hypocrite. That’s real iron-clad reasoning, there, Richard.
@ djf: Again, I don’t think I defended him. My comments were directed solely at the Israeli campaign against him and not in support of anything he did or said. There’s nuance in that statement that you’re missing. But I’m not terribly surprised.
Why do I assume you support their statements? I never said you did. But you did conveniently omit them and talk as if Palestinian Muslim leaders were rancid anti-Semites w/o acknowledging that there’s a greater quantity of equally or more rancid Israeli rabbis than there are such imams. A little perspective & context never hurt. But somehow you never manage to provide any.