Tom playing football with children at a refugee camp in Jordan

The life and death of Tom Hurndall

Jocelyn Hurndall has written a poignant memoir of her son, Tom, and her battle for justice after he was shot by an Israeli sniper. By Andrew Johnson

Defy the Stars: The Life and Death of Tom Hurndall. By Jocelyn Hurndall. Bloomsbury £16.99 order this book
Click here for extract from the book

IN this moving and wonderfully elegant book, Jocelyn Hurndall recalls the grief and her battle for justice following the death of her son, which can only be described as murder.
Tom Hurndall, then 21, was shot by an Israeli sniper while in Gaza a little over four years ago.
Like many young men, he was idealistic. And like many idealistic young men, he wanted to do something immediately to stop the injustice he saw in front of him.
Tom was from Tufnell Park, where his mother Jocelyn still lives. He was in Rafah, a town on the border of Egypt in the Gaza strip, with the International Solidarity Movement.
They were trying to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli Defence Force by standing in front of the armour-plated bulldozers, described by Tom as the size of a house. The assumption was that, as Europeans, the Israeli army would be less inclined to kill them.
But a few weeks before Tom’s death, the American activist Rachel Corrie had indeed been crushed and killed by one of the bulldozers.
Tom was shot while rescuing children. Snipers from the watchtowers overlooking the town were firing above the heads of a group of children who were playing on a mound of rubble, probably the remains of a house. Used to gunshots, the children ignored the whizzing bullets until they became low enough to be dangerous. They then scattered, except for a small group who were frozen in fear. Tom grabbed one small boy and placed him in safety. It was when he was returning for another that the crackshot Bedouin soldier Taysir Walid Heib, took aim and shot Tom in the head.
The bullet smashed Tom’s brain, leaving him in a coma. Never expected to recover, he died in a London hospital nine months later shortly after his 22nd birthday.
From the outset Tom’s family met with obstruction and lies from the Israeli government and army. Tom was wearing a fluorescent peace activist jacket, a fact confirmed by numerous witnesses, but reports on Israeli radio after the shooting described a gunman in army fatigues who fired a pistol in the air.
The Hurndall family were lied to by officials of the army and were even shot at themselves when they visited Rafah. Unbelievably, a cheque they prised out of Israel to pay for Tom’s repatriation bounced.
At one point Jocelyn Hurndall was stopped at an Israeli airport, taken to a room where her suitcase was unpacked, presents unwrapped, make-up opened and dipped into, her hair inspected.
“It’s not enough that you kill my son,” she eventually says in exasperation.
That they managed to force the IDF to charge one of their soldiers with manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to eight years, was a victory. It was the first time an IDF soldier had been held accountable for the numerous shootings in Gaza. Jocelyn Hurndall is more than aware that as a middle-class British woman, whose husband is a forensically minded lawyer, she was more able to seek justice than the many Palestinian mothers whose children have been arbitrarily shot.
Jocelyn describes with commendable restraint the humiliation and intimidation that is handed out to the Palestinians on a daily basis. Their homes are pockmarked with bullet holes, and families live in the back of their houses, such is the fear of sniper fire. Children are shot with impunity. If Israel can humiliate her, what can it do to Palestinians?
It would be a mistake, and disservice, to portray Defy the Stars as an anti-Israel diatribe, however. Mrs Hurndall reveals herself as a wise and peace-loving person with a great deal of empathy for others, who is thrown into the politics of the region.
She has sympathy with both sides, knows that Israel has suffered greatly and wishes only for peace.
As she so eloquently says, however, Israel’s daily humiliation of the Palestinians, provoked by their own fear, is a sure way to “breed enemies”.
It would also be a mistake to portray this book as political. While her treatment by the Israeli and British governments can’t help but provoke indignation in the reader, her description and remembrances of her beloved son provoke tears.
This book is a mother’s lament. Throughout, she recalls her son growing up, his mannerisms, faults, and qualities. At the end of the book the reader knows Tom well, and can’t help but admire him.
In one moving paragraph, Mrs Hurndall describes how she found a folder in her son’s bedroom marked “memories”.
“Some folded bits of paper fell out,” she writes. “On one was written ‘Playing with Sophie when we were little’. On another ‘When my mother says Well Done’. It took my breath away, that sharp reminder that everything you say and don’t say as a mother means something.
“Oh Tom, did I say ‘Well Done often enough? I pray that I did.”
Above all, though, Defy the Stars is a book about grief. It is about the ripples caused by a senseless act of casual violence, through family, friends and, in this case, the world.
In her honesty and the exposure of her feelings – anger, grief, bewilderment – Jocelyn Hurndall transcends the politics surrounding her son’s death, and transcends her own feelings, to lift her words into the realms of that which is human and common to all – loss and the never-ending battle to come to terms and recover from the devastating blow of losing someone who was a part of your being.
“The book is not a political book,” she told the New Journal. “It’s a book that appeals for us not to trample on one another; not to use the gun as a dialogue.”
She added that a South African-style truth and reconciliation committee might help resolve the conflict, pointing out that Israel has still not apologised and if it did it would go a long way to helping heal her wounds.
“Not just where Tom is concerned,” she said. “But where others have lost their lives too. It helps to soften the wound and heal the wound and heal the guilt for them.”

Several weeks after Tom was shot, representatives of the Israeli army and
government finally agreed to meet the Hurndalls – on the day they were due to fly back to Britain.
Click here for an extract from her book in which Jocelyn Hurndall describes the surreal meeting