It was 1967 and nine-year-old Bassem, a Yerushalayim-born Arab, was visiting his aunt’s one-room apartment in the Old City.
The aunt’s radio was broadcasting news of how Israeli soldiers had recaptured the city. The boy heard the word “Yahud” repeated on the newscast. He had no idea what the Arabic word for Jew meant but gathered that it was something bad.
He asked his aunt if the “Yahud” was human. She replied, “No, they eat humans.”
Not long thereafter, there was a knock on the door, and little Bassem found himself facing an Israeli soldier. He expected to be eaten, but the soldier, speaking Arabic, offered the two occupants food. Venturing out, Bassem found “all of the neighborhood people were there, bringing tomatoes, bread and milk.”
Bassem Eid is 66 today and currently resides in Yericho, in the Yehudah-Shomron region commonly called the West Bank. His life trajectory since the moment when he realized that Jews aren’t cannibals has been remarkable.
Despite the disabusing of his aunt’s malevolent “mesorah” when he was a child, much of Mr. Eid’s adulthood was spent monitoring the Israeli Army for suspected abuse of Palestinians.
During the first Palestinian intifada (1987 to 1993), the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem recruited Mr. Eid. He reported on incidents of alleged overuse of force against Palestinian civilians and was sent on speaking tours around the world, aiding B’Tselem in its famously one-sided “exposing” of Israeli soldiers’ actions it deemed objectionable.
But, perhaps influenced by his youthful introduction to Israeli soldiers, he also brought skepticism to all such accusations. Once, investigating the shooting death of a six-year-old girl, which was blamed by her father, a member of the Palestinian security forces, on an “Israeli settler,” he discovered that the fatal bullet had come from the father’s own gun, as he was cleaning it. There were other such “revelations” as well, and he reported them objectively.
He contributed much, too, to a B’Tselem report published in 1995 on the subject of the killing by Palestinians of other Palestinians suspected of “collaborating” with Israel. It found that the term “collaborator” was used to kill all sorts of people who, for any of an assortment of reasons, had gotten on the Palestinian authorities’ bad side. And that torture, humiliation, sleep deprivation and withholding of medical treatment were routinely used by Palestinians on other Palestinians.
As a result, Mr. Eid was denounced as a “collaborator” and an “Israeli police agent.” In 1996, he resigned from B’Tselem and created an organization of his own: “Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.” It still published reports on detention of Palestinian prisoners, home demolitions and assertions of abuse of Palestinians by “settlers.” But its prime focus was on confirmed abuse of Palestinians by Palestinian authorities.
He also became a vehement critic of UNRWA. As to Hamas, he calls it “vile.” He observed in an interview this past November with the Canadian newspaper National Post that “Israel is using its…rockets to protect its people, but Hamas is using its people to protect its rockets.”
More recently, on January 28, Mr. Eid published an opinion piece in Newsweek, in which he offered a “truth [that] must be told: It is Israel—and the Zionist Jewish community preceding independence—that consistently offered compromise, dialogue, and a two-state solution. And it is Palestinian demagogues valuing personal power over the good of their people who have rejected these openhanded offers —in favor of endless strife and the desire that the Jewish community be completely destroyed.”
He went on to list the various occasions—from the 1922 League of Nations proposal to the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan to the 1947 UN plan to the 2008 Annapolis Conference proposition and on—all rejected by Palestinian leaders and met on the ground with Arab violence against Jews.
“The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regarding a two-state solution,” he wrote, “reveals a harsh reality: Israel has consistently made genuine efforts toward peace, only to be met with rejection, treachery, and blood-curdling violence by the Palestinian side. This pattern of refusal, particularly epitomized by groups like Hamas, has been the real obstacle to peace.”
A lonely, sane voice in the Palestinian wilderness.
“Eid” means “feast” in Arabic, but in Hebrew, of course, it means “witness.”
Mr. Eid is, indeed, a most trustworthy one.
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