John Ross Savagely Attacked in Palestine

Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): 
Free Americans Resisting the Fourth Reich on Behalf of All Species. 
NOTE:  Thanks to Elizabeth Bell for this; I hope everybody can 
circulate it to the max.   --  kl, pp

FROM: JOHN ROSS

On the Road in Palestine

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

415-282-2341 (message phone)

THE CHILDREN OF GOD

EIN ABUS OCCUPIED PALESTINE (Nov. 6th) -- The Children of God charged 
down the bare brown hillside swinging thick clubs and hurling large 
lethal stones, war-whooping in Hebrew their harsh curses upon the 
people of this lacerated land. I was standing with a Palestinian 
farmer and his family under a freshly-picked olive tree when they 
came for us and thus, I suppose, guilty of being a race traitor in 
their perverted vision.

The old farmer had just showed me the scars on his scalp from the 
beating the settler youth had inflicted upon him in last year's olive 
harvest when he heard them running towards us. Hurriedly, his wife 
gathered up the tarpaulins and his son shouldered the heavy sack of 
new olives. Yala, they warned. Time to go.

I was following the old man down the terraced terrain when the 
savages broke out of the trees and before I had time to turn towards 
them, they were upon me -- six, maybe seven, young men in yarmulkes 
and long, lank hair. The first blow glanced off the small of my back 
and I tumbled to the red-brown earth. trying to cover my head with my 
forearm. The second smashed into my wrist and the blood began to 
spurt -- the wound only excited the settlers' thirst for more of it. 
Now they were pulping my lower legs with sharp blows from their 
sticks. One Nazi youth picked up a large, jagged rock and advanced 
upon me with malice glowing in his evil, rabid eyes, hurling it from 
five feet away. I felt the painful crack against my knee and winced 
visibly, and then they were pulling me to my feet . tearing my 
clothes and booting me down the hill like a punctured soccer ball.

Just as I felt my legs collapsing under me all over again, my new 
friend Arik Ascherman, the head mavin of the Rabbis for Human Rights, 
dove into the fray, momentarily diverting the attackers' attentions. 
Soon, they had ripped Arik's own yarmulke from his bushy head and 
yelled at him that he was a betrayer of the Jews. Meanwhile, young 
Palestinian men took hold of both my bloody arms and led me down the 
narrow goat path to safety in the valley below.

The rabbis had come to Ein Abus, a village north of Jerusalem, to 
verify reports that these self-appointed children of god had 
chainsawed hundreds of olive trees the week previous, a crime against 
both the people and the land. Yitzhar, an illegal, barebones 
settlement which had spawned these crazies, stretches across 18 
kilometers of naked hilltops but is really not much more than a 
string of tincan mobile homes that followers of the late and 
unlamented Meir Kahane seized from Palestinian villagers a decade ago.

Under the so-called "road map" peace plan, so hypercritically touted 
by George W. Bush and Israeli strongman Ariel Sharon, Yitzhar was 
supposed to have been dismantled because it lacks the proper permits 
to be a settlement at all but when the Israeli Army sent its troops 
to accomplish this simple task last spring, the heavily-armed 
soldiers were pelted with rocks and eggs and retreated in shame.

Although the Israeli press and even the U.S. consulate would 
half-heartedly condemn the attack on Rabbi Ascherman and this old 
Jewish reporter, minimal energy would be expended on bringing the 
muggers to justice (I have been mugged by better people) -- much as 
little effort was assigned to investigate the murders of Rachel 
Corrie and Tom Hurndall, and the maiming of Brian Avery, young 
International Solidarity Movement activists last spring under the 
guns and bulldozers of the Israeli "Defense" Force (IDF). Bringing 
homicidal settlers and soldiers to justice does not have much 
political scratch here in this Promised Land.

Two days after the attack in Ein Abus October 27th, Rabbi Ascherman 
and I traveled to the white-washed modern settlement of Ariel where 
district police headquarters are located, to file complaints against 
god's children. Ariel, a fenced city of 20,000, is, of course, named 
after current prime minister Ariel Sharon, once the nation's housing 
secretary who had sponsored its construction when he took over that 
ministry after being replaced as defense chief in the wake of the 
terrible massacre of 1700 Palestinian refugees in Beirut at Sabra and 
Chatila in 1982. As such a malevolent context implies, justice would 
not be served at Ariel.

For five hours, we paced the hallways of the fortress-like police 
headquarters there waiting to identify our attackers. With obvious 
disinterest, the cops showed us a handful of ill-defined mug shots 
and seemed to suggest that we were responsible for our own beatings. 
The idea, I suspect, was to drive us away unsatisfied with Israeli 
justice which is not unlike that meted out in Mexico City or San 
Francisco's Mission District, venues in which I have been similarly 
assaulted, so that never again would we have the chutzpah to demand 
redress. Although Arik, the first peace activist to stand up to an 
Israeli bulldozer after Rachel Corrie was crushed last March during a 
home demolition in Rafah camp, Gaza (for which he will soon stand 
trial -- the settler community has published a 'wanted for incitement 
to murder' poster with his likeness attached), is a persistent man, 
at the end of the day he had to concede he owed me 50 shekels which I 
had wagered on the hunch that justice would never be done.

The Israeli settlement movement first took wing after the 1967 war 
that defined the occupied territories when the children of god 
established a beachhead in Hebron where the Brooklyn-born racist 
fanatic Baruch Goldstein would later murder 29 Palestinians to become 
a martyr to their movement. Today, there are 195 settlements in 
Israel proper and the occupied territories, with a total population 
of 200,000 (twice that if east Jerusalem is factored in.)

Although they account for only a small fraction of the Israeli 
population, financed by U.S. tycoons, White House loan guarantees, 
and the all-powerful Israeli lobby, the settlements gobble up vast 
and disproportionate government resources, depleting education, 
health, and other social service outlays for the majority of Israeli 
citizens -- not to mention hundreds of thousands of acres of 
Palestinian farm land.

As I stumbled bleeding and bruised (x-rays showed no bones broken) 
down the hillside in Ein Abus after the beating at the hands of god's 
children, my Palestinian hosts were eager to underscore how they had 
suffered such wounds during a half century of Israeli despotism 
"Perhaps it is not nice to say this when you are in such pain" Moussa 
(not his real name), a village official said gravely, "but now you 
will know in your own body how we have suffered here."

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John Ross invites his readers to know the reality of Palestinian life 
by participating on the annual olive harvest in this hard and 
dangerous land.
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