The students take to the streets

We were not surprised when the students took off to the nearest Israeli checkpoint to vent their anger. As you can see (left), the Israelis were waiting in 'appropriate' numbers. Needless to say there were rather a few more than necessary but why let proportion get in the way of a jolly good day's fun?

There was a case once, where a Birzeit lecturer had his house turned over by a group of IDF soldiers. He understood Hebrew and heard the commander teaching them how to search a house. Afterwards, they just left and said, "You're okay." What happened there? Training, I reckon.

So, today, the poor IDF soldiers haven't had any crowd control practise for a while. What will they do? Ahhh! Moshe rings Shlomo, "I hear a bunch of Birzeit students are on their way to demonstrate at Bet El checkpoint."

"Excellent! Tell the lads." You don't think it happens? Tell me this then: why did some of the soldiers who participated in the morning raid parachute into Birzeit village? The rest managed fine in jeeps. We're not exactly in the middle of a jungle over here.

Look at this guy on the right, for example. What's his game? It is a bunch of students a few hundred yards in front of him, not Hizbollah guerillas with Katushas.

A large number of the 1,500 or so Palestinians that were killed by Israeli soldiers in the Intifada, died at demonstrations. The PHRIC human rights center used to publish brief autopsy reports along with the names of the Intifada dead. It was quite sickening, to read the lists concerning demonstrations, as so many of them went like this: Mohammed Abdul Sa'id, 18 years old, two bullet wounds in lower back area.

In other words, he was shot in the back. Clearly the result of one of two things: the soldier was shooting at him in a non-life threatening situation, or else the type of weapons used have excessive penetration for crowd control situations. Look again at the picture. How many people will an M-16 bullet kill on a crowded street? Is this really necessary?

In any case, all such horrors were spared us, as the Palestinian police got in between the two groups (left). Students shouted at them, they reasoned back, and eventually everyone got bored and went home.

Sometimes I think that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to give both sides foam clubs and put them in a gym for a few days. Then I shake my head and think: naaah, someone is bound to slip a chunk of metal into their foam club and then we'd be back to square one.

For the full Birzeit report on the day's events which I wrote, check out this link to the Human Rights Archive.