Regular Israellycool reader Micol has sent me an eyewitness account and photos of the anti-terrorism/pro-Israel rally in the Hague earlier this week.
We met in Brussels at 6:45 to leave for the Hague leaving around 7:15. The bus leaving Antwerp left half an hour later. In total we were 52 people, which is actually dissapointingly little. It was mostly due to the fact that it’s carnival week here and many people are on vacation in Europe. We were told that there were 8 buses coming from Germany and some buses left Paris during the night, but not that many people outside of the general Benelux area would come, because we had to meet at 9am, an impossible hour for anyone outside the 3-hour radius (Brussels is a 2 hour ride, Paris is 5 hours).
We had some delay getting there (many traffic jams) but we talked on the phone to some contacts we had who were alrady there who told us most of the people are late too, they’ll wait for all of us. When we parked, we had no idea where to go, but saw some people donning Israeli flags on them, so we followed them. We first arrived at a little park where a lady (probably from the Almagor association) handed out posters with pictures of victims. Some posters were just black sheets of paper with sunday’s date quickly scribbled along with the appropriate names. At this point, Dutch police told us that we had to leave behind any sticks we had to hold up our flags, and couldn’t use our loudspeakers. This is why on the pictures you can see that the Israeli flags are usually corn as capes.
Most of the people there were Dutch. There were people who were from the association “Christen voor IsraÎl” – Christians for Israel. You can recognize them on the pictures as the people wearing yellow armbands. There was a group of 52 Israelis from the “Israel at Heart” association (they send young Israelis out to the world to talk at universities and schools to show another image of Israelis where they talk about their everyday lives and people can ask questions). We were about 1000 to 1400 people. It’s hard to tell, but one thing is sure, the first batch of 927 posters of victims were distributed completely before handing out posters from the second batch, to make sure every face was shown and that nobody be forgotten, and I saw many posters in double.
We started walking silently in the direction of the ICJ. We had trees to the left of us and grass and some empty houses to our right. We had the occasional jogger cross our path, but other than that no human beings could have ever been aware that we were there.
Getting close to the ICJ, my group of young people (“Friends of Israel” and “Union of Jewish Students of Belgium”) decided to start singing and wake up the people around us, because it was getting relatively boring. That got an Israeli cameraman interested and he turned to us, filmed us singing then asked one of us “Why are you talking about terrorism? The subject of the day is the fence, not terrorism” and then had a little interview with that person. We sort of walked next to the ICJ, then passed the place where the remains of the no.19 bus from Jerusalem was, but we weren’t allowed to go near it. There, about 300 people who weren’t participating in the walk were present. These were parents, families and friends of victims, doctors who treated after terror attacks, wounded survivors, ZAKA volunteers, etc. One woman came up to us, looked at the posters we were holding up, asked us where we were from (Belgium), and then told us “Thank you, it is so important that you came. You are wonderful”. She had a necklace with a picture of a young girl in a heart. I recognized the girl as Rachel Levy who died in the bomb on the Kiryat Yovel supermarket.The woman was her mother. Some people walked around the place with signs saying “Arafat murdered my family”
The rest of the walk went in the opposite direction of the ICJ and the bus remains. We walked through a park where there was no one but us. We sang everything ranging from “Haleluya” to “Hevenu shalom aleheim” to David Broza songs. Reporters took pictures, but we’re really not that interesting, we don’t burn flags, we don’t shout out with rage slogans that mean nothing, we don’t have unusual people walking with us, we’re just normal people who agree that it’s normal to defend yourself from terror. The march ended where it started. We had done a full circle while briefly passing in front of the ICJ. It was about half past noon.
Everybody from the Belgian delegation then went to a drink and information session held not far from the ICJ (though we weren’t allowed to go in front of it again, it’s closed to public circulation, meaning no one will see the charred remains of the bus). This was (on a personal level) much more interesting. We were given pamphlets containing information and comeback answers to the most regularly asked questions, we were given pro israel CDs and DVDs (containing info both about the fence and about Israel in general), we got booklets and stickers and more pamphlets. We got a replica of an Israeli bus ticket (kartisiya) with these sentences added on it: “one way ticket, non transferable bus ticket, terminal station”. (one of the videos we got on the CDs can be seen on the www.idf.il site).
We met some very interesting people from different organizations (I even met a person who had read an article about me in some Israeli newspaper called “Makor something” I was so estatic!!) and then got on our way again. On the way back to the bus, we saw the pro-Palestinian people near the ICJ. Keffiehs and Palestinian flags, some people with posters that had both Israeli and Palestinian flags on them. We saw the first of the Neturei Karta getting there. There was no interaction possible with them, because a police barrier separated pro barrier people from anti barrier people at all times to prevent any fighting, so we just saw them from far. They also had their flags on sticks and loudspeakers, which we figured they would also have to remove. We later saw on the news that they kept them, and were able to make all the noise we couldn’t.
The Holland TV news that night reported everything quite correctly, saying that there were about 1500 people in the morning (which is what we had counted more or less, with the 300 people standing in front of the ICJ) and 600 people in the evening. Belgian TV barely spoke of the event, showing an image of the morning and an image of the afternoon. The newspapers the next day were less appropriate. They all had the Neturei Karta rabbis pictures in the headlines, rarely showing a picture of the pro-Israel walk. One Belgian newspaper said that the morning walk had some “tens of people” but that a police officer told her it was 300 (obviously talking about just the people standing at the ICJ, not about the rally people) and that newspaper writer is getting a nasty letter from us.
This picture was taken before the walk, when we were getting ready in the park:
In this picture, you can see people with the yellow armbands; they are the “Christians for Israel”:
In this picture, you can see a man carrying a black paper instead of the regular posters. These were for the last minute additions.
Here is the glimpse we got of the bus wreckage brought to the Hague. There was a barrier between us and the 300 people with the bus, but they had badges that let them walk wherever they wanted so they could come to us.
Here is another view of the bus and some of the posters the 300ers were holding:
And here is one of the people who walked around with a sign saying that Arafat murdered her family.
