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A red, black and green Fourth of July in Shuafat, Jerusalem

[additional-authors]
July 7, 2014

To spend this Independence Day at the hemorrhaging heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict was to witness, in stark contrast to U.S. independence, the sound and fury of a people still fighting for it.

Of all days, Israeli police decided to give the body of brutally murdered Palestinian boy Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, “>delivered a double-patriotic “America loves Israel, Israel loves America” speech at the U.S. embassy, and as thousands of Tel Aviv residents and ex-pats held their annual Fourth of July “>Another chant: “With our blood and our spirit, we shall sacrifice for the martyr.”) As tears began to run down the faces of the men and women who knew him, the crowd tunneled the boy's body down the small alley that separates the Abu Khdeir family home from Shuafat's central mosque.

“I feel nervous to see him,” said Yazzam Nadesheh, a 16-year-old neighbor. “I'm nervous to see someone I know, and he's dead.”

“>Jewish terrorists” were responsible for the Palestinian teen's murder, but everyone in town had already assumed as much. Many had gathered at the Abu Khdeir house to watch security footage of the abduction before it was released to police and, eventually, leaked to press.

“Here, the people are all related, and if it was a social crime, you would see [the killers] driven out of this village,” Mahmoud Odeh, 46, a physical therapist in Shuafat who rents an apartment from the family, had told me the night before the funeral — referring to rumors that Abu Khdeir had been the victim of a family “honor killing.” 

“He was a nice kid, very good in school, and playing with the “>sitting in Gush Etzion, they lost their sons. It's not political.”

For the crowd that rallied and threw stones in Abu Khdeir's memory on the Fourth of July, there was greater justice at stake. “We're defending our families,” said a young man with a white shirt wrapped around his head, who did not wish to give his name. He called for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to demolish the homes of Abu Khdeir's suspected murderers, “>fun-loving all-American teen” beaten black-and-blue 

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