Westerners Killed to Suppress Palestinian Perspective?

In the beginning of this millennium, the growing numbers of young Westerners who went to the occupied Palestinian territories to live for a while with the civilian population were helping the world opinion turn more and more against Israel's occupation of the Palestinian people. The often moving first hand accounts of these autonomous, self-governed freelance reporters and human rights activists appeared in local papers all over the US and Europe and swamped the internet, often providing a rare insight into the life of the occupied civilian population.

When reading these accounts, it made a difference to many Americans and Europeans that it was one of "their own" who had experienced the brutality of Israeli occupation close up and then reported on it. It made the stories credible in the eyes of many, and paved the way for them to identify with the Palestinian suffering and understand the Palestinian perspective for the first time. More and more ordinary people in the West were aware of the inhumane nature of the Israeli occupation.

However, the bloody spring of 2003 changed all that. When Israeli soldiers in five tragic weeks killed Rachel Corrie and James Miller and critically injured Brian Avery and Tom Hurndall, presenting the Palestinian perspective to the world suffered a hard blow. Telling the alternative story to the official Israeli one became difficult as the Israeli army introduced more restrictions to the movements of internationals across the green line between Israel and Palestine and, as fewer internationals have had the courage to travel inside Palestine

Today, five years later, our knowledge of what goes on inside the West Bank and Gaza and of the devastating impact to ordinary Palestinians of the Israeli military's actions is still suffering due to the atrocities of spring, 2003.