Stresses recent Palestinian deaths Returns home after Israeli expulsion

JIM WILKES STAFF REPORTER

Canadian activist Jaggi Singh says Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel are a "completely understandable response" to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Singh, who was arrested in Jerusalem on Wednesday and turfed out of Israel, arrived in Toronto yesterday on a flight from Tel Aviv.

Singh, 29, who lives in Montreal, was arrested after violating a court order to stay out of the occupied territories. An Israeli court had allowed him to stay in the country after his arrival in mid-December.

He told a handful of supporters at Pearson International Airport that he had been slapped and choked by an officer at Jerusalem's police station.

Singh debated a few pro-Israel youths in the airport terminal after he told reporters that suicide bombings in Tel Aviv that killed 22 and injured 100 others last Sunday were "an exact parallel to the collective punishment that is being imposed on Palestinians every single day.

"Fifteen Palestinian civilians died in just a one-week period before that suicide bombing," said Singh, who was a leader of anti-globalization protests at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April, 2001. "Over 50 civilians died between the last suicide bombing and this suicide bombing," he said.

"It's just a completely understandable response, one that I don't necessarily condone.

"I'm trying to understand the context under which these attacks occur. Bombers are often people who come directly from families who are victims of this occupation.

-- Anonymous, January 11, 2003

Answers

"They're in a desperate situation and they want to inflict the same kind of collective punishment on Israelis that Israelis are inflicting on them." Singh said he went to Israel and Palestinian territory as an observer.

He wrote Internet articles from locations such as the West Bank city of Nablus.

Asked whether he considered his trip useful, Singh said it was "not about success or failure.

"There's literally hundreds of people that go to Palestine to do what I was doing, to observe, to support, to identify with one of the pre-eminent struggles for liberation and self-determination in the world," he said.

"It was a privilege for me to be able to do that."

Not so his treatment in a Jerusalem jail, where he said an officer beat him for refusing to answer questions.

"He proceeded to slap me twice, hard enough that my glasses went flying. He choked me. He tried to knee me in the groin," Singh recalled.

"He pulled my hair back and said to me, `You have no rights, so you better answer the questions.' "This is while I'm sitting in my underwear refusing to be strip-searched."

Israeli authorities denied Singh was beaten in custody.

"His claims (of rough treatment) are totally unfounded," said Jonathan Peled, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman. "But more than that, he is a criminal and a provocateur and he has abused his rights as a prisoner. He was given permission to call a lawyer, but instead he called the media and slandered Israel."

"All we want is to be rid of him," Peled said. "He is a kind of all-purpose troublemaker."

Singh said he was happy to be back in Canada and planned to visit with his mother in Toronto before returning to Montreal this weekend.

-- Anonymous, January 11, 2003

he better stay home now or he might 'disappear' next time.

the suicide bombers aren't too picky about who is nearby when they get the urge.

-- Anonymous, January 11, 2003