BiographyOn February 15th, 2003, as massive anti-war marches protesting the imminent US invasion of Iraq took place all over the world, 21-year-old British photojournalism student Tom Hurndall was offered a flyer at the London event.
It was about volunteering to be a human shield in Baghdad - he took it and immediately determined to volunteer. Within two months, Hurndall was in a coma from which he was never to recover, shot in the head by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) bullet while saving a child from gunfire in the Gaza city of Rafah.
His mother, Jocelyn, here relates the tragic circumstances surrounding his shooting and subsequent death, nine months later, in a London hospital. Determined to find out what actually happened, and bring to justice whoever was responsible, Jocelyn and Tom's father, Anthony, began a painstaking investigation, stymied at every turn by the IDF's stonewalling and cover-up. In the process, the family had their eyes opened to the horrific plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, a grim existence that Tom hoped to in some way alleviate.
After quickly realising that the human shields in Baghdad were a mere propaganda tool for Saddam Hussein's regime, Tom went via Jordan to Israel and Gaza to work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organisation that seeks to protect Palestinian homes and communities by non-violent resistance. Only three weeks earlier, the US volunteer Rachel Corrie had been killed by an IDF bulldozer in Rafah while working with the ISM, and it was this tragedy that prompted Hurndall to make his own way to the region.
On April 11, while attempting to save a young Palestinian girl while bullets rained down from an IDF watchtower, Hurndall was shot in the head and sustained massive brain damage. The IDF, which claims to be "the most moral army" as Jocelyn points out, alleged he was in army fatigues and was shooting at the watchtower, but photographic evidence demonstrated he was wearing the peaceworker's fluorescent orange jacket and was, of course, unarmed.
Jocelyn's account of the family's visits to the ravaged town of Rafah form the heart of this book, a wretched backdrop to their grief. "The terrible inequality bled through the crushed earth," Jocelyn writes.
"This is what it meant to be a Palestinian in Gaza - constant humiliation and frustration, your every movement checked and controlled."
The Hurndalls were regularly subjected to similar treatment on their many visits to Israel, and on one occasion were shot at as they passed through a security checkpoint - deliberately targeted and intimidated, Jocelyn believes, for their determination to see justice done.
THREE WEEKS LATER, British cameraman James Miller was shot dead by the IDF, also in Rafah. The three Western victims, Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall and James Miller, garnered huge amounts of international attention, but Jocelyn quickly realised that "these incidents . . . were a daily occurrence for them [the Palestinians]. How different was our life experience, how different the backdrop to our own personal loss . . . When you are living in such devastation, with the world looking the other way, at what point, I wondered, do you simply give up?"
The Hurndalls' persistence resulted in an amazing precedent - for the first time in such a case, an IDF soldier was convicted of manslaughter. The killer was a Bedouin, Taysir Heib, but his eight-year sentence did little to alleviate the Hurndalls' sense that Tom was really the victim of a larger injustice. In the words of Anthony Hurndall: "He [ Heib] is a scapegoat, a pawn in a larger system. As a Bedouin he has been laid at the sacrificial altar of Israeli policy, one of very indiscriminate shooting and very little accountability".
Though Defy The Stars tries hard to live up to Tom Hurndall's optimism and idealism, and is marked by Jocelyn Hurndall's decency and compassion, it is, finally, a bleak book. It is impossible, it seems, to witness the poisonous relationship between Israelis and Palestinians first hand without getting poisoned oneself to a degree. Theirs is a hatred most of us would rather not understand, and consequently theirs is a reality we would rather not witness. Tom Hurndall was brave enough to want to understand and witness, but his death serves only to reinforce the sense of despair.
Davin O'Dwyer is a freelance journalist
Defy The Stars: The Life and Tragic Death of Tom Hurndall By Jocelyn Hurndall, with Hazel Wood Bloomsbury, 310pp. £16.99