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State Dept to ‘check out’ vicious attack on Palestinian athletes

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Palestine National Team, AFC Challenge Cup Qualifiers Feb 21, 2013 (photo: anantasports.com)

On Jan 31st, without warning, Israeli forces attacked two young Palestinian athletes on their return home from football training in al-Ram in the central West Bank. They shot them repeatedly in the feet, unleashed attack dogs that mauled their arms and legs and dragged them hundreds of feet on the ground, beat them and broke their knees (video).  The youths, cousins Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, 19, and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya, 17, will never play competitive sports again.

attack
Palestinian footballer Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, 19, after attack by Israeli forces Jan.31, 2014 (photo: Ma’an News)

Dave Zirin, Sports Editor for The Nation, writes a damning article After Latest Incident, Israel’s Future in FIFA Is Uncertain, detailing the event and calling attention to the ongoing atrocities perpetrated against Palestinian athletes that have thus far escaped the attention they deserve.

Whether it was the particularly horrific nature of this attack against young Palestinian athletes as they neared a checkpoint– (“Ten bullets were put into Jawhar’s feet. Adam took one bullet in each foot”)– or the exposure afforded by The Nation article coming right after Amnesty International’s 87-page report (pdf) landmark report “‘Trigger-happy’ Israeli army and police use reckless force in the West Bank”– but look what popped up at today’s State Dept Daily Press Briefing:

QUESTION: I know you had addressed the excessive use of force in the occupied territories by Israeli soldiers in your Human Rights Report.

MS. [Jen] PSAKI: Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: But there was a report that Israeli soldiers at checkpoints are targeting Palestinian soccer players, that they shoot them in the legs and so on. A number of them have been sent to hospitals. Do you have any comment on that or are you aware?

MS. PSAKI: I haven’t seen that. Obviously, we spoke to our concerns, again, in the same Human Rights Report about certain actions and behavior.

QUESTION: Right. Okay. (Inaudible) because FIFA – I think FIFA has warned Israel that it might —

MS. PSAKI: I will check that out. Thanks, everyone.

We do hope Psaki ‘checks it out’ and doubly hope reporters keep dogging her til something breaks this through to the mainstream.  Zirin asks, “Just imagine”:

This is only the latest instance of the targeting of Palestinian soccer players by the Israeli army and security forces. Death, injury or imprisonment has been a reality for several members of the Palestinian national team over the last five years. Just imagine if members of Spain’s top-flight World Cup team had been jailed, shot or killed by another country and imagine the international media outrage that would ensue. Imagine if prospective youth players for Brazil were shot in the feet by the military of another nation. But, tragically, these events along the checkpoints have received little attention on the sports page or beyond.

The vicious attack was condemned by Jibril al-Rajoub, Chairman of the Palestinian Football Association: “Israeli brutality against them emphasizes the occupation’s insistence on destroying Palestinian sport.”

Al-Rajoub is demanding the expulsion of Israel from FIFA and the International Olympic Committee. As reported in Inside World Football and other sports related media outlets, this demand is not new. But it’s long overdue.

The Nation agrees. Zirin:

The shooting into the feet of Jawhar and Adam has taken a delicate situation and made it an impossible one. Sporting institutions like FIFA and the IOC are always wary about drawing lines in the sand when it comes to the conduct of member nations. But the deliberate targeting of players is seen, even in the corridors of power, as impossible to ignore. As long as Israel subjects Palestinian athletes to detention and violence, their seat at the table of international sports will be never be short of precarious.

At a regional meeting of Arab states set for March 14, Al-Rajoub plans to organize support for his demand to become a formal resolution when all the member nations of FIFA meet in Brazil this June. It’s about time. Maybe, like South Africa, it will be sports that breaks the will of Israeli apartheid. 

Meanwhile, doctors said it may take six months to evaluate if Jawhar or Halabiya will ever be able to walk again.

 

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Yeah, because shooting football players in the feet, breaking their knees is somehow demonstrative of how the IOF values life….

