In 2014, I spent seven weeks working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. My experiences form the subject of my book, The Other Side of the Wall.
ISM is a group of activists who come to Palestine to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against the brutality of the occupation. One of our primary purposes is to monitor and document the human rights violations perpetrated by both Israeli soldiers and colonisers against the local populations. We regularly attend the demonstrations that take place in villages all over the West Bank.
The excerpt below is taken from a protest at the village of Kufr Qaddum, where the occupying forces closed an important road in 2003, an action that caused the descent of the village into high unemployment, abject poverty, and despair.
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Suddenly, I felt something pass just to the left of my head. It was difficult to pinpoint what had happened. There was a buzzing sound that lasted a fraction of a second. Then it was gone. It felt like it was very close, but it was hard to tell for sure. I looked at Giuseppe, who was standing a few metres away. “Did you feel that?” I asked him.
“Yes. What was that?” he replied.
My first thought was that it was a rubber bullet that had been fired to scare the protesters. But did rubber bullets make a buzzing sound when they passed by? I did not think so. And I had not heard the sound of a gun being fired. Perhaps the soldiers were using silencers today. Did guns that fired rubber bullets have silencers? Maybe the bullet had hit a rock or a tree and ricocheted in my direction. It seemed like a change of direction in the bullet’s flight path might cause it to wobble, thereby creating a sound of vibration. I was merely guessing at this point. I wished I had paid more attention during the ISM [International Solidarity Movement, a prominent organisation of peace activists] training a month ago. Ayman had spent an hour explaining the various kinds of guns and bullets employed by the army. Could it have been a real bullet? Would the soldiers really be using live ammunition at a protest like this, where the threat of violence was almost nil?
I did not discover until later that it was a rubber bullet that passed by my head that day. At the time, my reaction to the event was quite different from what I had expected. I was surprised to notice that I was not frightened in the least, and I continued to take pictures at the protest, although I did try to stay lower. As I thought about it later in the day, I realised it was probably because it seemed so unreal to me. I could not see any danger, which somehow made me feel that it was not really there. The soldiers firing their guns were far away, and I could barely see them. Could their bullets really hurt me? Even if they had no weapons of any kind, I would have been much more afraid had they been closer.
Throughout my time in Palestine, I was much more fearful of being arrested than being shot. Being arrested meant physical confrontation and facing a real person, a person who was likely angry and wished me harm. Being shot was different. It was more clinical, and there were no emotions involved. It was cleaner, somehow.
Suddenly, there was a commotion under one of the trees on the hillside. A young man had been shot in the left knee, with a real bullet. Although rubber bullets could be dangerous and even lethal when fired from close range, their effectiveness deteriorated drastically and usually did not even break the skin when they were fired from a great distance.
So it was indeed live ammunition they were using today. The victim was a young man, about 20 years old. His friends had rolled up his pant leg to reveal the entry wound made by the bullet. There was not much blood. On the inside of the knee was the exit wound. Or was that where the bullet had entered?
In any case, the bullet was now gone, lodged in the dirt somewhere. His fellow protesters carried him to the ambulance, which was waiting just out of range of the soldiers’ rifles. He grimaced as he supported himself by wrapping his arms around the necks of two of his friends, while two others gently held his legs, trying to avoid touching the wound. The ambulance sped away as soon as the young man was placed gently in the back.
I was shocked. There had been no warning: no teargas, no skunk water, no open confrontation, no buildup, just a shot without a noise of any kind. The soldiers were clearly using silencers, robbing their victims even of the millisecond between the moment when the bullet leaves the rifle and when it strikes human flesh and bone.
I was used to seeing conflict that begins innocuously and escalates slowly. Two people exchanging words, then perhaps some shoving and eventually punches thrown. This defied all conflict logic, if there is such a thing. There was no beginning. No slow crescendo that would allow one of the parties to avoid real harm. It seemed like a law of sorts had been broken.
“Those soldiers are Druze,” a man standing next to me observed. “They are Arabs, and they are shooting their own brothers. They are usually the ones we have to be careful of. The Jews treat them badly, and they try to impress their masters by being as harsh to us as possible.”
The protesters proceeded as if nothing unusual had happened, some of them continuing to either throw stones at the soldiers or use their slingshots with the same objective. As I watched a skinny boy load his slingshot, I wondered what he must have been thinking. Was he not afraid? He had just watched his friend get shot with live ammunition for doing what he himself was about to do. Was there any temptation on his part to simply drop his slingshot and run home? Even if the social pressure not to flee must have been enormous, he could have taken steps to protect himself without anybody noticing. He could have slowly crept further away from the front, throwing rocks with a little less frequency. But he was doing just the opposite, running closer to the soldiers, swinging his slingshot with just a little more vigour, screaming just a little louder.
