Category: In the Media

“Every week we bear witness to yet another violent attack by the security forces at the village of Bil’in,”

by, Yoav Stern
Haaretz Correspondent
See the story online at: www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/603111.html

Five people were lightly hurt and five others were detained for questioning during a a demonstration against the West Bank security fence in the village of Bil’in, adjacent to Ramallah, on Friday.

Hundreds of Israeli, Palestinian and foreign protestors took part in the demonstration. According to the demonstrators, Israel Defense Forces troops and Border Policemen sprayed tear gas and fired rubber bullets at them.

Protests have been held in Bil’in for several months to protest the construction of the separation fence on village land. Once completed, the fence will cut village residents off from their fields.

Every Friday, village residents protest, along with left-wing Israeli activists, Arab MKs and members of the Palestinian parliament. Hamas militants, headed by Hassan Yousef, have taken part in the demonstrations, alongside Israelis.

MK Barakeh receives summons over alleged protest violence

MK Mohammed Barakeh (Hadash-Ta’al) received a summons on Thursday requesting him to show up at the Binyamin police department’s offices to face allegations that he assault a border police officer.

The alleged attack took place at an anti-fence protest outside Bil’in in April.

Sources close to Barakeh said that they have video footage clearly showing it was Barakeh was assaulted by the border police officer, and not vice versa.

Barakeh said that he would not abide by the summons that was handed to him by the Knesset Speaker’s office because the Binyamin police department is situated in the occupied territories.

“If anyone wants to question me they are invited to do so in my office in Nazareth,” said Barakeh defiantly. When summoned to be questioned by police, lawmakers are usually allowed to ask police to question them at their chambers.

“Every week we bear witness to yet another violent attack by the security forces at the village of Bil’in,” said Barakeh. “The victims are not just Palestinians but also the peace activists who are non-violently demonstrating against the racist separation fence. We’ve all seen this week just how differently security forces treated the violent protests of the right (at Kfar Maimon).”

Beyond the wall

Something is astir in Bilin — mass Palestinian demonstrations based on non-violence and Israeli participation.
Graham Usher reports from the West Bank village
weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/751/re1.htm

Sheikh Taysir Al-Tammimi, one of the leading Islamic clerics in the West Bank, gently pulls away the barbed wire that has been laid before him. He then spreads out his prayer mat, facing Mecca. A hundred or so Palestinians cross the imaginary line that once demarcated the coiled border and kneel behind him. Fifty Israeli soldiers stand and look. As the prayer ends, two hundred people quietly applaud, some of them foreign activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), most of them Israeli Jews, from different parts of the Israeli peace camp. It is an act of non-violent protest of almost Gandhian simplicity. For the moment, it works. Israel’s military phalanx, its iron wall, is rendered politically and morally mute.

We are in Bilin, a minuscule Palestinian village two and a half miles east of the Green Line. Before the demonstrators — behind the Israeli soldiers — is a scar of freshly razed white earth, the preliminary ruptures for the next section of the West Bank wall. Behind that is the vast, sprawling settlement metropolis of Modin Illit, which the wall “defends” by devouring 600 of Bilin’s 1,000 acres of land.

Since February, Bilin’s 1,600 residents have mounted 50 demonstrations against the wall. Two principles govern them. One is non- violence. One day they chain themselves to olive trees, demonstrating that the wall not only steals their land but their lifeblood. Another day they give out letters to the troops, explaining in Hebrew that the struggle is “not against Israel as a state but against Israel as an occupation”.

This week they are commemorating the first anniversary of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling on the wall: that it and the settlements it “effectively annexes” are illegal under every tenet of international law and must be dismantled. A mock up “scales of injustice” has been erected on the back of a truck. On one weight, the lesser one, hangs the world; on the other, the heavier, hangs Israel. Uncle Sam holds the balance. It tells much of what you need to know about the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The army has not responded in kind. Since the protests began over 100 Palestinians, Israelis and other have been injured from teargas, beatings, rubber coated steel bullets and live ammunition. Dozens have been arrested, including, in June, two of Bilin’s brothers, Abdullah and Rateb Abu Rahme, allegedly for throwing stones. An Israeli military judge dismissed the charge after the army’s own videotapes showed it to be spurious. The prayers too were eventually dispersed in an explosion of tear gas and rubber bullets, leaving 14 injured, four arrested and an ambulance struck by gunfire.

