Posted on 09/29/2003 7:12:28 AM PDT by Piranha
Bitter Lessons For an American Family in Mideast Conflict By Allen G. Breed, AP Writer When Brian Avery called home in early January to say he was heading for Israel, his parents realized they could not stop him. Brian was an adult, after all. But he was still their youngest child, and they had to at least try.
"This issue has been there for so long," his father, Bob Avery, tried to reason with his 24-year-old son. "How do you think you can change it?"
"If everyone took the position that 'there's nothing I can do,"' Brian replied, "then nothing's ever going to change."
Brian knew that peace activists had been wounded in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- and that a humanitarian worker had even been killed the year before. But that had supposedly been accidental, a fluke.
Bob Avery expressed a different fear to his son.
"Brian," said the 30-year Navy veteran, "do you remember this fellow named John Walker?"
He was referring to another young man with long hair and a spotty beard, like his son's. Walker was the notorious "American Taliban" who had traveled to Afghanistan to join the jihad. He had nearly been killed in a clash with U.S. troops, was captured and branded a traitor, and is now in prison.
"I'm not going to be a fighter," Brian assured him. "I'm going to report on the events and write articles."
His mother's voice came over the phone: "Sort of like a journalist?"
"Yup," he replied. "Sort of like that."
The words "human shield" didn't come up until later.
Julie Avery had always called Brian "my free spirit."
The ponytailed rock drummer had studied music in college, but dropped out after a year to work on an organic farm. He traveled to Chicago and joined the Stone Soup Cooperative, a social justice group, where he worked with the homeless and the poor.
Some might perceive her boy as an aimless idealist. But the retired teacher was certain that if he had decided to do something, he'd studied on it long and hard.
His studies often led him to view the world in terms of the big guy vs. the little guy; the corporate behemoth against the family farmer; Goliath and David.
While studying herbal medicine in Albuquerque last winter, Brian had become involved with the local Arab-Jewish Peace Alliance. Eventually, feeling the need to act, he decided to volunteer with a group called the International Solidarity Movement.
Like so much about the Mideast conflict, what the International Solidarity Movement stands for depends on whom you ask.
Founded in 2001, the ISM operates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- lands Israel seized in the 1967 war. Some Israelis see these lands as a necessary buffer against continuing sniper attacks and suicide bombings; Jewish settlers claim them as a biblical birthright.
For Palestinians, the Israeli presence there is a heavy-handed occupation in their homeland. They bridle at Israeli Army checkpoints and other restrictions. The United Nations has repeatedly called for an Israeli withdrawal from the disputed lands. There have been pullbacks, but renewed violence has begotten reoccupation.
The latest Palestinian intifada, or "uprising," began three years ago. Since then, 2,477 Palestinians and 860 Israelis have died in the fighting.
ISM's founders saw themselves as an international peacekeeping and monitoring presence that the United Nations could not or would not provide.
The activists, mainly from the United States and Great Britain, act as "human shields" at checkpoints or when Israeli troops move in to retaliate for a suicide attack by bulldozing a bomber's house.
The Israeli government sees ISM very differently -- as meddlers whose actions range from negligence to outright abetting of terrorism.
The Israel Defense Force blamed the escape of several terrorists on the group's infiltration of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah during the spring of 2002. ISM's interference, the IDF said, hampered efforts to end a siege at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity two months later.
Brian hadn't been in the West Bank city of Nablus a week when his parents got a lengthy e-mail.
His group's main "actions," as he put it in the Jan. 31 note, consisted of "being monitors and witnesses at military checkpoints" and "lodging in the homes of the families of individuals who chose suicide bombing as their method of resisting the occupation."
The e-mail turned his parents inside-out again. They had pictured him handing out food and medicine, or sharing his knowledge of organic farming with the Palestinians. Instead, he was negotiating with armed border guards and occupying so-called "martyr houses."
Brian told them he felt his American citizenship put him in a special position.
On the one hand, it made him feel partially responsible for what was happening in the territories because of U.S. aid to Israel.
At the same time, though, he saw his American passport as a unique asset -- a "badge of invincibility" that he would share with the Palestinians.
His parents weren't so confident -- and even less so six weeks later, following a news report from the territories.
On March 16, another ISM member, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Wash., was crushed to death while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer demolishing a row of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Israeli officials said she was in a blind spot and the driver couldn't see her, despite her bright red vest.
"Please get out of Palestine while you can!!!!" Julie Avery begged her son in an e-mail afterward. "I love you and support what you are trying to accomplish, but sometimes you just have to pack it up."
But Brian had trained with Rachel Corrie, and her death made him more determined.
Still, he tried to reassure his parents: He had a couple more weeks left on his visa, after which he would see them. Besides, he was headed north to Jenin, even farther from the volatile Gaza Strip.
"Don't worry, Mom," he said in a rare telephone call. "They don't shoot Americans."
Bob Avery was sitting in his basement office on April 5, watching the rain that had washed out his softball game, when the phone rang.
"I'm afraid I've got some very, very bad news for you," came a voice in heavily accented English.
It was Tobias Karlsson, head of ISM's Jenin office. Just minutes before, he and Brian had heard gunfire in the streets below. The city was under curfew, but the two went out to meet four other activists and investigate.
That's when they noticed two Israeli vehicles -- an armored personnel carrier and what appeared to be a tank -- rumbling behind them.
Slowly, they backed up under a street lamp and put their arms out at their sides to let the vehicles pass, Karlsson said. Only Brian was wearing a reflective vest, identifying him as a peace activist.
