JohnR

On this day—October 12, 2000 The Ramallah lynching. Two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn. Yossi Avrahami, a 38-year-old toy salesman, and Vadim Nurzhitz, a 33-year-old truck driver, were heading to their unit near Beit El in a civilian Ford Escort. They took a wrong turn and ended up in Palestinian Authority-controlled Ramallah. PA police stopped them, but instead of turning them around, the officers took them to the police station in el-Bireh. Rumors spread that Israelis were being held there, and more than 1,000 Palestinians descended on the station and began calling for their execution. They stormed the station, found the two Israelis and began beating, stabbing, and mutilating them. Aziz Salha later described entering the room: “We were in a craze to see blood … I saw an Israeli soldier sprawled on the floor … a knife lodged in his back … I removed the knife and stabbed him … I put my hand over his mouth … to strangle him.” He then walked to the window, hands and shirt soaked in blood, and waved at the baying crowd below. An Italian television crew captured it, and broadcast the images to the world. One of the bodies was thrown from that same window, and the mob immediately started stomping on and beating him. The other man was shot and set on fire. Once they were unrecognizable as humans, the crowd dragged their bodies through the streets to Al-Manara Square for an impromptu celebration. British photographer Mark Seager arrived in time to see a body being hauled by the feet, lower half on fire, head “a pulp, like a red jelly.” He reached for his camera, but the mob stormed him with punches. They smashed his equipment and shouted, “no picture.” He later wrote: “It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places … There was such hatred … It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man’s head, all smashed. I know that I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.” A Palestinian police officer, Raed Sheikh, later admitted he took an iron pipe into the room and struck one of the still-living Israelis across the body and head. “The soldier began making a grunting noise.” This was not “resistance.” It was a deliberate, ecstatic, public slaughter of two Israeli men who had taken a wrong turn, carried out in broad daylight by a Palestinian mob. The image of Salha’s bloody hands became a defining photograph. Salha was later arrested, convicted of murder, sentenced to life, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, and finally killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza in 2024. Decades later, Hollywood celebrities and other professional virtue-signalers put on red hand pins. They call it a “ceasefire” symbol. To anyone who lived through October 2000 or who otherwise knows anything about the history of the conflict, those pins are not ambiguous. They are a stylized recreation of the exact gesture a murderer used to show a cheering crowd the blood of the Jews he had just helped butcher. The useful idiots who wear them either do not know, or they do know and have decided the image is aesthetic. Either way, it is a disgrace.