link to mondoweiss.net
Funeral for Mohammed Asfour who succumbed to injuries from a rubber bullet shot into his head by the Israeli Defense Forces on March 7th. His burial took place on March 8, 2013 in Aboud, near Ramallah. (Photo: Allison Deger/Mondoweiss)
Mohammed Asfour's burial earlier this month in the village of Aboud near Ramallah was not a national event. The 23 year-old student of Bethlehem University and lover of sports may not be memorialized outside his small village, yet Asfour's March 8th funeral was a turning point. His death, caused by a rubber bullet to his temple shot two weeks before by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), is a landmark in the escalating tensions between Israeli forces and the Palestinian countryside.
"Now the angels wash his clothes. If you smell the flag you are going to know what I speak of," said the deceased's cousin Loubna Asfour, 29, while motioning to a flag crumpled on a mattress that sat bare on the floor. The flag was the last piece of cloth to touch Asfour's body. It covered him as he was carried from the village's mosque to the cemetery, amidst a crowd of at least one thousand.
"He's so lovely, he's caring, he's so nice," said Loubna of her cousin, speaking of him in the present tense.
Palestinian children lead the women's march during Mohammed Asfour's funeral procession.
During the bereavement period, pictures of soccer players that appeared to be cut from magazines hung in the Asfour family home. Before his death the young Palestinian pasted them in a neat vertical row on the wall. Loubna pointed to the images—his lasting material marks on the family's stone house—explaining that Asfour liked to play with the village's children.
Loubna talked to me in a back room immediately following the procession. Although the interview began in the courtyard, it was abruptly moved inside to avoid tear gas that seeped through the village. It is commonplace at Palestinian funerals that within minutes of burying a martyr, a shaheed, a person—often a youth—whose death was caused by the Israeli military, clashes ensue between the local community and the IDF. As we rearranged, Loubna brought some of the children in the family indoors whose eyes were reddening by the second. In the living room around 30 women were seated in plastic chairs, including Asfour's mother, who was addressed with the title of respect "um shaheed," or "mother of the martyr." As female visitors came and left, each greeted the matriarchs of the family. Yet Asfour's mother was unable to speak. Overcome with grief, she tearfully gestured with her hands alone, her body sunken into the chair like collapsed fabric.
Nearly all of Aboud's residents attended Asfour's funeral. The recognizable faces of Palestinian notables highlighted the existence of popular resistance in unlikely places. Famed hunger striker Khader Adnan and scores of members of the Tamimi family from Nabi Saleh, one of the first Palestinian villages to begin Friday protests against the Israeli occupation, came to pay their respects.
Beyond the funeral procession streets were empty and every business closed.
Palestinians mourn Mohammed Asfour near grave site.
Mouners gather around the grave of Mohammed Asfour.
Where months ago Aboud was known as a quiet village, excellent for hiking and lounging by one of its many natural springs, nearly every Friday for the past six weeks the sleepy town has railed against Israeli forces. Originally supporters of twelve high profile hunger strikers held in Israeli jails, including Samer Issawi who is lauded for surpassing 200 days of political fast, called for the demonstrations. Asfour was fatally wounded in one of these marches.
"He feels what others feel. For the prisoners, his sister's husband is a prisoner," said Loubna describing the motivation of her cousin. "He often went to demonstrations. He was very sad and happy for the cause of the Palestinians and prisoners," she continued.
But now the protests have taken a local turn. Palestinians face-off with the Israeli military not only to support their arrested relatives and friends, but to remember one of their own. Indeed, as much as the prisoners' call served as a lightening rod, so do the deaths of young Palestinians protesting in these marches.
Since Asfour's funeral nearly two weeks ago, demonstrations in Aboud have grown, driven by the anger over the local death. Aboud is part of a series of new confrontations in West Bank regions that have not engaged in popular resistance since the end of the second Intifada. This spreading protest movement stands in stark contrast to the official position of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.
In November 2012 Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas promised that there would be no third Intifada under his watch. Eight Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military fire since the beginning of 2013, and with each West Bank fatality daylight is growing between the rumbling popular support for prisoners and the leadership's commitment to diplomatic measures.
Pressure on the leadership to squash resistance has even turned violent. Earlier this year, 300 PA Special Forces raided al-Amaari refugee camp located inside of Ramallah's municipal borders in order to end a protest that began when prisoners' families blocked a road from Ramallah to Qalandia, the main artery to Jerusalem. PA police dressed in black riot gear showered the densely populated neighborhood with live bullets, injuring dozens of Palestinians. However, the crackdown has yet to impede the proliferation of dissent.
For now, it is funerals like Asfour's that seem to foreshadow the coming months; protests backed by an array of political parties and faction groups that do not support Abbas's desire to return to negotiations and overarching statehood project. The prisoners' hunger strike has pushed into small villages, re-invigorating popular dissent with flags from Hamas, Fatah and the DFLP in particular. And despite President Barack Obama's much lauded arrival in the region this week to advocate for these same measures, a nascent uprising is forming.