Suddenly, they were being pelted by bits of shattered pavement. The Israelis would often fire two or three warning shots at a wall, Karlsson explained, but this time 10, 15, 20 rounds were fired.
When the shooting stopped, he turned to find Brian lying on his stomach in the street, blood seeping between the fingers wrapped around his face.
"It is a very large wound," the Swede, still breathless after running back to the office from the hospital, told Bob Avery. "I'm afraid that I can't tell you at this point if he's going to be OK again."
Three days later, Bob Avery arrived at Haifa's Rambam Medical Center. It was around 2 p.m. local time, and he had been on the road and in the air much of the past 24 hours.
The doctor paused at the entrance to the ward, as if to give Avery a chance to brace himself. As the physician spoke in medical terms, Avery caught sight of a patient lying in a bed along the opposite wall.
From the ponytail, he knew it was his son.
Brian's face was twice its normal size, its hue a surreal yellowish-purple from the massive bruising. The suturing pattern on his left cheek, where the bullet had exited, looked like a ragged spider's web. Avery gingerly embraced his son.
He knew most of the damage was on the inside and asked to see Brian's X-rays.
The bullet had entered just below Brian's right tear duct. There was a large hole where Brian's nasal bone should have been. Half of the teeth were missing on the top left side, and another on the bottom. The floor of his left eye socket was gone. His lower left jaw had been sheared in half.
"He'll never go back together," Avery said to himself.
When he got back to his hotel room that night, he wept.
April 10, was Brian's 25th birthday. The hospital staff sang to him. Members of Amnesty International brought a chocolate mousse cake. And a surgeon laid out a plan to harvest bone from the sides of Brian's skull to rebuild the nasal area.
Bob Avery tried to cheer his son. "They said they needed a model for what you've got to look like. I gave them a picture of Elvis."
This would be just the beginning of reconstructing Brian's shattered face.
Brian was still in the hospital, recovering from further surgery to stabilize his facial fractures, when the Israel Defense Force released its findings on his shooting in late May.
The APC crew reported firing on three occasions that day, including eight to 10 warning shots toward three or four "suspicious figures" who had approached them. No casualties were identified.
The army noted that vehicles enforcing the curfew were directed to keep their hatches closed for protection, creating "enhanced chances of misidentification and misunderstandings."
Still, the "presence of innocent civilians" on the streets during curfew was rare, the report noted.
The soldiers in Jenin saw ISM as anything but innocent.
Just eight days before the shooting, Israeli forces had raided the office and arrested an Islamic Jihad leader suspected of planning suicide attacks. (ISM says the man ran into the office during a foot chase.)
The report's conclusion: "Mr. Avery's injury is an unfortunate incident."
Bob Avery was outraged.
His own investigation -- interviewing the five ISM witnesses who saw Brian shot and others -- produced what he considered a key discovery:
ISM had said Brian's injury occurred at 6:30 p.m., a time when the army showed the APC several blocks away. Actually, it was an hour later. Israel had just begun observing the equivalent of daylight-saving time, but clocks in the Palestinian sector were still set an hour earlier.
That put the APCs in the shooting area around the right time, Avery concluded.
In a response to an Associated Press query, the IDF denied its soldiers shot Brian Avery. "Mr. Avery knowingly placed himself in danger by deciding to accompany armed terrorists in Jenin," read the statement. A request to interview the APC crew was denied.
The IDF paid for Brian's treatment in Haifa. But when he left the hospital, he was on his own.
By the time Brian returned to the United States on June 14, 21/2 months on a liquid diet had shrunk the former defensive lineman to 115 pounds.
He has added a few pounds since then but remains weak and more dependent than he'd like to be, back in his parents' safe cul-de-sac home.
When he talks now, he says the sound echoes inside his skull. He cannot breathe through his nose and has no sense of smell, though he sometimes catches a phantom whiff of a favorite Chinese dish.
He faces at least five more rounds of surgery in the coming year. More bone will be taken from his skull to rebuild the left jaw so artificial teeth can be implanted.
Doctors say they can erase much of the scarring, and he has recovered enough sight to drive a car.
He has no insurance. He and his parents have met with several congressional staffs in an effort to pressure the Israeli government take responsibility, but to no avail.
Brian thinks often of Rachel Corrie. He thinks of Tom Hurndall, an ISM activist from Great Britain, who was shot during the same month by IDF forces during a Gaza protest and is brain dead in England.
Brian knows he's the lucky one.
He regrets that his medical needs have thrown his parents' retirement plans into financial chaos. He regrets that he may never again smell a rose or smile as before.
But he insists he does not regret his decision to go.
And he wants to return to the region someday. Only next time, he'll go as a true observer. He has no more illusions of invincibility.
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
"His group's main "actions," as he put it in the Jan. 31 note, consisted of "being monitors and witnesses at military checkpoints" and "lodging in the homes of the families of individuals who chose suicide bombing as their method of resisting the occupation." "
And then they had the nerve to try to force the Israeli government to pay for treating this terrorist-lover.
Exactly. Instead of suing the Joooos, why doesn't idiot boy's dad sue ISM?
Actual caption (from electronicintifada):
Mary-Lou Leiser Smith, Coordinator of the Coalition for Peace with Justice, and Phil Jones, Coordinator for Peace 1st, welcome home Brian Avery. The Coalition for Peace with Justice (North Carolina), Peace 1st, (North Carolina), and Partners for Peace (Washington, DC) organized the welcome home. Their efforts were joined by those of several peace and justice groups, and Peggy Misch with the Peace and Justice Committee of the Community Church of Chapel Hill. The News & Observer quoted Brian as saying, "As long as there's this many people ready to support peace and justice in the world, we're in good hands."
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