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While some 100 activists rallied at the downtown Berkeley BART station against what they called the “brutality” of the Israeli government, eight people draped themselves in Israeli flags and blasted the Palestinians as the cause of the violence in Israel and Palestine. 

“It’s an emergency,” Berkeley attorney Osha Neumann told the crowd, describing a recent visit he made to the Middle East. “I saw Jewish boys patrolling (the Palestinian town of) Ramallah with clubs – and the clubs had nails on the ends of them.” 

Some of the demonstrators volunteered to lie down on the plaza and others outlined them in colored chalk.  

The outlines were named after Palestinians who died in the violence the past week and included a 75-year-old woman and a 12-year-old boy. Demonstrators said almost 400 Palestinians have been killed, 94 of them children; more than 60 Israelis have been killed. 

“How can we as American Jews sit by and not do everything we can do for justice,” said Penny Rosenwasser of the Middle East Children’s Alliance. 

On the outskirts of the demonstrators, members of the Israel Action Committee of Berkeley with Israeli flags draped around them engaged some of the demonstrators in dialogue. “I want to send out the truth of what’s being done,” said David Singer, a freshman at UC Berkeley. “(Israelis) only shoot when they are shot at. The truth is, Israel has used excessive restraint.” 

“According to President Bush, as well as several members of his cabinet, the violence is being perpetuated by the Palestinian Authority and their refusal to peacefully negotiate an end to this conflict,” according to literature distributed by the Israel Action Committee. 

Sarah Tuttle-Singer, a member of the committee, argued that the Palestinian children killed, were killed in crossfire, not deliberately. 

But demonstrator Amy Gerber said that that’s a distortion portrayed by the media. The media say “Arabs are killed in crossfire and Israelis are killed by Palestinian gunmen,” she said. 

“There’s been 52 years of brutal occupancy,” said Barbara Lubin of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, comparing the Palestinian territory to the former South African Bantustands. “It has got to end.”