I refer to recent claims by Laurence Brass about his visit to Susiya.
1. That a “Palestinian village… spokesman told us that he was very worried at the prospect of local Palestinian children being attacked by settlers… Just 48 hours after we left, a six-year-old girl… was stoned… just as we had been warned”
2. That “this type of behaviour goes unchecked by the IDF.”
3. That Mr Brass saw “an old rusty car being dumped down the village well”. This had the effect of “preventing the locals from having fresh water.”
4. That an “ever-increasing number of settler outposts… have sprung up all over Area C, which [are] illegal”.
5. That the Palestinian villagers had a “miserable existence” and were “surviving in… squalid surroundings”.
Palestinian media manipulation is notoriously common; Googling for “Pallywood” (i. e. Palestinian Hollywood) will provide many eye-opening examples of purportedly slain Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression climbing off stretchers and returning to life when they believed the cameras to no longer be in operation, and so forth. Just in the past few days, for example, Palestinian Media Watch has exposed Palestinian “reports” of Israel’s purported “plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque”, of Israel’s “enthusiastically imitating everything the Nazis did to them”, of an Israeli lab which purportedly “turned marijuana into heroin for Palestinian use”, etc.
We have absolutely no knowledge of any Jewish attack whatsoever on any little Palestinian girl; or of any car, rusty or otherwise, being dumped down any well of any village, unless this was a result of an internal Palestinian feud; our communities may be termed “outposts” by some, but are not illegal; and finally, some Palestinians, and some Israelis, and some Britons, are “miserable” and “survive in squalid surroundings”, and singling out Palestinians as suffering from this poverty exclusively merely leads me to suspect a vehement political bent.
On the topic of violence against little girls, firebombs were recently thrown on a bus full of batmitzvah girls, which was engulfed with flames, and I hope that Yachad UK and Breaking the Silence will be giving the JC all the details on that attack as well; or is that attack less shocking to them since it was perpetrated against Jewish girls rather than Palestinians?
Assaf Fassy
Spokesperson, South Hebron Hills Regional Council