http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/show_katava.asp?mador=4&datee=9/20/98&id=28715
Sunday, September 20, 1998
An Old Man and a Young Woman and Evil
By Gideon Levy
Manal al-Atrash is a 17-year-old girl; Ahmed
Hamdan is an 81-year-old man. Both are
hospitalized. Other than that, there is no
apparent connection between the two, except
for the fact that their stories are symbols of
the essence of Israeli evil in the
territories.Manal is a pretty young woman
whose youth could have been spent peacefully.
Her father works at a shoe factory and she has
nine brothers and sisters, for whom she is
like a second mother.
On three occasions, Manal has watched as
soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and
representatives of the civil administration
demolished her house. Three times she saw her
parents trying to resist the demolition with
their own bodies, and three times she saw
soldiers dragging them on the floor, beating
them until they bled, humiliating them in
front of their children and finally taking
them away to detention, leaving behind 10
children and a demolished home.
Manal cannot forget the sights. She also never
could simply stand by. Last April, I saw
soldiers beating her up when they came with
representatives of the civil administration to
confiscate a small cement mixer. Manal was
hospitalized them, vomiting blood. For a long
time after that I could still see the
emotional scars that the trauma etched in this
girl.
Last Thursday a jeep of paratroopers drove by
the ruins of Manal's house, on the side of a
rocky hill in south Hebron. The IDF spokesman
said they were on a routine patrol. It was
dusk, the parents were not at home and Manal
was watching her younger brothers.
Did I say home? It was a canvas shelter in
which they have been living since the
destruction of their third house.
Manal saw the soldiers approaching, and maybe
she got scared. Maybe she thought they were
coming to destroy again, maybe they brought
back memories. The IDF spokesman says she
started throwing stones at them - perhaps one
of the rocks broke the jeep's mirror.
Palestinian neighbors say nothing of the sort
happened. In an interview with her this past
weekend in the newspaper Al-Ayyam, Manal said
a soldier got out of the jeep and started
beating her with no provocation.
Whatever happened, the paratroopers used force
on the 17-year-old and Manal again was cruelly
beaten. By evening she was rushed to the
hospital in Hebron and has been hospitalized
since.
No less cruel is the story of the old man.
Eighty-one-year-old Ahmah Madian worked his
entire adult life as a guard for UNRWA. In the
winter of his days, he wanted to bequeath an
apartment to another one of his eight
children. He added a single story to his house
in Silwan.
His son, Madian Hamdan, says the Jerusalem
municipality refused to grant his father a
building permit. In 1993, Hamdan finished
building the additional floor to his house,
still the lowest house in the crowded alley
where they live.
In 1997, the municipal inspectors arrived, and
legal proceedings began, leading to a fine of
NIS 100,000, expected to be followed, of
course, by the demolition of the second floor.
The son says the family does not have that
much money - not even if they pay in
installments.
The Jerusalem judge dealing with local
matters, Shlomo Bar Eli, was impatient. When
Hamdan's lawyer asked for a time-out to try to
raise bail money from Hamdan's sons, Bar Eli
said the police were busy and no more time
could be wasted. He scolded Hamdan's sons and
ordered the 81-year-old man - whom the police
doctor had described as a "a sick man who
needed nursing care and could not remain in
detention and had to be transferred directly
to the welfare department of the prison
authority," to 1,000 days in prison in
exchange for the fine that he could not pay.
The old man, who is not likely to live another
1,000 days, was hospitalized in the prison
authority medical center at the Ayalon Prison.
Over the weekend he phoned his sons, begging
them to get him out of there.
Over the weekend, across the alley from the
Hamdan residence in Silwan I saw an
intimidating iron gate, through which jeeps
were coming and going.
A raggedy Israeli flag indicated that the
premises were purchased by the Elad movement,
the converters of the village to Judaism.
When the gate opened, I stepped in. A muscular
guard from a private security company funded
by the government drove me away rudely. But
before I was banished, I noticed a wooden
shack built on the land. A wooden shack in
Jerusalem, where construction is only allowed
with Jerusalem limestone?
Municipality Spokesman Hagai Elias, said, "the
issue is in legal proceedings."
Will these proceedings also lead to a NIS
100,000 fine and throwing an 81-year-old man
into prison for 1,000 days? Will law-enforcing
soldiers come here, too, to beat up a
17-year-old girl whose parents were beaten and
humiliated in front of her eyes?
On New Year's Eve these stories should be
making us lose sleep.
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