At 6.30pm on Saturday August the 9th villagers of Ni’lin accompanied by Israelis and internationals walked to their fields to have a noise demonstration against the nearby settlement of Hashmonaim. The settlement was built in 1981 on 8000 dunums of land belonging to the farmers of Ni’lin.
The demonstrators built rock road blocks on the sand road leading to the construction site of the illegal apartheid wall, in order to keep the Israeli army away from the nonviolent protests against the wall which will ensure the continuous annexation of their land. Two jeeps with Israeli soldiers drove to the first road block and started shooting tear gas on the people gathered in the fields. This attempt to stop the protest failed and the villagers managed to create a big drum out of an old well.
Fires where made in the grass which made the nonviolent noise demonstration an aesthetic experience. Soldiers continued to aimlessly fire teargas across the valley, putting on an unexpected fireworks show for the people singing and dancing around the fires.
In memory of Mahmoud Darwish who died on the 9th August 2008
This article was published by Al-Ahram Weekly in April 2002. To view original article click here
“Yet, Israeli forces, armed to the teeth with racist superstitions and military hardware, are besieging the Palestinians’ right to live ordinary lives, albeit lives lived on a margin narrower than dreams, and wider than nightmares”
A war for war’s sake
By Mahmoud Darwish
This is a war for war’s sake, since it has no other aim than its self-perpetuation. Everyone knows this; and, once again, the sword will prove incapable of crushing the spirit. The Arabs have offered Israel a collective peace in return for Israeli withdrawal from a fifth of our historical homeland. Israel’s answer to this generous offer was to declare all-out war against the Palestinian people, and against the Arabs’ very imagination.
Once again, we will prove that we occupy the moral high ground — nothing remaining to us now but this proof. Those who control the international balance of power will continue to shape events without respect for intellectual or legal argument until we awake to the realisation that, just as they have proved themselves incapable of ensuring deterrence — though there is no option other than peace — they have also shown themselves incapable of ensuring peace.
In every corner crimes are being committed. On every street lie the bodies of the murdered. On every wall is blood. The living are deprived of the basic right to life, and the martyrs are denied graves in which to rest in peace. Above all, however, what we are now seeing is the expression of the will of a people that has no choice but to resist. Between one beat of a wounded heart and the next we ask: how long will we carry on cheering as Christ ascends to Golgotha?
Is the Palestinian side all that is left of the famous “Arab-Israeli struggle”? Does this account for such neutral incapacity before so lurid a black and red scene? How we fear now that Yasser Arafat’s cries will be pinned forever to a wooden cross: present events contain enough of the aesthetics of martyrdom to make a whole nation’s mourning superfluous on an endless Good Friday. Tears purify the soul, cleansing the body even as they sting with salt, and tearful spectators now await live coverage of the moment when the tragic hero is crowned with an appropriate end, making the tightly wrought elements of the story into myth, the hero ending, as Arafat has put it, “a martyr, a martyr, a martyr.”
But no. The Palestinians do not need such feelings of solitude or uniqueness. They do not need to play the part of sacrificial offerings any more than they already have done. Palestinians want to live outside of metaphors, in the place where they were born. They want to liberate their country from the heavy weight of mythology, from the barbarity of occupation and from the mirage of a peace that promises nothing but destruction.
Yet, Israeli forces, armed to the teeth with racist superstitions and military hardware, are besieging the Palestinians’ right to live ordinary lives, albeit lives lived on a margin narrower than dreams, and wider than nightmares. This right is also under siege from a world under American control, a world set on the horns of a raging bull that has abolished the conjunction, the “and,” that used to fall between America and Israel. The Palestinians are besieged by a condition of dependency that has robbed the Arab political establishment of the eloquence even to beg, and of the ability to placate a populace that is angry at everything.
How many times must the Palestinians be besieged before the Arab world realises that it, too, is under siege? How many times before it realises that it too is a hostage, even though it does not resist? Television has made it unnecessary for us to explain ourselves: now our blood is shed in every home and is on every conscience. From this day on, he who does not become Palestinian in his heart will never understand his true moral identity. This is not only because the unfashionable values that lay hidden beneath daily talk of a “peace process” empty of justice and freedom have now been brought back to life. It is also because the will has now been liberated from the simplistic calculation of profit and loss and from a debilitating intellectual pessimism. This has liberated the only real meaning human existence has: freedom.
The Palestinians have no other choice. In the face of the political genocide being offered by the American- funded Israeli occupation of their land, they offer their steadfast resistance no matter what the cost. Backs against the wall, their eyes fixed upon hope, they show a strength of spirit for which there can be no facile explanation.
Israel’s all-out war on the Palestinians has flung the doors wide open to every kind of question. The most important of these is the question of future Arab-Israeli and Arab-American relations. Israel has been quick to declare that this war is a “struggle for Israel’s existence” and that the war to found the Israeli state has not been finished yet. This can only mean that the elimination of the Palestinian national movement remains on Israel’s agenda despite the peace process, and that the Palestinians’ existence, not the Israelis’, is threatened with destruction.
Israel has invited us to take the struggle back to its very beginning and, ironically, to review all the stages through which we have passed, during which our concept of struggle changed. Israel has declared war on the very idea of peace. What is it that threatens “Israel’s existence,” this existence it defends with such aggression? Is it the war the Arabs have not declared on Israel? Or is it the peace the Arabs are offering?
