by LAUREN BANKO
PHOTO/Popular Struggle
The Banality of Kidnapping an Eleven Year Old
On the morning of Tuesday, January 25, the small village of Nabi Salih witnessed yet another horrific breach of law and violation of human rights when Israeli occupation forces, for the second time in less than one week, entered the village and forcibly kidnapped a child.
This morning’s victim was eleven year-old Karim, taken seemingly randomly after an Israeli army patrol entered the village. The reasons for Karim’s kidnapping are unclear, as the Israelis did not give a reason to Karim’s parents nor to an international journalist in the area, calling it simply “an arrest.” However, a small child being taken violently from his home by uniformed forces without reason and most certainly illegally, can hardly be called “an arrest”, which is something more often associated with the rule of law. A short time later, a nineteen year old boy protesting the arrest was shot thirteen times by rubber bullets and remains under medical care.
Just last weekend, Karim’s fourteen year old brother was kidnapped in the same fashion from Nabi Salih. He was taken to an interrogation center and has been awaiting trial by a military court– his family do not know the exact charges. The village has lately been subject to night-time raids by armed Israeli soldiers, also without reason or cause. Members of the village’s popular committee have made an attempt to film every night-time raid as well as the weekly Friday peaceful demonstrations during which residents, internationals, and students are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. The village itself is the site of the tomb of the prophet (nabi) Salih, sacred to Muslims and Jews. Due to the site of the tomb, settlement building on all sides of the village has escalated, including the settlement of Hallamish which has confiscated land from the village even though the village won a court order to prevent this. The village itself is in A, B and C areas. The water and electric power resources are in C area, and hence subject to Israeli control. The entire village has a demolition order against it. The Israelis routinely block all entrances to the village during the Friday demonstrations, and when they conduct their raids. At the entrance to the village is a small Israeli compound, surrounded by a metal fence and barbed wire, outside of which are army jeeps and soldiers. An outpost is to the right on the road leading out of the village.
Karim was returned to the village late in the afternoon. To see him walking back to his home and his mother’s arms, a tiny figure in a hooded sweatshirt, holding the hand of his father, was a powerful, emotional sight. Those present to welcome his return all shook his small hand. His younger brothers joyfully welcomed him back, running around and circling him on their bicycles.
The leader of the village’s popular committee filmed Karim being chased by two or three soldiers, grabbed violently, dragged away and pushed into a van, and the video shows adults protesting against this. His mother can be seen running into the street, her head uncovered, screaming and trying to run past soldiers to reach her son. The van drives away from her and the others in the street, and the soldiers offer no assistance or help to the devastated mother.
Karim was thankfully returned unharmed but the mystery remains as to why Israeli authorities would kidnap an eleven year old child– or a fourteen year old child, or any child in such a small, peaceful village. Karim was interrogated, obviously without any sort of lawyer or advocate present, in a complete breach of international child rights. Unfortunately, his story is not unique in the West Bank. It seems that lately these sorts of stories are in fact on the increase.
In the case of Nabi Salih, this has happened before, as children are specifically targeted by Israelis in night raids. Villages are especially vulnerable– to the encroachment of illegal settlers and to acts of violence by these settlers and by occupation forces as well as sieges of the villages. In Nabi Salih, all are routine. The Friday demonstrations organized as peaceful resistance measures, which Palestinians have practiced since the time of the British Mandate against occupation and expropriation of their land, are increasingly popular for international activists as well as sites of acts of violence by Israelis soldiers. As activists in Nabi Salih explained, their own protests are often far more violent that those in the more media-swarmed towns of Bi’iln and Ni’iln, sites where peaceful protesters have been injured and even killed by both teargas and bullets, and sites which have attracted a good deal of attention. However Nabi Salih and smaller villages attract little media attention and are not visited by nearly as many international activists and this gives soldiers a sort of impunity to more violently disperse protesters.
Those who declare that Israel is a state which operates its occupation in the West Bank under the rule of law are sadly mistaken and cannot possibly have ever experienced the daily assaults on human rights that Palestinians, and quite unfortunately Palestinian children, face. The events of today in Nabi Salih, the kidnapping of the fourteen year old last week, and the nightly incursions by soldiers, are a testament to the exact opposite of anything that can be called the rule of law, and are a gross violation of human rights.
It’s an incredible thing, to see a small, quiet, beautiful village like this, and to think of the horrors it has gone through and continues to go through. What sort of government allows for such horrors to take place–for eleven year old children to be abducted off the streets?
If a group of Palestinians, armed and uniformed, routinely went into Israeli settlements and did the exact same things that the Israeli forces do, what would these actions be called, and how would they be retaliated against? Why do the same international human rights standards not apply to the Israeli occupation authorities?
The popular committee in Nabi Salih and popular committees throughout the West Bank routinely send their filmed footage of Israeli incursions and acts of violence to the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, which posts the footage on their website. Photos and videos are also available on the website: Popular Struggle Coordination Committee
Lauren Banko is a Ph.D candidate of history at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. She can be reached at lauren.banko@soas.ac.uk