|
|
|
|
|
|
Archives The Bi-monthly
publication of the PHRMG |
|
The Monitor |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bombing Attacks against Palestinian
Residence in West Jerusalem
Manal Diab, Sonia Khouri, and Wafa’ Khouri are three young Palestinian
women from northern Israel, who all hold Israeli citizenship. Manal Diab
is from the village of Tamra; Sonia and Wafa’ Khouri are sisters from the
Arab town of Nazareth. They had been living in Jerusalem in order to study
at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Because the Israeli government
does not provide adequate public services in East Jerusalem, such as
public transportation, Ms. Diab and the two Khouri sisters decided to rent
a flat in West Jerusalem.
Ms. Diab and the two Khouri sisters located a flat in the West Jerusalem
neighborhood of Musrara, which borders the Jewish ultra-Orthodox
neighborhood of Mea She’arim. Musrara’s location was convenient for the
women because it was close to the university and to their jobs and because
it was easily accessible by public transportation.
In July 1997 the women moved into an apartment on the top floor of an
apartment building on Ido Ha’Navi Street. The inhabitants of the apartment
included both secular and religious Israeli Jews. As members of the
Palestinian minority in Israel, which comprises 20% of the Israeli
citizenry, Ms. Diab and the two Khouri sisters were the only Arab tenants.
On three separate occasions – October 13, 1997, November 30, 1997, and
April 30, 1998 – the flat they had rented in the Musrara neighborhood was
attacked. In the first attack, the front door of their apartment was set
on fire. Of the three attacks, the second one was most severe. It involved
a bomb made of 4 aerosol cans, which exploded on their front doorstep. In
the third attack, a pipebomb blew up in front of their apartment.
Various forms of hate-based harassment and intimidation in the
neighborhood preceded the attacks. According to Manal Diab, the “violence
began with verbal attacks (with cries of ‘Go to Jordan! Go to Gaza! To Ras
El Amoud! This is not your country!’), then graffiti on our door
(including swastikas), and stones thrown at us by children of the Talmud
Torah.”8 The women also found curses written in Hebrew on the wall of
their stairwell and on their mailbox, including the Hebrew words “nevella”
(a biblical term for a female rotting carcass) and “Manyakim Hakhutsa”
(which means “Fuckers Get Out”).9 Ms. Diab and the Khouri sisters were not
the only Palestinian Arabs subjected to harassment because of their
nationality. Residents of the neighborhood also subjected other
Palestinian Arabs who lived on the same street to verbal intimidation.10
The First Attack
The first attack on their apartment consisted of blazing petrol-soaked
rags, which were thrown at their front door. In an interview with the
PHRMG, Ms. Diab described the first attack on the night of October 13,
1997, in the following terms:
“Around 2 o’clock in the morning, Sonia, Wafa’, and I were sitting in
Sonia’s room – drinking, laughing, joking, talking about many things,
enjoying life. Suddenly we heard a sound outside – Like plastic burning.
Wafa’ went outside and she started yelling. She was saying that something
was burning. We all went outside. There was black smoke. We saw a fire
just outside our front door. The smoke was really dark. We went back
inside and called the police.
When the police arrived, Ms. Diab told them that she had seen a suspicious
man in religious dress riding a bicycle near their house just after the
incident. She begged the police to find the man and to ask him what he had
been doing in the area so late at night. Nevertheless, the police did
nothing.
After the first attack, the landlord of the building attempted to evict
the women, giving them one month’s notice to vacate the premises.12
However, following the intervention of the women’s lawyer, the landlord
gave the women permission to stay. Nevertheless, in the six weeks after
the first attack, they explored alternative living arrangements. Although
they saw 30 other apartments in West Jerusalem, only two apartments were
offered to them. The women did not accept either of the apartments,
however, because they were not easily accessible from their work and
school.
The Second Attack
After the first attack, al-Fanar, a Palestinian feminist organization
based in Haifa, organized a local civil guard to help protect the women in
their apartment. The guard consisted of both Jewish and Arab volunteers,
who watched over the apartment. According to a bulletin released by
al-Fanar, the purpose of the civil guard was “to ensure the security of
these women who are persecuted by racists with religious, national or
other motivations.