Then it happened again in the same way as the first time: no warning or noise of any kind. Suddenly, a boy was on the ground, clutching his leg. Four protesters rushed to pick him up and carry him back to the ambulance. As they passed me, I could see that this time the wound was on the fleshy part of his leg, just above the knee, and that there was a great deal more blood. The victim was wearing a ski mask. When I looked into his eyes, it seemed like he was calm, but perhaps he was just in shock. I watched his friends carry him past me, towards where the ambulance should have been. But the driver had not yet returned from his first trip to the hospital, so the most recent victim would have to wait. His friends carefully placed him on the ground, in the shade, next to a house, so he could lean against its cool wall. Three of them quickly returned to the battle, while one remained to comfort him, speaking to him softly.
I began to be concerned about my own safety. I noticed that both victims had been throwing stones before they were shot, and I assumed that I would be a less likely target, because I was doing nothing other than photographing. Why would they aim at me, when I was just a bystander? But this was ascribing to the soldiers qualities that I was not sure they possessed. I knew that soldiers sometimes shot and even killed protesters who were not engaging in behaviour that could in any way be construed as violent, as they had done during the protest at Ofer prison just months earlier. That incident had been captured on video and garnered international attention for a short time.
I also remembered the demonstration at Nabi Saleh the previous summer, when my friend Jessica had been shot in the arm with a rubber bullet while she was running away from the soldiers. The only weapon in her possession at the time had been a cell phone camera. The incident with Jessica reminded me that the protection afforded me by my white skin was by no means absolute. Enough Western activists had been killed or injured by the IDF.
Even if I was not a primary target for the soldiers’ bullets, this did not guarantee that I would not be the victim of an accident. Perhaps that was what had happened earlier. The bullet that had whizzed by my head might have been intended for someone else. I decided to stay away from the hillside, which was where both of the protesters had been shot thus far.
And then another man was shot; I had not even seen it. This time it was in the groin. Were the soldiers slowly setting their sights higher and higher? The knee, the thigh, the groin. What was next?
I had heard that Israelis tended to aim for the groin area, when they shot at protesters. Perhaps this latest soldier was just a better shot than his comrades. Or maybe it was the same shooter all along, and he was just improving with time. Maybe he had been nervous for the first two shots, and now he was settling down, his nerves calmed by his early successes. This victim too was carried to the ambulance, which had returned by now, and he was placed inside to join the boy who had been shot in the thigh. There was a heated conversation between the driver and some of the others. I was unable to catch it all, but it seemed like the driver was itching to leave, while the others wanted him to wait in case there were other victims. The driver relented, and the ambulance waited.
And then another man was shot. Blood was pouring from his arm. He was also wearing a ski mask, and I could not see his face, but he had a sizeable belly, which made me think he was significantly older than the others. He must have been seriously hurt, because, despite being hit only in the arm, he was unable to walk and needed considerable assistance to make it to the ambulance.
And then, suddenly, it was over. The protestors slowly straggled back to the village. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that everyone was quieter than usual. Altogether five people had been shot. I knew it was not unusual, but it was also not something that happened every day, and it must have affected the villagers. It was the first time in my life that I had witnessed someone being shot with live ammunition, and I really was not sure how to react. It felt surreal, and I found myself wondering whether it had really happened. The fact that it was also the first demonstration I had attended at which no teargas had been used made it seem even more unreal.
After we arrived back at the apartment in Nablus, I went up to the roof to be by myself and try to process what I had just witnessed. I felt numb, and it worried me. I knew the words should and normal had no place when it came to feelings, but it still felt to me that there should have been some reaction. I simply felt nothing. Five people who were protesting against the injustice meted out by an occupying power had been shot in cold blood. And I had seen it. Should I not have been raging against the unfairness of it all? Should I not have been moved to tears by the suffering of the victims? Was I feeling okay because it was not me who had been hurt, that I was one of the lucky ones who was safe?
There is a famous thought experiment in which a man is confronted by a general. The general has at his disposal a powerful army, to which he can give the order to have a million people in a foreign country executed. The only way to save them, the general tells him, is for the man to agree to have his left pinky finger cut off. The man does not hesitate and accepts the offer. It is just his finger, and he can save a million souls. But the night before the deed is to be done, he is terrified of facing his fate. He thinks about a tall, powerful, masked man swinging a cleaver down onto his finger, severing it from his hand, blood spurting everywhere. He can imagine the almost unbearable pain, and he begins to sweat. All night long he tosses and turns, unable to sleep.
In the second part of the experiment, the general does not offer the man a choice. He simply informs him that the following day one million people will die and that there is nothing he can do about it. How will the man react? He will feel sorry for the victims, and he will most likely be upset for a time, but eventually he will calm down and go to sleep. He will not be nearly as affected in the second scenario as he is in the first. When given the choice between the saving of a million people and his finger, he will always choose the people. But the thought of losing a finger is much more terrifying to him than the idea of a million people he does not know meeting their deaths.
The story illustrates how conflicted people can be. They are willing to make enormous sacrifices in order to do what is right, but at their core what terrifies them most is the thought that their own personal safety is at risk. Perhaps my own reaction to the shootings merely indicated that I was a normal human being, one who is primarily concerned with his own well-being.
For more information about the book, visit www.richardhardigan.com
