Anarchists Against the Wall by Uri Gordon; Ohal Grietzer

Author:Uri Gordon; Ohal Grietzer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2013-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Here, Murderers Are Heroes

On Tuesday evening, July 27, 2008, a few of us gathered at the Vegan Community House for a meeting. Shortly before the meeting was scheduled to begin, we received the news: the army had murdered a child in Ni’ilin. Minutes later, five of us quickly headed out to the village. When we got there, hundreds of people were in the streets, rioting out of sheer fury over the death of their neighbor, friend, brother, and son. The army, too, was rioting. It had invaded the village, with its armored jeeps and M16-toting soldiers. About an hour earlier, ten-year-old Ahmed Musa along with a small group of kids and teenagers had approached the wall’s construction site and were messing with the razor wire installed around it by the army. A military jeep approached them, shooting rubber bullets. The kids ran away, but in his escape, Ahmed Musa lost his sandal. When he returned to pick it up, a soldier got out of the jeep and shot a single live bullet into the little boy’s forehead, killing him on the spot. The others, including his own brother, carried his lifeless body back to the village, leaving a thick trail of blood through the ancient olive groves. From there he was transferred to the hospital in Ramallah, where shortly after, his body was sent to the morgue.

Faced with the despair and deep sadness that slowly started accompanying the initial rage, the five of us headed toward Ramallah as the riots quieted down, hoping for something—confirmation of the unbelievable maybe, or perhaps simply to offer the family our support. Yet the family was already gone when we arrived. For a reason I cannot clearly remember, we were taken to the morgue by one of the doctors, where Ahmed’s tiny body lay inanimate.

The sight hit me with shock. I had never seen a dead body before, let alone that of a child. I didn’t know how to react or what to say. Anger, frustration, and pain flooded my body. Though the army’s cruelty and violence are nothing new, I could not understand how a ten-year-old could have ever been perceived as a threat to a soldier.

The following day, at the funeral, thousands of people from all over the West Bank came to show their solidarity and share their pain with Ahmed Musa’s family. We were there too, lost for words.

In the evening, after the funeral, rage took over the streets of Ni’ilin once again, and clashes erupted as the army invaded the village. Yousef Amirah, seventeen years old, was in a yard close to the clashes, observing. An armored jeep pulled up in the street in front of him, and a soldier shot three rounds of rubber-coated bullets from inside the jeep through the firing loophole. Two bullets ended up lodged inside Yousef’s skull. Minutes later, he was pronounced clinically dead at the Ramallah hospital, and died of his injuries a few days after.

The shock was once again terrible. Two murdered kids in two days.

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