Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 17

27 November 1981—13 January 2004

Defying the Stars for Peace

Jocelyn Hurndall wrote about the death of her son Tom this way: “I am often asked, what is it like to lose a child? It’s like this. Between the instant of receiving the news and the next instant in which you have to comprehend it, you somehow realize that every cell in your body is about to be shaken furiously, and you freeze to delay the moment of impact. Your entire existence becomes concertinaed into the space between the blow and the pain, and nothing will ever, or can ever be the same again.”

Tom’s is a tragically old story: a son who learns the value of the struggle for peace and justice from his mother and then loses his life in the effort; the mother who continues the tradition of peacemaking in memory of her son.

London-born Tom Hurndall was a twenty-one-year-old university student photographing activists acting as human shields to protect ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad when he heard about the death of Rachel Corrie. Rachel was a twenty-three-year-old peace activist crushed under an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to protect a Palestinian family’s home.

In April 2003, Tom travelled to Gaza to investigate Corrie’s story, joining the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) at a refugee camp in the Gaza strip. When shots began hitting the buildings, Tom left his safe position behind a roadblock to lift a small boy out of danger. He was returning for two small girls when an Israeli sniper in a tower shot him in the head. His transport to hospital, which should have taken seven minutes, took thirty minutes because of delays at Israeli checkpoints. Nine months later, never coming out of a coma, Tom was dead.

Jocelyn Hurndall began the frustrating task of making sense of her son’s death within the conflicting context of the refusal of Israeli and British authorities to assume accountability (and their subsequent cover-up) and Yassar Arafat’s praise of Tom as a martyr.

In the end, a Bedouin sergeant, Taysir Walid Heib, an Arab who couldn’t read or write Hebrew, was convicted of Tom’s murder and given an eight-year sentence—the longest for a Israeli soldier since the Second Intifada. Jocelyn wrote that “Tom was a victim of a victim.” She believed the policymakers of the war deserved the heaviest recriminations.

Jocelyn wrote a book in memory of Tom, the title of which echoes the words he had tattooed on his wrist: Defy the Stars.