Posted by
Benyamin Solomon on Thursday, September 10, 2009 4:47:13 PM
To add to the pile of more of these stories of courageous Palestinians "resisting" Israel,
Stop the Wall, the militant anti-Israel propaganda site, and
Al Jazeera both published these stories where Ibrahim Jadallah makes allegations about courageous villagers "resisting" the Israeli "occupiers" and their alleged plans to expel them. Anti-Israel propagandists will wet their pants over this. And the Al Jazeera version is in the section titled "1967-40 years of occupation", where you see it spewing the anti-Israel narrative.
However, both versions have contradictions. For example, here's one. In the Stop the Wall version, Ibrahim Jadallah says this about alleged settler violence:
The settlers were attacking us constantly; we were fighting them to defend ourselves. Every day there were problems with them. They beat me with an iron bar. You can still see the scar on my face - from my eye to my mouth - and my broken teeth.
However, the Al Jazeera version shows a picture of him as seen below:
The question I have is "Where is the scar"? Of course, Al Jazeera doesn't mention the scar from his eye to mouth that he supposedly got. But it does talk about the alleged beating he supposedly got from the settlers using an iron bar [as seen below, in the Al Jazeera version, it's from more than one iron bar]:
In one incident, the settlers came onto Jaddallah's land and he went to confront them. He said they beat him with iron bars, leaving him needing hospital treatment for a damaged eye.
Another contradiction comes from how they supposedly figured out that Israel seeks to expel the villagers. In the Al Jazeera version, Jadallah states:
Israeli tanks encircled between two to three thousand dunums of our land and declared it a military area that no one could enter.
But soon the settlers started to use it.
Seventy-five cars full of people from the village went to see Moshe Dayan [the Israeli defence minister] in Jerusalem to ask what was happening.
Dayan told us that our land was need[ed] for military use and that he would give us more land elsewhere.
But we told them we didn't want any other land and we didn't want money for it.
That this land was ours and that they would have to take it by force.
Then comes the section titled House demolitions, where the first sentence of that section of the article is:
That is exactly what has happened in Khirbet Zakariyya, with villagers facing what they say is a campaign of intimidation to force them to leave.
The Stop the Wall version is different. In that version, Jadallah says:
After the settlers failed to implement the Zionist plan, the Occupation authority started to distribute military orders stating directly ‘You have 24 hours to leave the area.’ The day after, they made the same announcement: ‘If you don’t leave we will shoot anyone we see in the land or outside the build up area.’ They wanted us to leave our land and our houses but no one left. The young men told the villagers not to leave whatever the Occupation does. We didn’t leave. In the end, it was all an effort to terrify us.
Of course, according to the Stop the Wall version, the "Zionist plan" is to get the villagers to leave and then to not allow them back once they left. Stop the Wall states:
The settlers’ assaults had no effect on the psyche of the people. They knew exactly what the Zionist plan was and what the Zionists wanted. They had learnt from the experience of expulsion in 1948 and knew that if they left their village they would not be allowed to return back.
Apparently, Jadallah seems to confirm it, since he made a mention of it in the Stop the Wall version. Jadallah contradicts it with this message, which undermines the credibility of the notion that the Israelis seek to expel the villagers:
They wanted to expel us in this way but despite this torture the people didn’t leave. Everyone continued to work their land, when the soldiers and settlers came and beat them and forced them to leave their land, they left it but never for more than for a couple of days.
Another time, in the Stop the Wall version, Jadallah says that no one left the land:They wanted us to leave our land and our houses but no one left. The young men told the villagers not to leave whatever the Occupation does. We didn’t leave. In the end, it was all an effort to terrify us.
In the Al Jazeera version, Jewish forces expelled the villagers including Ibrahim Jadallah in 1948 and that version does not say that he or any other villager returned after supposedly being expelled by the Jews:
The Jewish forces arrived at Jaddallah's home in the middle of the night, and he, along with all the other men in the village, was forced at gunpoint to walk to Bethlehem, about 15km away.
The only problem with that is that Jewish forces were unable to expel him or any of the villagers at that point. After all, it was the Arab forces that expelled the Gush Etzion settlers, who returned to where they were after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six day war.
Of course, Israeli soldiers and settlers who do intentionally commit atrocities on innocent Palestinians are punished. To get back to the point, apparently, Palestinians should take a class on consistency before making up stories about the big bad Israelis. If they don't, then people like me will expose their stories as shams.