The lie that is Israel’s current war is necessary for Israeli society, so that it can cohere around its founding myths. If occupation is the condition and essence of Israeli existence, as seems to be the case, then this is an issue not amenable to resolution.
What concerns us is the defence of our national and human existence — even if our backs are up against the wall. We have absolutely no other option.
To view original article, published by Gulf News on the 9th August, click here
Dubai: Adam Shapiro, 36, and the International Solidarity Movement have in many ways been the face of the foreign activism that complemented the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation.
Founded by Shapiro and his former colleague, Palestinian-American Huwaida Arraf [now his wife], the ISM was established as a non-violent resistance organisation against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Shapiro has been vilified in the United States and Israel for his work with the ISM. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post once called him the “Jewish Taliban”, in reference to John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban”.
He received much media attention in the United States after he gained access to late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah during the 2002 Israeli siege, where he had breakfast with him.
The ISM’s activities have proved to be a nuisance for Israel, particularly with the bad press it received after a bulldozer operated by the Israeli Defence Forces crushed and killed American activist Rachel Corrie, who was acting as a human shield to prevent the demolishing of a Palestinian home in Gaza. The driver is said to have crushed her, reversed the bulldozer then run over her again. Israel said it was an accident.
Shapiro has been banned by Israel since the Intifada but insists that one does not have to be inside to make a difference.
Asked if he would consider taking advantage of the Israeli “Law of Return” which guarantees citizenship any person of Jewish heritage, he said: “While it would perhaps allow me access, it would require me to acknowledge not only the existence of the state but its ideology too… I don’t see how I could [do it].”
To view original article, published by the Jerusalem Post on the 9th August, click here
Israel is battling hard to overturn a Spanish court’s decision to issue arrest warrants against six current and former politicians and senior military officials, a source in the Attorney-General’s Office told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Late last month, Audiencia Nacional, the National Court of Spain (the highest Spanish judicial council), issued arrest warrants against the six – Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Doron Almog, Moshe Ya’alon, Dan Halutz, Giora Eiland and Mike Herzog – accepting a petition from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that suggested they were guilty of war crimes in the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2002.
At that time, Ben-Eliezer was serving as defense minister; Ya’alon was IDF chief of General Staff; Eiland headed the National Security Council; Halutz was commander of the IAF, Almog was OC Southern Command and Herzog was a senior Defense Ministry official.
The plaintiffs claimed that Ben-Eliezer personally oversaw the killing of Hamas commander Salah Shehadeh, a Palestinian terror chief who was responsible for killing of dozens of Israelis, in which 14 civilians also died. Israel subsequently apologized for the civilian deaths.
The Foreign Ministry has said only that the matter is being taken care of. However, the Post has learned from a source in the Attorney-General’s Office that active negotiations between Madrid and Jerusalem were taking place to overturn the warrants.
This is not the first time that PCHR has filed suit against high-ranking Israeli military commanders, but if the court’s decision is not reversed it will set a disturbing precedent in international law, said Ofer Zalzberg, co-chairman of YIFC (Young Israeli Forum for Cooperation), an organization that promotes relations between Israel and the European Union.
Zalzberg recalled a 2005 incident in which Almog, travelling to London to raise funds for handicapped children, stayed in his plane upon arrival in London rather than risk arrest. Shortly thereafter, a British warrant for his arrest was revoked.
“This time,” Zalzberg said, “we are talking about several people and a very significant and drastic step. It might also cause a shower of law suits from various groups and individuals in Europe against various Israeli officials.”
Almog told the Post that he believes the warrants issued against him, first by the British and now by Spanish courts, are not directed at him personally, but at Israel and its right to defend itself.
“Some elements with very clear motives and intentions use these lawsuits as a weapon against Israel. The combat between Israel and terrorists continues on different scenes, and the legal scene is just one of them,” he said. “I don’t think the decision of the Spanish court indicates a crisis in Israel-EU relations, but it seems that these elements exploit the law in these countries to act against the State of Israel.”
PCHR head Raji Sorani, welcoming the decision of the Spanish court to issue the warrants, said, “We believe that these persons are criminals and that they committed horrible crimes against humanity. A one-ton bomb was thrown at a civilian neighborhood in Gaza and 15 people died.”
At 1pm on Friday the 8th August the citizens of Ni’lin gathered as usual to pray on their land.
They were prevented from reaching the usual site of their Friday prayer by around twenty Israeli soldiers with dogs, and so had to pray in a field very close to the village while being watched by the army. A foul-smelling unknown substance was sprayed at protesters by Israeli soldiers, suspected to be animal waste.
After the prayer they gathered with Israelis and internationals in an attempt to march to the part of their land where the annexation wall is about to be constructed. The wall steals more than 50% of the current farming land of the village and more than 80% of the land that belonged to the villagers before 1948. The Israeli army dispersed the protesters by shooting stinky wastewater and teargas at them, while they where still in the village approximately 3 kilometers from the construction site.
The demonstrators of Ni’lin escaped back into the village while being heavily gassed. Two persons later had to receive medical treatment after the demonstration due to the bad wounds caused by tear gas canisters fired as projectile weapons.
The demonstration that followed the initial clash lasted for 5 hours. They Israeli army kept shooting massive amounts of tear gas and rubber bullets while the demonstrators finally managed to build small stone road blocks to prevent the army jeeps to get into town as well as remove some of the barbed wire down to the road where the wall is being constructed.