But the iron fist has not quelled the protests. On the contrary, they have grown — which brings us to the second principle.

All of the demonstrations have been joint actions by Palestinians and Israelis, backed by the ISM. They march together, plan together, organise together and in some cases live together, with Israelis maintaining a vigil in the village to monitor the army’s arrest raids, which usually come the night after the demonstrations.

Together with like demonstrations in the neighbouring villages of Budrus and Biddu, Bilin represents the most concerted joint Palestinian-Israeli protest since the Intifada began and consigned the two peoples to their ghettos: ideological in the case of the Israelis, physical in the case of the Palestinians. This is as significant as the ICJ ruling and the non-violence, says Israeli peace activist, Adam Keller.

“In many ways the wall is a physical manifestation of what has happened to the two peoples ideologically. The demonstrations in Bilin and elsewhere challenge this segregation. By joining the struggle here Israelis are signalling they want to integrate, not only with the Palestinians, but with the region — which is the ultimate precondition for peace,” he says.

No one would argue (least of all Keller) that the Israelis who come to Bilin are representative of Israeli opinion. They are its radical fringes. But as a veteran of the protests of the Lebanese and the first Intifada he knows that what was once deemed heretical can become the heritage. “We know these demonstrations won’t become mainstream today, but they can become the catalyst for the mainstream in the future,” says Shaul Moghrabi-Bergen from Anarchists Against the Wall, the most active Israeli group in Bilin.

Is a similar catalyst being formed on the Palestinian side, beyond the confines of Bilin, Budrus and Biddu? The first row of worshippers behind Al-Tammimi comprised representatives from all the PLO factions, including (like Keller) veterans from the Lebanese war and first Intifada. But they were joined by delegations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

This is new. For years the Islamists adjured non-violent protest in favour of the armed struggle. They also refused all joint activities with Israelis as an implicit recognition of the “Zionist enemy”. Today they are marching alongside the Anarchists Against the Wall. “We are not against these demonstrations,” says Hassan Youssef, Hamas’s West Bank spokesman. “Hamas, like all the Palestinian people, is giving Israel a chance.”

The chance is based on two considerations. The first is the only road from ICJ ruling to enforcement is through international public opinion, including, critically, Israeli opinion. It is only when the Israeli peace camp as a whole supports the Palestinian struggle on the bases of international law that it will shed its implicitly racist notions of demographic separation in favour of a genuinely anti-colonial sentiment. The second is that critical breach in Israeli opinion is more likely to be wrought through non-violent struggle than violent and uncoordinated resistance. “When we demonstrate non-violently the world at least is with us. When we resist violently, it isn’t,” says Bilin resident Samir Banar, beneath the skewed scales of injustice.

Help us stop Israel’s wall peacefully

International Herald Tribune
www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/11/opinion/edkhatib.php

BILIN, West Bank: While the international media has been focusing on Israel’s planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, in my village of Bilin, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, we are living an equally important but overlooked story. Though Israeli forces plan to withdraw from Gaza, they are simultaneously expanding their West Bank settlements. On our village’s land, Israel is building one new settlement and expanding five others. These settlements will form a city called Modiin Illit, with tens of thousands of settlers, many times the number to be evacuated from Gaza. These settlements consume most of our area’s water. Throughout the West Bank, settlement and wall construction, arrests, killing and occupation continue.

One year ago, the International Court of Justice handed down an advisory ruling that Israel’s construction of a wall on Palestinian land violated international law. Today, Palestinians in villages like ours are struggling to implement the court’s decision and stop construction using nonviolence, but the world has done little to support us.

Bilin is being strangled by Israel’s wall. Though our village sits two and a half miles east of the Green Line, Israel is taking roughly 60 percent of our 1,000 acres of land in order to annex the six settlements and build the wall around them. This land is also money to us – we work it. Bilin’s 1,600 residents depend on farming and harvesting our olives for our livelihood. The wall will turn Bilin into an open-air prison, like Gaza.

