Palestinian activists commemorated American aid worker Kayla Mueller on Friday in what they said was gratitude for her support of their cause.
Mueller, who died in Islamic State custody last week, had spent a month in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with the International Solidarity Movement before she traveled to the Turkish-Syrian border, where she worked with Syrian refugees before she was kidnapped by the Islamic State in Aleppo, Syria, in August 2013.
Abdullah Abu-Rahmeh, an activist in the West Bank village of Bilin, said locals marched Friday with photographs of Mueller in their weekly protest against the route of Israel’s security barrier. Israel began building the barrier roughly along the border with the West Bank in 2002 in response to a wave of Palestinian attacks. Palestinians say the barrier cuts deeply into the West Bank, leaving nearly 10 percent of Palestinian lands – including a sizable portion of Bilin’s land – on the Israeli side of the barrier.
Abu-Rahmeh said Mueller marched in Bilin five years ago and got to know the villagers. She wrote online about the Palestinian struggle during her visit and after she left.
She was particularly upset by the death of Jawaher Abu-Rahmeh, who died after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli troops in 2011. Of Bilin, Mueller wrote, “their best farm land, their wells, their olive trees, their livelihood, their very existence is silently and illegally being stolen from them; the village is slowly being strangled.”
“I am very proud to know Kayla,” Abdullah Abu-Rahmeh, a cousin of Jawaher, told McClatchy. “I will remember her all my life because she was a brave girl and she supported us as a human being.”
In addition to her work in Bilin, Mueller attended protests against Israelis moving into Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem. She also accompanied Palestinian children to school in Hebron, where 700 Jewish Israeli settlers live among 250,000 Palestinians. In Tel Aviv, Mueller volunteered at an advocacy organization for African migrants to Israel.
On Tuesday, after U.S. officials confirmed that Mueller was dead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed sorrow at her death. “On behalf of the people of Israel, I wish to send condolences to President Obama, the American people and the family of Kayla Mueller. We stand with you,” he said.
But many in Israel view the groups Mueller worked with here with suspicion. The International Solidarity Movement where Mueller volunteered comes under frequent fire for its tactics. In 2003, 23-year-old activist Rachel Corrie, of Olympia, Wash., died in Gaza as she tried to block an Israeli military bulldozer from razing a Palestinian house. Corrie’s family has been embroiled in a legal suit against Israel ever since; on Thursday, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal against a previous ruling that exonerated Israel of wrongdoing.
Conservative commentators on Twitter have also been critical of Mueller’s work on behalf of Palestinians. Joel Pollak, a senior editor at Breitbart.com, tweeted in response to confirmation of Mueller’s death, “Sad that Kayla Mueller was anti-Israel activist. If she understood both sides she might have avoided idealizing the enemy that killed her.”
The circumstances of Mueller’s death are in dispute. The Islamic State last week said she had been killed when Jordanian aircraft bombed the building where she was being held. U.S. officials have acknowledged that Jordanian aircraft, supported by “American air crews,” bombed the building, but said there was no evidence she or any other civilians were present at the time. U.S. officials say that in any case the blame falls on the Islamic State, which was holding her against her will and had an obligation to ensure her safety.
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