All photographs are by the author taken on March 8, 2013.
Dying from a bullet is terrible, though neither one of us knows what he did to provoke it. A third intifada isn’t what you should wish for, as an unmentioned but huge problem among young Palestinians is unemployment. Even when tax monies collected by Israel for the PA went as scheduled, the PA economy is tanking, and many educated university grads have no work to find, let alone work beneathe their level of training. Another intifada would worsen the economic situation. There is some outside investment in the W.Bank, but not enough, as the lack of peace and stability inhibits more. The PA-you call it Palestine-needs to work on this, and as a pro-Palestinian site, you should devote more time and energy to highlighting and suggesting growth, not just anger directed at anything Israeli.
I’m still waiting for an article that explains how/if a one state solution would accept the over 5 million Israeli Jews living in Israel today, grant them equality/voting rights, and prevent the expected revenge that most Palestinians say they’d take on them. Nu?
though neither one of us knows what he did to provoke it.
i do not presume he provoked it at all.
He had the audacity to stand on the ground and breathe the air in Palestine.
RJL – You are waiting? You have no right to ask for anything. What title do the invaders have to ask for acceptance? None.
And now, we all are waiting for one, I mean a single isolated minimal gesture of decency from you. “Dying from a bullet” –one of yours– “is terrible”, eh? You really have no shame, no respect, a typical Zionist. Couldn’t you stop screeching just that once?
“I’m still waiting for an article that explains how/if a one state solution would accept the over 5 million Israeli Jews living in Israel today, grant them equality/voting rights, and prevent the expected revenge that most Palestinians say they’d take on them. Nu?”
I can think of no other group of people who, after oppressing and stealing from another group of people, that would say “remember, if there is a solution that ends the conflict on a fair and equal basis, you have to make allowances and give us every privilege that we wanted to deny or outright took away from you.”
Luckily for those of your ilk, I think that- if there is a solution that ends up being fair to Palestinians- they will be too excited about that aspect to really think about paying back in full all of the injustice meted unto them by the Israeli government (and abetted by an apathetic jewish population).
He was Palestinian. You ought to be familiar with that concept and what it means.
You would expect that from the shreds left of a land that is occupied, its industry destroyed, its fields ravaged and set on fire, it’s land stolen on a daily basis, its factories bombed, its people forced into indentured servitude to their colonizers and occupiers. You ought to be mighty proud of that. It’s part of the blowback of occupation.
LOL! Thank Ford for candid slips of the tongue such as this even when which reveal the perverse and darker universe you’re trying to cover with your Hasbara blanket. Of course what counts is even when not the rest of the times when it doesn’t.
Yeah, it worsen the economy…ISreal’s that is. Palestinians don’t have an economy thanks to the occupation. Remember how y’all had to come crawling to your much hated Sugar Daddy in the 80s, after the First Intifada, crying poverty and “borrowed” BILLIONS of US taxpayers to pull yourselves when the hole you had dug for yourselves? See, that economic thingie doesn’t just apply to the Palestinians, it’s just that they have no one to cry to, no Holocaust™ to milk, no powerful nations to blackmail and no foreign taxpayers to suck dry.
As for the outside investments in the West Bank, you may be confusing those with the illegal settlements. And you are right, they are foreign but investments they are not, certainly not for the Palestinians.
Hmmm…no, YOU call the PA Palestine, the rest of the posters here know the different between the US/ISreali lapdog commonly known as the PA and Palestine. And you are right, the PA does need to work, they need to work on representing their people – not the invading and occupying genocidal Zionist forces. They need to work on uniting their people so they can get themselves out from under the yoke of occupation and colonialism. They need to work on getting some backbone and doing what is right for Palestine not ISreal.
While the rest of us eagerly await for an “article” … nay, a statement, an admission of how ISreal plans to deal with the Palestinians living in Palestine and the ones that were expelled or had to flee since 1947. We await to see the Palestinians that live in “ISreal” have voting rights and equality. We await to see the Apartheid wall come down and the illegal settlements be dismantled. We await to see ISreal pay reparations to the families of the Palestinians it has callously slaughtered and the land it has stolen. And expect the freedom and equal rights that most ISrealites say they’d afford the Palestinians. Nu?
“The over 5 million Israeli Jews living in Israel today, grant them equality/voting rights, and prevent the expected revenge “the over 5 million Israeli Jews living in Israel today, grant them equality/voting rights, and prevent the expected revenge that most Palestinians say they’d take on them. Nu?” right,
is solipsism a side effect of Zio-caine use, “that most Palestinians say they’d take on them.” when was that, was it a Gallup or Made-Up poll? “expected revenge” ah yes Amalek is such a dodgy fucker.