The IOF and the Israeli government are monstrous and guilty, guilty, guilty of war crimes. Yet our House of Reps (HORs) just voted to make their country our very special strategic ally.

The world looks on with horror.

Expel Israel from FIFA forever. Shame them on the world stage. They are not fit to be on any playing field with humans.

Fuck Israel.

Fucking scumbags.

I think this incident — this series of incidents apparently — makes it plain that BDS must attack all Israeli sport. I assume that a sufficiently adverse action taken by FIFA against Israel would in effect knock Israel out of the soccer (futbol) track of world sport and that would be a beginning. It would not be enough.

Wanton cruelty of this sort must be severely punished. And it must be assumed to come either on “orders” from the top or subject to a conscious decision by the top military leaders to overlook it and to refrain from issuing “orders” not to do it and/or punishing those who do it.

All told, this bestial brutality comes from the top and it is the not-so-kindly folks at the top of Israel’s military who should most impressively be held to account. And, who knows, perhaps this cruelty is a war-crime. Torture?

CAVEAT: there is nothing too much new about this. Rabin, I believe, whatever his thoughts on peace, oversaw a program of deliberate breaking of the bones of captured Palestinians. And most Israeli occupation commanders oversaw a lot of (as the orders are said to have specified) “shooting at the feet” of Palestinians (including children) where the bullets, once shot at the feet, miraculously turned upward and struck bodies and heads.

Perhaps one should also cite the Israeli version which is sufficiently plausible for the State Department to put it in “we will check” file rather then “we deplore”.

The lawyer told Haaretz that the two suspects told him they bought cigarettes at a nearby store and were shot as soon as they lit a match. Immediately after, they were attacked by dogs. They claim the Border Police troops beat them, then dragged them to the base – 300 meters from where they were attacked. They claim they were beaten inside the base as well.

In response to inquiries, a Border Police spokesman said, “During operational activity, a group of individuals was seen just seconds before throwing bombs at security forces. When they saw the Border Policemen, the group attempted to run away and tried again to throw bombs at the policemen. The policemen initiated the protocol for opening fire in order to neutralize the threat. The suspects were apprehended, and a bomb was found on them, which has been deactivated.”

The response included a picture of the bomb, but did not include any answers to the claim that the suspects were beaten.

To my recollection, members of Border Police are particularly enthusiastic, compared with other units of IDF, so once they “initiated the protocol” it was really hard to stop. The succession of events is a bit curious, first the suspects were observed about to throw bombs, then they were thoroughly disabled, then a bomb (singular by that time) was found — how was it observed earlier? — and duly photographed. According you the youngsters, they had nothing more lethal then a cigarette lighter.

It reminds me a story by Jorge Louis Borghes about a place were ideas are actually alive, so a search for an object fervently believed to exists always produces a material result — sometimes more than once, resulting in slightly different copies.

Great article. Thanks Annie.

To underscore this pattern of wanton evil, Mahmoud Sarsak, the Palestine NT goalie at the time was arrested and jailed (sorry, indefinitely administratively detained), and had to end his career with a hunger strike to get attention, let alone release, let alone justice. His crime, traveling to the WB for NT practice. http://samidoun.ca/2012/04/palestine-football-star-seriously-ill-from-four-week-hunger-strike/

Zirin again (2012): http://www.thenation.com/blog/167827/what-if-kobe-bryant-were-imprisoned-palestinian-soccer-player

This is unignorable behavior to normal people, especially when contrasted with the “pure sport” idyll of FIFA and the IOC. It’s also a [violent lack of] morality that the tens of millions of young, US soccer/football players (billions globally) might just “what if” themselves into (“What if MY dreams were crushed like this?”).

Zirin (2014) says that FIFA is on the spot with this purely malevolent Israeli behavior. I hope they do right. May the increasingly legitimate and strengthening BDS movement give them cover if not strength to act morally and according to their own rules.

The movement down the South Africa isolation path is quickening.

Thanks again, Annie.