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Tom, aged 3, looking at photos with his mother |
It was a like a scene from Kafka
I UNDERSTOOD that the soldier at the door, Major Briton, was in charge of the enquiry into Tom’s shooting and presumably there to defend the infamous ‘field report’. He looked about Tom’s age. How on earth, I wondered, could someone so young be given such a responsible job, with all its diplomatic and political implications…
Anthony (Tom’s father) then said, very clearly, “We haven’t come here to criticise or point the finger, but we do want to get to the truth. Our aim is to exchange as much information as possible in order to build up a picture of what really happened on the day our son was shot. Israel used to be a country we all admired and respected. But that respect has been eroded by the way the IDF are conducting themselves now, and there is huge disappointment. We are saddened by the change in the world’s perception of Israel.”
This produced an uncomfortable silence. Everyone on the other side of the table looked away or fiddled. I knew that no family of a Palestinian victim would ever be given the chance to confront them, and it clearly didn’t feel good to have an English family, with all their advantages, to do so now.
Anthony then spoke eloquently and at length of his hopes for a proper judicial enquiry, and our wish to use what had happened to improve the army’s accountability and contribute to peace in the region.
“As I said earlier, we hold no grudge against the Israeli people,” he said finally. “We ourselves have many Jewish friends in London. I have to say, however, that the results of my own enquiry do not tally with the findings of the army’s field enquiry. They are so very far from the facts as I understand them that to me they suggest a cover-up.”
The last word went through the meeting like an electric shock.
“On the contrary,” said (Danny) Carmon (of the Ministry of Affairs), “I think it was an impressively frank and open enquiry… I can assure you there has been no cover-up.”
Here was a diplomat, cool as a cucumber, praising this blatantly superficial report and complacently imagining we would accept it. It shook me to the core, and undermined all my assumptions about the way the world worked. But Anthony remained calm and courteous.
“To take just one example,” he said, “the report claims that a single shot was fired from the watchtower at the time of the incident, whereas 15 eyewitnesses state unanimously that there were at least five shots and possibly more than eight. How do you account for the difference?”
“Not true,” said Major Briton. “The soldier in the tower fired only once.”
“And he was using a telescopic sight?” said Anthony.
“He was using a telescopic sight,” said Major Briton, “but there was poor visibility from where the soldier was standing.”
“Which was…?”
The major went over to a whiteboard and with a thick black marker drew a crude picture of the tower. On it there was a single window, halfway up, which he marked with a large cross.
“That would be the soldier’s position,” he said. “Because of the intervening building it would have been impossible for him to have seen your son.”
“But there is something wrong there,” said Anthony. “The lookout windows are round the top of the tower. There is a surveillance platform at the top which is missing from your drawing. I have seen and photographed it myself, as did my son two days before he was shot. From these windows there would have been perfect visibility.”
Major Briton simply shook his head.
“Then,” said Anthony, “the proof will surely be in the CCTV footage. May we see that?”
“We have no CCTV cameras on that watchtower,” said Major Briton.
“But in my son’s photographs one can quite clearly see the CCTV pictures fixed to a mast.”
The Major had no answer to this. He stood silent for a moment, then inspiration struck.
“Ah yes,” he said, “but those cameras are pointing into Egypt.” It was beginning to resemble a scene from Kafka. Even a civilian like myself could see there would be no purpose in pointing the CCTV cameras over the border when the scene of military action was on the Rafah side…
I was determined that I was going to try to communicate my pain to them. In the silence I spoke quietly.
“This is a terrible, terrible thing that’s happened to our family,” I said. “It’s not just a tragedy for Tom and us. It’s much more than that.”
They stared at me impassively.
“I mean,” I said, “that shootings like this, of people who can’t defend themselves, have an effect on all of us. They devalue life and make us lesser human beings. Such actions go to the core of all we believe about being civilised.”
No one moved. No one spoke.
“Our lives have been completely shattered,” I said. “Tom and his siblings were very, very close. What the loss had done to us emotionally I can’t begin to describe. We are distraught, devastated. I can’t, at the moment, see how we will ever recover.”
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