Barry Trachtenberg volunteered to be a member of the civil guard. He
stayed periodically with the women in order to give them a greater sense
of security. On the night of November 30, 1997, Mr. Trachtenberg witnessed
first-hand the severity of the second attack on the women’s apartment.
Political tensions in the city had been running high that night due to a
nationalist right-wing demonstration, which had been held in front of
then-Prime Minister Netanyahu’s house. Mr. Trachtenberg explains the
details of the second attack:
“I remember calling Manal and asking her if she wanted me to come that
night, although nothing had happened for a number of weeks. I ended up
going to spend the night at their place. We were up really late until
about 2 in the morning, playing backgammon. Manal was also teaching me how
to count in Arabic. At 4 in the morning, I awoke because I heard a loud
boom, which sounded like a car backfiring. I didn’t know what it was. But
I decided I had better go check it out.
“I went to the front door of the apartment and did all the things they
teach you when you’re in elementary school. If you think there is a fire
on the other side of the door, you feel the door to make sure it is not
hot. Then you look through the hole, and then you touch the doorknob. I
didn’t see any smoke. And I didn’t feel any heat. But there was a funny
smell in the air that made me concerned. I opened the door. At my feet was
what initially looked like a bag of trash. I thought that maybe the
neighbors had thrown trash down the hallway. I couldn’t figure out what it
was.
“I looked at it very carefully. It was a plastic bag. Inside the plastic
bag there was a plastic bucket with lots of paper, what looked like cloth,
and four aerosol cans. Some of the cans were poisonous – like roach spray
or ant killer. One of the cans had blown up. The top of another can had
melted. There were still two cans there. I realized this was a bomb. I
realized that this was the real thing!
After discovering that a bomb had been placed outside of the front door of
the apartment, Mr. Trachtenberg went back inside the apartment and woke up
Manal and her sister Reem, who had been visiting. He told them what had
happened.
They called the police, and two or three policemen came. Approximately 40
minutes later, the bomb squad arrived. Mr. Trachtenberg relays the rest of
the story:
“The bomb squad told us to go in the back room in case something happens.
One of the men from the bomb squad had on his safety gear. When he went to
go pick up the bomb, it exploded two more times. We were in the back room,
and we saw these big flashes of light. Lots of screaming and yelling. We
had no idea of what was going on. I was trying to sort of protect the
girls. And then after what seemed like an eternity – but what was in
reality probably just 4 or 5 seconds – the man from the bomb squad
appeared. He was covered in flames from head to foot. The propellant from
this stuff had gotten onto his asbestos suit. He was trying to put himself
out.
“Sometime later – probably after 30 seconds or so – the people from the
bomb squad came in and said ‘Run, run, run for your lives!’ The whole
apartment filled up with this thick black smoke that was highly toxic. We
ran outside onto the balcony. We couldn’t go down the stairs because the
bomb was there. The heat from this bomb was so intense that it set off a
big fire in the stairwell, blew out the window, and melted all the plastic
fixtures – like the light fixtures which were a combination of plastic and
metal. It melted the fixtures into these grotesque shapes. The whole door
was covered with black ash.
The day after the second attack, Mr. Trachtenberg went to the Jerusalem
police headquarters at the Russian Compound to give a statement. He
offered evidence that pointed to Jewish connections, such as the Hebrew
graffiti and the harassment by neighbors of the women. Nevertheless, the
police officer tried to convince him that the attack was most likely
Arab-on-Arab violence and that the attack was probably not in any way
Jewish-related.
