Thursday, August 07, 2014

Eyal from 1948 Palestine was hit on the head by Israeli hoodlums for speaking out

From Eyal (I cite with his permission): "* I took an aluminum pole to the head after an anti-war demo last Saturday (I mean, July 26th). I think I was targeted because I had a T-shirt with writing in Arabic. The Zionist thugs have been moving forward from shouting "death to the Arabs, death to the leftists" to more concrete action. Or maybe I should say, metal action.
* Later that week, I got interviewed on RT news (the Russian satellite channel), although it was about signing this letter of refusing to do reserve military service if/when we're called up.

It's not very news-ish, probably not material for your blog, but one point I was happy to make is in the following segment:

"RT: Some would consider your decision a betrayal... do you feel you've distanced yourself from your fellow citizens somewhat?
ER: Well, it _is_ a betrayal of the ethos that the Israeli govt wants us to follow. We're not willing to be their "Good Israeli"s, to support their military adventures - neither in Gaza nor elsewhere. And it does distance us from those who are perfectly supporting this operation, to the extent of us even experiencing violence. But we have to remember the population of this country, the majority of it, are the Palestinians, whether they're in Palestine itself or whether they're refugees... we can't just count ourselves among Israeli Jews and ask ourselves whether we're close enough to the soldiers, to the government, to the establishment; we have to think about the people of this country, and of this region, and the best interests of everybody involved.
RT: What repercussions could this entail for you?
ER: Hmm, well, just a couple of days ago, one repercussion this has entailed for me is being hit over the head with a metal pipe, and I still have these, well, stitches on the back of my head I got at the emergency room... (cont.)"...

...other anti-anti-war demonstrators did chase some other people and beat them up on their own apartment building's stairs. As for me, I had this guy come up to me, take his time getting a nice photo, smiling, then retreating. And 2 minutes later, someone hits me from the back and runs away...I thought long and hard about whether to file a complaint with the police about my beating. Ok, that's not true, but I did spend some time here and there thinking about it, and consulting with my friends.
Eventually I decided not to complain, because:

- The police is essentially a hostile force towards the anti-war demonstrations, in general.
- I'm against the criminalization of political violence. It could be heinous, but I don't want the state treating it as criminal matter.
- In general, the core social role of the police is to enforce ownership, private property. All of the social order business is a graft onto that. I don't want to legitimize the police as an institution.
- The way we _should_ be dealing with this situation is collective-self-defense training rather than police protection.

Although there are valid arguments for filing a complaint."