Jerusalem, Palestine, January 4 — Working-class activists from all over Israel-Palestine, both Jewish and Arab, have visited the East Jerusalem village-neighborhood of Issawiyye to show solidarity with the locals in the face of prolonged police terrorism against the villagers. Today, fifty activists of the Tarabut broad-left movement came to demonstrate against this police brutality. Three PLers, as well as an activist from Tarabut came to show solidarity as well and visited the homes of several villagers whose sons and daughter have been brutalized by the racist Israeli cops.
Before the 1967 war, Issawiyye was an agricultural village on what was then the border between Israel and Jordan, on the Jordanian side. In 1967, Israel conquered East Jerusalem (as well as the entire West Bank and Gaza) and soon annexed the villages in East Jerusalem to its territory. The villagers have blue Israeli IDs and can vote in the municipal elections, but cannot vote in the national elections. Many of the villagers’ lands were confiscated, forcing them to abandon agriculture and become low-paid workers for Israeli bosses in West Jerusalem.
Contrary to what many Israelis believe (misled by the racist media), the residents of East Jerusalem pay taxes in full but do not receive any decent services from either the state or the municipality. In fact, even a small debt owed by the Issawiyye villagers to the tax authorities is met with brutal repression and repossessions. 
The village’s infrastructure is horribly substandard, with little sanitation and narrow, dangerous roads in terrible condition. The village’s children have no facilities available for them except for the (under-funded) schools — no parks, no clubs, nothing to do after school. City hall never gives locals any building permits, and then charges them with “illegal construction” when they build homes for their children on their own land. This usually leads to house demolitions.
Adding insult to injury, the Israeli police terrorize the villagers, especially the youth. We visited the home of a 17-year-old who was recently jailed for eight days for “stone throwing” suspicions. No charges were ever submitted and the authorities have no clear evidence of any crime, but this did not bother the bosses’ court. As the villagers have told us, “the moment the judge hears that the defendant is from Issawiye, he immediately prolongs the arrest.”
Another youth, a 12-year-old who suffers from a tumor in one of his eyes since his birth, was arrested last month and interrogated so aggressively that his sick eye shed blood due to the stress he was in. No charges were ever pressed in his case.
Last June cops came to another family in the village we visited, broke their front door with a massive sledgehammer, arrested the family’s father, his 21-year old-daughter and two more sons, beat them up and then charged them with “assaulting a police officers.”
Last month again, the cops came to terrorize a group of village kids who were playing soccer. One  18-year-old young man, tried to escape the cops by climbing a wall. The cops shot him three times with “rubber bullets” (regular bullets coated with rubber to slightly reduce their lethality), causing him to fall from the wall. The cops grabbed him and took him to the police station, where he was severely beaten and his arm was broken by the fascist cops. He was then interrogated for long hours, and only after midnight was he brought to a hospital. When the cops heard that he needed to be operated on, they ran away as fast as they could to avoid blame.
Faced with this kind of fascist terror, it is natural that the village’s enraged children throw stones, from time to time, on cops and people they suspect are undercover cops. This, of course, is used as an excuse by the cops, many of them undercover, to rampage through the village. We in PLP need to transform the youth’s anger into revolt against the entire capitalist system these cops defend.
The villagers have sometimes been demoralized by years of police terrorism, but they are now trying to build local and international solidarity with their plight. The plan is to hold weekly demonstrations in the village to smash the racist KKKops and demand better infrastructure and services for the village. We in PLP will, of course, join these demonstrations and raise our red flag in them.