The reason I devote space on this blog to Israel's abuses of Palestinian human rights is because 2 years ago in Hebron in the house of an Arab who fears for his safety I saw a video of Palestinian girls being attacked and stoned by religious Jewish settlers as these girls tried to make their way to school. As Amnon Aahronson, a member of the tour I was on, said, he wanted to run outside and vomit. (All of us on the tour were Jewish, led by the great Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence.)
Here is a new report by Christian peacemaker teams, allied with an Israeli group, that details this continuing crime against humanity: “A Dangerous Journey: Settler violence against Palestinian
schoolchildren under Israeli military escort”. The report
journey of the children from the [West Bank] villages of Tuba and Maghaer al-Abeed
to and from their school in At-Tuwani under Israeli military escort. It
highlights how settler threats and violence during the journey
undermine the children’s safety and documents the Israeli military’s
violations of its legal obligations to ensure the children’s safe
passage and right to education.
A comparison of the data
collected during the 2007-08 school year and the 2006-07 school year
shows a constant level of settler violence against the schoolchildren
for these two years. … During
the first two months of the 2008-2009 school year, the children made
sixty-eight journeys to and from school. On fourteen of these
sixty-eight occasions (21% of journeys) the children had to wait,
either before or after school, for over half-an-hour for the Israeli
military escort to arrive. On four of these occasions, the children had
to wait for over an hour, and one morning had to wait for one hour and
forty minutes for the escort to arrive.
Again I would say that the failure of Israeli society to honor the rights of these children and the failure of the American Diaspora community to ever discuss this abuse is a failure of Jewish ethnocentrism. Put another way: selfishness. I think at some level I truly love my Jewishness or I wouldn't be so engaged by it; it was how I thought of myself all my growing-up years. And I really think there is a fight on now for the soul of Jewishness. I ask all young Jews in America who cherish their minority rights here, to the point where they don't even think of themselves as a minority, many of them: How can someone be Jewish and tolerate this?
