http://www.independent.co.uk
Israeli police 'carry out routine, organised cruelty'
Robert Fisk In Jerusalem
The Independent
August 14, 2001, Tuesday
THE ARABS called it a "day of rage" but the Israelis were the ones
demonstrating their rage outside Orient House yesterday. The
Palestinian youth who dared to hold up a Palestinian flag made of
paper was seized by six border guards and plain-clothes police,
kicked, beaten, punched in the face and back and then kneed in the
groin in front of us all.
Many of the police had been brought down from Haifa, where a
Palestinian suicide bomber had blown himself up a few hours earlier in
a vain effort to murder Israelis in a cafe, and there was a tangible
desire to inflict pain on some of the crowd.
A tall, thin young man with shaggy brown hair who tried to escape a
policeman's grasp at the iron security barriers was dragged back into
the police lines and set on by eight men. There must have been 20
television cameras and a score of photographers running level with the
Shin Bet intelligence boys as they dragged the man screaming up the
road towards Orient House, kicking him in the chest and forcing back
his head until he choked. The moment he was in the back seat of a
white police van, an Israeli plain-clothes man in a red shirt set upon
him. As he was held down from the other side of the vehicle, the
Israeli kicked him again and again between the legs until the young
man was crying in a high, animal voice.
It was, as one of the foreign protesters muttered, enough to turn a
Palestinian into a suicide-bomber. It was also very, very weird. Here
we were, perhaps a hundred journalists watching a hundred "peace"
demonstrators, European, American, Christian and Jew, and Palestinian,
and every few minutes, on a signal from a fat policeman in a blue
shirt, his colleagues would run amok.
After all the talk of Israel being a peace-loving state among the
nations, founded upon the rule of law, the police would suddenly prove
that those constant Palestinian complaints of beatings and brutality
were true, right in front of us. A border guard became so fascinated
by the beating of one man - he could not take his eyes off the fists
that were hammering into the man's stomach and ribs - that he forgot
to keep the press at bay and allowed me to walk up to the van as one
of his colleagues viciously assaulted another man.
Every police force can lose its cool - we have our bad eggs in Britain
- but this was calculated, routine, organised cruelty. A lot of the
border guards were grinning when the Palestinians screamed. After a
while it was obscene to watch.
I walked over to the Israeli mounted police. One of the officers was
sitting in the saddle, smoking a cigarette and laughing as he talked
on a mobile phone. A Shin Bet man patted the lead horse. "Most of
these are Hannovers," he said of the breed. "We've got Hannovers and
quarters. They take really good care of them."
Up the street, closer to Orient House, his colleagues were taking good
care of their prisoners. In front of the horrified eyes of a group of
humanitarian workers, one of them American, they beat the captured
Palestinians all over again.
The crowd had no chance of seizing back Orient House, occupied by
Israeli troops and police after Thursday's Jeru- salem suicide bombing
that massacred 15 Israelis.
They were kept all of a quarter of a mile from the building. But the
horses were ridden into the crowd; a couple of stun grenades were
fired into it. Just one officer realised, after more than an hour,
that this piece of state bullying was a public relations disaster.
"Stop carrying them," he shouted as two Palestinians were dragged past
the cameras under a rain of blows. "Let them walk."
But they could no longer stand upright. One of them had his shirt
dragged over his head to reveal a back covered in red welts. A thought
kept recurring in our minds: if this is what the Israeli police do to
Palestinians in front of us, what do they do to them behind our backs?
Nor was it difficult to guess what these young men were thinking.
Just a few hours before, they had heard that a 10-year-old Palestinian
girl had been shot dead by Israeli troops in Hebron, in another of
those notorious "clashes", as the press likes to call them, and that,
after a night of grieving, her 60-year-old grandmother had died of a
heart attack.
A little after midday yesterday, the little girl and her grandmother
were buried together in the same grave.
