Since I will not be reassigned to Palestine, here's information on
eyewitness accounts from internationals in Palestine:

The ISM posts a lot of inside material from internationals in the
area. You can read their reports and join their mailing list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/palsolidarity/

My friend Douglas Dicks digs through local media reports in Jerusalem
to provide a sample of daily news from the area. Please see my website for
information on joining his or Palestinian mailing lists:

http://www.bobmay.info

Doug sent this article from Ha'aretz a couple of days ago.

If it were the reverse
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz -- Sunday - July 18, 2004

What would happen if a Palestinian terrorist were to detonate a bomb
at the entrance to an apartment building in Israel and cause the
death of an elderly man in a wheelchair, who would later be found
buried under the rubble of the building? The country would be
profoundly shocked. Everyone would talk about the sickening cruelty
of the act and its perpetrators. The shock would be even greater if
it then turned out that the dead man's wife had tried to dissuade the
terrorist from blowing up the house, telling him that there were
people inside, but to no avail. The tabloids would come out with the
usual screaming headline: "Buried alive in his wheelchair." The
terrorists would be branded "animals."

Last Monday, Israel Defense Forces bulldozers in Khan Yunis, in the
Gaza Strip, demolished the home of Ibrahim Halfalla, a 75-year-old
disabled man and father of seven, and buried him alive. Umm-Basel,
his wife, says she tried to stop the driver of the heavy machine by
shouting, but he paid her no heed. The IDF termed the act "a mistake
that shouldn't have happened," and the incident was noted in passing
in Israel. The country's largest-circulation paper, Yedioth Ahronoth,
didn't bother to run the story at all. The blood libel in France - a
woman's tale of being subjected to an anti-Semitic attack, which
later turned out to be fiction - proved a great deal more upsetting
to people. There we thought the assault was aimed against our people.
But when the IDF bulldozes a disabled Palestinian to death? Not a
story. Just like the killing, under the rubble of her home, of Noha
Maqadama, a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, before the eyes of
her husband and children, in El Boureij refugee camp a few months
earlier.

And what would happen if a Palestinian were to shoot an Israeli
university lecturer and his son in front of his wife and their young
son? That's what happened 10 days ago in the case of Dr. Salem
Khaled, from Nablus, who called to the soldiers from the window of
his house because he was a man of peace and the front door had
jammed, so he couldn't get out. The soldiers shot him to death and
then killed his 16-year-old son before the eyes of his mother and his
11-year-old brother. It's not hard to imagine how we would react to
the story if the victims were ours.

But when we're implicated and the victims are Palestinians, we prefer
to avert our eyes, not to know, not to take an interest and certainly
not to be shocked. Palestinian victims - and their numbers, as
everyone knows, are far greater than ours - don't even merit
newspaper reports, not even when the chain of events is particularly
brutal, as in the examples above. This is not an intellectual
exercise but an attempt to demonstrate the concealment of
information, the double morality and the hypocrisy. The indifference
to these two very recent incidents proved again that in our eyes
there is only one victim and all the others will never be considered
victims.

If a European cabinet minister were to declare, "I don't want these
long-nosed Jews to serve me in restaurants," all of Europe would be
up in arms and this would be the minister's last comment as a
minister. Three years ago, our former labor and social affairs
minister, Shlomo Benizri, from Shas, stated: "I can't understand why
slanty-eyed types should be the ones to serve me in restaurants."
Nothing happened. We are allowed to be racists. And if a European
government were to announce that Jews are not permitted to attend
Christian schools? The Jewish world would rise up in protest. But
when our Education Ministry announces that it will not permit Arabs
to attend Jewish schools in Haifa, it's not considered racism. Only
in Israel could this not be labeled racist. The heritage of Golda
Meir - it was she who said that after what the Nazis did to us, we
can do whatever we want - is now having a late and unfortunate
revival.

What would happen if a certain country were to enact legislation
forbidding members of a particular nation to become citizens there,
no matter what the circumstances, including mixed couples who married
and raised families? No country anywhere enacts laws like these
nowadays. Apart from Israel. If the cabinet extends the validity of
the new Citizenship Law today, Palestinians will not be able to
undergo naturalization here, even if they are married to Israelis. We
have the right, you see. And if the illegal Israeli immigrants in the
United States were hunted down like animals in the dark of night, the
way the Immigration Police do here, would we have a better
understanding of the injustice we are doing to a community that wants
nothing other than to work here?

What would we say if the parents of Israeli emigrants were separated
from their children and deported, without having available any avenue
of naturalization, no matter what the circumstances? And how would we
classify a country that interrogates visitors about their political
opinions as soon as they disembark from the plane at the airport and
bars them from entering it the security authorities look askance at
the opinions they express? What would happen if anti-Semites in
France were to poison the drinking water of a Jewish neighborhood?
Last week settlers poisoned a well at Atawana, in the southern Mount
Hebron region, and the police are investigating.

And we still haven't said anything about a country that would
imprison another nation, or about a regime that would prevent access
to medical treatment for some of its subjects, according to its
national identity, about roads that would be open only to the members
of one nation or about an airport that would be closed to the other
nation. All this is happening in Israel and is pulling from under us
the moral ground that makes it possible for us to complain about
racism and anti-Semitism abroad, even when they actually erupt.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/452564.html