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2011年6月18日星期六

The Lede: Palestinians Record West Bank Protests With Cameras Supplied by Israelis

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While journalists have found themselves scouring the Internet in search of video from protests across the Middle East recently, one protest movement, by small groups of villagers opposed to Israel’s security barrier in the West Bank, has gotten far less attention.

Even so, there is no lack of footage of the weekly protests that my colleague Isabel Kershner described last year as a sort of slow-motion, “part-time intifada.” That’s true in part because an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, has distributed video cameras to Palestinians to make sure the demonstrations do not go undocumented.

This week, B’Tselem released a video report made from footage shot by two Palestinian residents of the town of Nabi Saleh, outside Ramallah, showing, the rights group said, the use of “disproportionate force” by Israeli officers to disperse a protest there last month.

Yoav Gross, the director of B’Tselem’s video department, confirmed in an e-mail to The Lede that the Nabi Saleh residents who shot the video, Bilal Tamimi and Nariman Tamimi, had both been given cameras by the Israeli rights group. He added, “in addition to supplying us with footage documenting the demonstrations, they also distribute materials independently,” through Bilal Tamimi’s YouTube channel, which features extended clips of demonstrations in the village over the past year.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokesperson for B’Tselem, said that the footage of the incident last month was also used in news reports on Israeli television which questioned the use of force shown in the video. In response, a spokesperson for the Israeli Border Police called the video “one sided” because the Palestinians featured in it were “those who attacked the police officers and attempted to release an arrestee from detention.”

Ms. Michaeli said that the rights group took time to verify and cross-check the events shown in the video before issuing a formal demand for an investigation of the use of force by the officers.

An American activist, Christopher Whitman, was wounded while filming the same demonstration. He was struck in the head by what he described as a tear gas shell fired by an Israeli officer.

More footage of the same demonstration was posted on YouTube by an Israeli video blogger, Israel Puterman, who frequently films West Bank demonstrations.

Nariman Tamimi’s husband, Bassem, is currently on trial in an Israeli military court for his role in organizing the weekly protests in Nabi Saleh.

The Palestinian activists have also used the cameras provided to them by the Israeli rights group to record what they describe as a broad effort by the Israeli security forces to quash their protest movement.

In January, the activists filmed these two clips during a night-time raid on the village, as Israeli soldiers went house to house to photograph children and young adults to help them identify anyone throwing stones during clashes.

Footage of the night raids was also broadcast on Israeli television. A military spokesperson told Israel’s Channel 10 that the measures were necessary to maintain order and security.

A few days later, Nariman Tamimi filmed this video, showing the arrest of an 11-year-old boy, Kareem Tamimi, and his mother’s desperate attempts to pull him away from the security forces:

Just before that arrest, Bassem Tamimi, the protest organizer, claimed in an interview with Joseph Dana, an Israeli-American activist and blogger, that children in the village were being arrested as part of an effort to “apply pressure on our resistance.”


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2011年5月5日星期四

Palestinians and Israelis Seek Support in Europe


In Paris, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy while the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, was expected in Berlin to talk with Chancellor Angela Merkel. The encounter in the German capital came just 24 hours after Mr. Abbas, the leader of the Western-backed Fatah movement which holds sway in the West Bank, joined forces with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, the Islamist group that many in the West call terrorists.


Mr. Netanyahu, in London to meet Prime Minister David Cameron, labeled the unity deal a “tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism,” illustrating the gulf between Palestinian and Israeli strategies and perceptions. Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction and Israel, like the United States and the European Union, classifies the group as a terrorist organization and refuses any dealings with it.


While Mr. Abbas seemed certain to laud the advantages of Palestinian unity, European aversion to Hamas may well make Mr. Netanyahu’s mission easier, analysts in Paris said, though many European countries, including France, have been largely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.


The European diplomacy on Thursday came under the looming shadow of several other events scheduled for later this year.


Later this month, Mr. Netanyahu is to meet President Obama at a time when the American president is buoyed by the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and has emerged as a sponsor of the Arab pro-democracy movements sweeping the region from Libya to Syria to Yemen One result of the changes has been the readiness of the new Egyptian leadership that replaced the ousted Hosni Mubarak to sponsor the Palestinian unity pact.


Beyond that, in September, the United Nations is to consider the fraught issue of declaring recognition of a Palestinian state — a prospect that has galvanized both sides.


During a visit to Berlin in April by Mr. Netanyahu, Chancellor Merkel said she would urge Mr. Abbas not to press for a United Nations declaration of statehood, according to German news reports at the time. In public, she said: “We support a two-state solution, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state” and German diplomats said Berlin wanted a negotiated settlement.


The French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, said his government may seek to press Mr. Netanyahu to consider a restarted peace initiative, according to French news reports. “How much will we be able to get him to evolve? You know the man, his character, his determination,” Mr. Juppé said of Mr. Netanyahu. “Our idea is to try a last resort initiative, so that, in the month of September, when the question of recognition is raised, we can say we tried everything.”


While Israel refuses to deal with Hamas, Mr. Abbas says the Palestinians cannot return to peace talks without a halt to all settlement activity by Israel.