After the second attack, the mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, visited the
women in their apartment. According to Ms. Diab, Mayor Olmert was less
than sympathetic to their situation. In her view, the mayor ducked the
fundamental issues raised by the attack. She explains:
“Mayor Olmert merely ran away from the issues. I asked him difficult
questions. He thought that we would beg him to help us because he is the
mayor. He told us that as Arabs we should live in East Jerusalem. I told
him that we have the right to live wherever we want and that he can’t tell
us where to live. He couldn’t answer me. He gave up. He thought that we
were poor women begging for his help. He made some promises to do things,
but in reality he has done nothing.”17
Sonia Khouri describes Mayor Olmert’s treatment of the attack in similar
terms. According to her,
“Mayor Olmert said that the same kind of attacks occur in the West Bank
against Jews. But we told him the situation was completely different. We
told him that we had a contract to lease the apartment; whereas, the
settlers in the West Bank have stolen Palestinian lands and have
established illegal settlements on them. We started to shout at him. He
said that he understood our situation, but that he could also understand
what provoked the perpetrators to do such a thing.
Following the mayor’s visit, the women asked the police to provide some
basic security measures. However, the police did not agree to implement
any special security measures for the women, even though the Israeli
authorities often provide extra security for Jewish settlers in East
Jerusalem. The police even refused to increase their nightly patrol in the
area near the women’s apartment. Furthermore, the women requested that a
special door be put on the front entrance to the apartment building, which
would automatically lock when the tenants left the building. The police
refused that request as well. It is important to point out, however, that
at one point the police did agree to install a security camera in the
entrance area of the women’s apartment. Nevertheless, despite the women’s
protests, the camera was taken away not long after its initial
installation because the police claimed there was no further need for it.
After learning of the women’s situation, United States Senator Patrick
Leahy of Vermont wrote the commander of the Jerusalem District Police,
Major General Yair Yitzchaki, on three separate occasions. He indicated
his concern for the safety of the three women. He also urged the local
authorities to provide equal protection to all residents of Jerusalem,
regardless of nationality.19 In letters dated February 5, 1998, and May
25, 1998, Mr. Yitzchaki responded to the Senator’s concerns.
The Third Attack
On the night of Israeli Independence Day – April 30, 1998 – the women’s
apartment was attacked for a third time, when a pipebomb exploded in the
entrance to their apartment.20 According to Mr. Trachtenberg,
“A week before Israeli Independence Day, Wafa’ had some stones thrown at
her by Jewish boys at the top of the street. She had her mobile phone with
her, so she called the police. The police may have even brought someone in
for questioning. What is important is that the police put the camera back.
“The night of Israeli Independence Day, which was about six months after
the second attack, at about 1 o’clock in the morning I happened to check
my answering machine. On one of the messages, I heard: ‘Barry, they’ve
burned us again! They’ve burned us again!’ It was Manal’s voice. So I
hopped into a cab and rushed over to their house. When I arrived, it was
clear that they had been firebombed again. By the time I arrived, the
police had already gotten there and had cleaned some of it up.
“The following Saturday night after this third attack, Manal and I began
to clean the hallway. It was still a mess. Earlier in the week all the
other tenants in the building had paid extra to clean some of the mess
without charging the women. It was very kind of them for sure.
Nevertheless, when we began to do some extra cleaning, a shouting match
broke out between Manal and some of the neighbors. I tried to step in the
middle to get people to be quiet, and an altercation developed between the
neighbors and me. They started shouting at Manal: ‘This is your fault!
This is your fault! You are bringing all these problems upon us. We are
the ones who are suffering the most.’ It was as if Manal was doing this
violence, and they were suffering from it. The neighbors did not recognize
that they were secondary victims of this violence. They did not recognize
that they should be united with Manal against the bombers and that they
should be trying to make the environment safer. But, in their minds, these
Arabs don’t belong here, and they should get out.”21
Within a couple of weeks of the third incident, the women finally moved
out of the apartment. They left the apartment about a month before their
lease expired, having received notice from the landlord that their lease
would not be renewed.22 Even though the women had courageously endured
three bombing attacks and months of nationalist intimidation and verbal
abuse, the attackers ultimately accomplished their goal of driving the
three Palestinian women out of the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of
Musrara.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our Profile
I
News & Events
I
The Monitor
I
Resources
I Links
I
Subscriptions
I
Home |
|
