Canadian Citizen Shot by Israeli Sniper - Where's the Outcry?
Rehab Nazzal is a Canadian artist and researcher of Palestinian origin. She is doing her doctorate at the University of Western Ontario.
Dear Friend,
I was shocked to learn that my friend, Rehab Nazzal, a Palestinian-Canadian artist who is conducting research towards her PhD in the occupied West Bank, was shot last Friday by an Israeli sniper.
Rehab was taking pictures of a "skunk" truck--a tanker that Israel uses for crowd control by spraying Palestinians with a putrid-smelling mist-- when she was shot in the leg. As she describes it, "I was alone, with no clashes, no stone throwers, absolutely no one around me, and yet I was intentionally shot by a sniper. This was not an accident."
This is the "skunk" truck that Nazzal was photographing when she was targeted by an Israeli sniper.
The sniper used a .22 calibre bullet, which the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem identifies as an illegal size for targeting unarmed civilians.
If a Jewish-Canadian citizen were shot by a foreign army abroad, would our political representatives be silent? Where's the public outcry?
This is a photo of the sniper that shot Nazzal, which she was able to capture with her camera.
Sadly, this incident is commonplace for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, who are regularly subjected to this sort of violence.
And it's no surprise, since Israel maintains an illegal occupation and expands its illegal settlements, while Palestinians are expected to do nothing as their homeland is gobbled up with impunity.
Why is Israel being singled out as being above reproach?
It's high time our politicians signalled a new era in Canadian diplomacy by choosing to support a basic tenet of international law: protection of civilians from state violence. Israel is a state, too, and it should be censured when it fails to uphold this basic tenet of law.
