Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2001, page 15

Special Report

 

Settler Assaults Guest of Hebron Peacemaker Team

 

By Bonnie Gehweiler

Around 12:00 p.m. on Aug. 29, the team in Hebron received a call that settlers were attacking vendors in the vegetable market (as typically happens when the Israeli military lifts the curfew there).

Dianne Roe and British activist Angie Zelter, on a week’s visit with the team, went to investigate. As they approached the market, they saw a group of young settler women trying to enter, with soldiers trying to prevent them. The young women called Zelter and Roe “Nazis.” Zelter then saw one of the girls throw a rock at a 75-year-old man, which hit him in the back of his head, causing profuse bleeding.

Roe left to escort the old man to his home and Zelter continued to take pictures of the settler actions. She wrote in her statement to the police, “I could see a group of around 15 or so, mainly female, settler children in their early/mid teens screaming and throwing rocks. I asked the soldiers to stop the violence and I tried to appeal to some of the kids to stop the violence. I then noticed an armed man in a white shirt with a long black beard and glasses…and asked him to try and stop the kids throwing rocks because people were getting hurt, and tried to explain I had just witnessed an old man being badly hurt. He started screaming at me, ‘You fascist whore,’ ‘f---ing Nazi,’ ‘Go home,’ the ‘Christians murdered the Jews’…

“As I was trying to take photos of the violence going on all around and also asking him to try to stop it rather than letting it go on, he screamed that he had to suffer while the filthy Arabs took over his land and how he couldn’t go certain places because of them, how they should all be killed. This may have taken only a couple of minutes, but as he continued to scream at me more kids were gathering around and shouting out, ‘Nazi, Nazi,’ and he got angrier and…

“One of his hands was clenched on his gun, which was held slung in front of him, and it was jerking up and down. He suddenly came at me ‘to teach me,’ and hit me on the right hand side of the head.…He grabbed my camera, which was around my neck and which I held in my hands. I tried to keep hold of it but he wrested it out of my hands and over my ears and dashed it to the ground and stamped on it over and over again, screaming. By this time I was starting to cry…

“I just stood there with my hands open, looking at him with tears streaming down my face, trying to stop crying but not managing. Unfortunately my weakness seemed to make him and the kids even angrier… Soldiers were looking on from their cars, like they had the whole time.”

Roe returned at this point and saw the settler girls jeering at Zelter, “Boo hoo hoo. Boo hoo hoo. Jews never get hurt.” When the police arrived, Zelter, whose late husband was Jewish, pointed to the globs of white spit all over her black blouse, the pieces of camera on the ground and then the settler who was sitting on a chair, smiling as though nothing had happened. At her request, the police arrested him.

When Zelter said she wished to make a formal complaint, she was put in a police van with Roe and a Palestinian man whose keys had been stolen by the settlers. Roe, Zelter and the Palestinian man were left outside the station near the Il Ibrahimi mosque/Cave of Macpelah amidst a group of settlers. One of them, Baruch Marzel, took many pictures of the three at a very close distance.

At the police station, the police asked Roe if she had seen the attack. She said she had not, but when the Palestinian man said he had seen the attack, the police ignored him. He told Zelter later that the police had warned him against making a statement on her behalf.

The police then drove Zelter and a screaming settler girl to the police station across from the settlement of Kiryat Arba. Zelter had to wait for an hour and a half before the police took her statement. They did not offer her a ride back to Hebron and she ended up getting caught in heavy crossfire in the Abu Sneineh neighborhood for two hours before she finally returned to the CPT apartment.

Bonnie Gehweiler is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron, where it has maintained a violence-reduction presence since June 1995 at the invitation of the Hebron municipality.

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