‘This small man with just his words and his staff’ — Velshi salutes martyred Palestinian Hajj Suleiman in groundbreaking MSNBC broadcast

Last week a veteran Palestinian activist Suleiman al-Hathalin, 75, died after being run over in his occupied village Umm al-Khair by an Israeli truck two weeks earlier.

MSNBC journalist Ali Velshi had met Hajj Suleiman two years earlier and on Saturday he did a 5-minute obituary for Suleiman honoring the man’s spirit of resistance against enormities. It is a wonderful piece of journalism. It shows incredible compassion for a small Palestinian village encroached upon by colonizers supported by the U.S. All facts, very little emotion, but a ton of suppressed rage– and by the end the listener is in tears over the nobility of a simple man who resisted occupation.

The Israel lobby is going nuts over this report. CAMERA is smearing Velshi. J Street is siding with Velshi in its struggle to preserve the future of the Jewish state.

What’s stunning about this report is that Palestinians are at last being humanized in mainstream media as grotesque atrocities continue to pile up. A day earlier, The New York Times covered the killing in the West Bank of Omer Abedelmajid Assad, 78, with the headline, “Palestinian American died handcuffed in Israeli custody, Witnesses Say.” The Times’s Raja Abdulrahim reports that Assad just wanted to see his grandchildren in the States.

These are remarkable pieces because the liberal media is seeing Palestinians as people deserving of equal rights, and the political consequences of that opening inside the U.S. establishment/Democratic Party are potentially huge.

Here’s an extended excerpt of Velshi’s report, in which he describes the illegal occupation of nearly 700,000 illegal settlers and their army, with the support of the U.S. government:

You and your family live on land that you’ve owned for decades maybe even close to a century. You live a simple peaceful life in a small village with people whom you’ve known for as long as you can remember. And then seemingly out of nowhere a new group of people build their own village right on your village’s land. Not as neighbors though. Rather they are intent on displacing and replacing you. They build their homes on your hands on your land with the sanction of the government and the protection of the military. Now there’s barbed wire where your sheep used to graze. Now you live in the shadow literally of homes that look like they were transplanted from 21st century America to your rustic village. All while you and your fellow villagers lack basic necessities like land to grow food, water and electricity.

Still, you’d be one of the lucky ones, because your home humble as it may seem remains standing. And for now you’re still allowed to live in it.

Almost weekly you watch government forces demolish homes, confiscate property and arrest your neighbors. That’s what’s happening right now to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. It’s been happening for years. The West Bank was occupied by the Israeli army during the 1967 war. International law forbids countries from settling on lands that they occupy as a result of a conflict if there’s no treaty or agreement in place about the transfer or control of that land. But Israel disputes that interpretation of international law and asserts its rights in the West Bank, actively promoting what the rest of the world sees as illegal settlements on land taken from Palestinians often with the support of the United States.

All Palestinians in the occupied territories live under Israeli military rule. Even in those areas that are nominally under the political control of the Palestinian Authority. And Israel continues to confiscate what little Palestinian territory is left under false pretenses every year. Now according to the Palestinian bureau of statistics, as of 2019 more than 688,000 Israeli settlers live in 150 settlements, which are spread disruptively across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The man right here is Al Haj Suleiman al-Hathaleen. He’s know locally in the South Hebron Hills as Haj Suleiman. He was a shepherd and a well-known anti-occupation activist. Suleiman was a small man with no weapons. He resisted the occupation through civil disobedience. When Israeli bulldozers destroyed the homes in his neighborhood, he stood in peaceful defiance with a Palestinian flag and his shepherd’s staff….

[From fellow activists writing in 972] “Every time we go to his home in Umm Al Khair he greets us with a cup of tea and a smile. Everyone in the South Hebron Hills knows him well especially the occupation. soldiers.”

I met Haj Suleiman on my last trip to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank in the end of 2019. In this photograph [photo at top of this post] we’re standing right in front of the village’s communal bread over. Just feet behind us an Israeli settlement encroaches on their livelihood. The new Israeli settlers did not appreciate the smoke that wafted from that bread oven into their settlement next door. So they sent the authorities to demolish one of the only food sources in the village. Israeli soldiers literally destroyed a bread oven to satisfy illegal settlers.

But the harassment continues. The goal was and always is to get Palestinians to leave the land, allowing more Israeli settlers to populate it. It came to a head days ago. On the afternoon of January 5, Israeli forces entered Haj Suleiman’s village of Umm Al-Khair and began confiscating unregistered Palestinian cars. Haj Suleiman did what he had done for decades: he peacefully resisted. Then he was run over by an Israeli tow truck, under contract to the Israeli police. Haj Suleiman was on the ground, battered and bleeding. Israeli officials say Suleiman charged at the truck. Witnesses say — and there were many of them — say otherwise.

What happened next was the real tragedy. Witnesses say the tow truck driver and their police escort simply fled the rural village. They did not render aid to Haj Suleiman. They did not even call for an ambulance. The protester Al Haj Suleiman al-Hathaleen never emerged from his coma, and he died of his injuries this week.

Suleiman was a man with little to his name, except for his land, his village, and his ability to stand up to an illegal occupation. This small man with just his words and his staff, was a thorn in the side of the Israeli occupation, because he had become a symbol of the resistance, and an emblem of the Israeli occupation.

CAMERA has responded with vitriol, describing the report as “grotesque propaganda that abandoned all pretense of real journalism…. Velshi delivers a dishonest soliloquy of fabricated history of the West Bank that would have been more at home at his former employer, Al Jazeera, than an outlet that purports to offer real journalism.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street responded with anguish over Velshi’s coverage of the killing, and called anew for a two-state solution so as to preserve the Jewish homeland that we gaze on from afar. “It is time for Israel’s citizens, American supporters of Israel and the US government to face the reality of 55 years of occupation and take steps to establish a state of Palestine alongside Israel (perhaps in confederation) and bring this conflict to an end,” Ben-Ami writes, and says, “I respond in the name of – and to honor the memory of – Suleiman al-Hatalin, a 75-year old Palestinian,” while repeatedly disavowing the Palestinian campaign of BDS, or boycott of Israel over human rights violations, which Haj Suleiman surely would have supported.

h/t James North and Terry Weber.