Maryland woman loses eye during Israel protest
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A woman from Maryland lost her eye during a demonstration in Jerusalem against Israel’s naval raid on a Gaza aid flotilla.
Emily Henochowicz, 21, underwent surgery after suffering the injury, said hospital spokeswoman Yael Bossem-Levy.
Henochowicz was hit in the face by a tear gas canister shot by an Israeli border policeman, a witness said.
The witness said Palestinian youths were hurling rocks, but Henochowicz didn’t participate in any violence and was standing at a distance.
Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said, “We can confirm that a U.S. citizen, Emily Henochowicz, suffered a serious injury when a gas canister hit her in the face, as she was standing among other protesters in the West Bank at the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel.”
In a Facebook message to the Associated Press, Sarah Henochowicz, Emily’s sister, said the family would have no comment, calling it “a private matter.”
On her Facebook page, Emily Henochowicz’s current city is listed as Ramallah, West Bank, and a posting she made May 31 read: “Gaza on my Mind.”
Her page says she is a student at Cooper Union, a college in New York, and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. — ap
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06/07/2010 at 04:52 PM
I was on a Solidarity Tour in support of Israel in 2000. They took us to Gilo, a southern neighborhood of Jerusalem that abuts a part of Palestinian Bethlehem across a valley. The Palestinians had been shooting sniper rifles into apartment houses in Gilo. Accordingly the Israelis had put sandbags in front of the windows and balconies of the apartment houses and a concrete wall on the Bethlehem side of the street to protect pedestrians and motorists from the sniper fire.
I have a picture of the American political tourists, including me, walking around on top of that wall. Which we had just been told was there to protect us from sniper fire!
There is some sort of madness that overtakes American tourists in Israel. We think that the laws of physics and of war somehow don’t apply to us, that our blue passports are bulletproof.
We were lucky. The Palestinians snipers were otherwise engaged and none of us was shot. Rachel Corrie assumed that she could walk in front of a bulldozer with impunity because she was an American. Rachel Corrie and her group and me and my group could not have been more different politically. But we shared that sense of American invulnerability.
Maybe that is why 9-11 was so traumatic. It punctured our sense of national invulnerability. Bad things didn’t just happend overseas and to someone else any more.
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