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‘Once you start looking at the truth you can’t stop’ (soldier pisses on 13-year-old boy, boy is imprisoned for 8 months)

Last week at an event for our Goldstone book at Alwan for the Arts, Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace said that the Gaza onslaught of ’08-’09 had caused “an irreparable rupture” between Israel and “some portion” of the American Jewish community. She added: “Once you start looking at the truth you can’t stop.”

I’ve heard that phrase ringing in my head since. She is talking about the recovery process that more and more American Jews are now engaged in. They start to undo the myth they were told, they become hungry to learn about the reality that exists in Palestine today.

From Aya Kaniuk and Tamar Goldschmidt’s site, “They pissed on him and he got eight months,” a story about Mohammad Mukheir, a 13-year-old sentenced to 8 months in prison for stone-throwing (h/t Ali Gharib):

At first Mohammad’s father was ashamed to tell about the pissing. To even say these words out loud. I think that for him, that was the most humiliating thing they did to his son, more than all the other things.

What kind of person, I wonder, takes a 13-year old boy no matter why, and tortures him like this. And then I answer myself, almost any Israeli. Any soldier in the army when it comes to Palestinians. Any person, in fact, if only the local codes designate that it’s permissible.

The day I first saw him was one of those Mondays at the ‘Ofer’ military court, in hall number 2. That’s where the children are tried. 20, 22, 23 children a day. Children and youths arrive in groups of two, three, sometimes four, wearing brown prisoners’ garb, their feet chained, one hand shackled to the next boy’s hand.

I noticed him in particular because he had soft, round curls, and because he looked very young, and because he wept.

…But why did the lawyer say nothing to the judge about the torture? We asked. Why did he not mention what this boy has gone through? “Because then they might treat him even worse”, the father explained. “Give him another two months for our saying that. That’s what I think..”

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