From Breaking the Silence
April 16, 2014 by
Filed under Readers' Letters
Jamie Hyams and Adam Shapiro of The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council have claimed on these pages that allegations aired on the ABC 4 Corners Program “Stone Cold Justice” were “old – some going back to incidents that were alleged to have occurred almost a decade ago.”
Specifically, Hyams and Shapiro were referring to the story of an array of settler attacks on Palestinian children in 2005 that led IDF soldiers to escort the children to their school in the village of at-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills.
It is spectacularly ironic that just a couple days ago, on April 9th, the same settlers from the illegal outpost of Ma’on Farm attacked a group of 18 young children on their way to school. Two young girls had to be evacuated and hospitalized due to the settlers’ barrage of rocks. At the time, the IDF escort was in their vehicle rather than escorting the children on foot and made no effort to exit the vehicle to prevent the attack. The next day, on April 10th, the IDF failed to arrive to escort the children so they were forced to take an alternati ve path that cut near Ma’on Farm. An international activist caught two young settlers on tape attacking the children once again. Thankfully, no one was hurt in this altercation.
Hyams and Shapiro of AIJAC first claimed that our testimonies were anonymous and unverifiable. When that turned out to be wrong, they changed gears and referred to our testimonies as dated and irrelevant. Now that this has turned out to be wrong, we look forward to the next line of argument AIJAC will cook up in order to avoid contending with the harsh reality of daily life in the Occupied Territories.
Yehuda Shaul
Jerusalem