After Israeli courts refused our appeals to prevent wall construction, we, along with Israelis and people from around the world, began peacefully protesting the confiscation of our land. We chose to resist non-violently because we are peace-loving people who are victims of occupation. We have opened our homes to the Israelis who have joined us. They have become our partners in struggle. Together we send a strong message – that we can coexist in peace and security. We welcome anyone who comes to us as a guest and who works for peace and justice for both peoples, but we will resist anyone who comes as an occupier.

We have held more than 50 peaceful demonstrations since February. We learned from the experience and advice of villages like Budrus and Biddu, which resisted the wall nonviolently. Palestinians from other areas now call people from Bilin “Palestinian Gandhis.”

Our demonstrations aim to stop the bulldozers destroying our land, and to send a message about the wall’s impact. We’ve chained ourselves to olive trees that were being bulldozed for the wall to show that taking trees’ lives takes the village’s life. We’ve distributed letters asking the soldiers to think before they shoot at us, explaining that we are not against the Israeli people, but against the building of the wall on our land. We refuse to be strangled by the wall in silence. In a famous Palestinian short story, “Men in the Sun,” Palestinian workers suffocate inside a tanker truck. Upon discovering them, the driver screams, “Why didn’t you bang on the sides of the tank?” We are banging – we are screaming.

In the face of our peaceful resistance, Israeli soldiers attack our peaceful protests with teargas, clubs, rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition, and have injured over 100 villagers. They invade the village at night, entering homes, pulling families out and arresting people. At a peaceful protest on June 17, soldiers arrested the brothers Abdullah and Rateb Abu Rahme, two village leaders. Soldiers testified that Rateb was throwing stones. An Israeli military judge recently ordered Rateb’s release because videotapes showed the soldiers’ claims were false.

The Palestinian people have implemented a cease-fire and have sent a message of peace through our newly elected leadership. But a year after the international court’s decision, wall building on Palestinian land continues. Behind the smoke screen of the Gaza withdrawal, the real story is Israel’s attempt to take control of the West Bank by building the illegal wall and settlements that threaten to destroy dozens of villages like Bilin and any hope for peace.

Bilin is banging, Bilin is screaming. Please stand with us so that we can achieve our freedom by peaceful means.

(Mohammed Khatib is a leading member of Bilin’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and the secretary of its village council.)

The disengagement as smoke screen

By Jonathan Pollak
Originally published in Ha’aretz

Exactly one year ago the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled that the fence that Israel is building in the territories is illegal. However, one hardly needs to mention that the construction has been affected only cosmetically. During the past two years we – Israelis, Palestinians and international activists – have been conducting a joint, popular and nonviolent struggle against what appears to us as one of the most significant moves, with destructive implications in the long term, in the history of the occupation in the territories.

From the very first moment Israel has found no means too repugnant, and has reacted aggressively to quash this struggle by simple people who are losing their lands and their livelihoods. Of course it has been the Palestinians among us who have paid the highest price – nine of them have been killed, many have been wounded and many more have been sent to jail cells or prisons. It seems that the fact that we have chosen a civil struggle and that firearms have played no part in our protest has not influenced the Israel Defense Forces and the government. Both have declared time after time that all of our demonstrations are illegal, and have acted accordingly. The fact that it was indeed their activity that was defined as illegal by one of the highest legal authorities in the world has not influenced their behavior in the territories one whit.

After four straight months of struggle in the village of Bil’in, I find myself once again fleeing from a thick cloud of stinging smoke, as now and then a rubber bullet whizzes past my ears. The familiar pattern is repeating itself. The Israeli policy is determined unilaterally, by the army and the government, and is destroying lives. Every attempt at protest and nonviolent resistance is suppressed with a heavy hand. Beyond the moral wickedness of this behavior, by making debate and civil resistance impossible, Israel is contributing directly to the escalation of the hostility.

Recently there has been a new and strong spirit coming from the direction of the soldiers. This is a spirit of conciliation, we have been told, the spirit of the disengagement. Thus, under cover of the disengagement and with steady American support, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is presiding over the occupation of the West Bank. It appears that Sharon knows that in order to win the West Bank, he must sacrifice Gush Katif on the altar of the disengagement. He also knows that with the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the international pressure for progress in the peace process will recede and the Jewish settlement project in the West Bank – his life’s project – can be renewed.

Under cover of the disengagement plan the fence continues to creep far beyond the recognized borders of the State of Israel and to butcher the West Bank into cantons. Many housing units are being built at this very moment beyond the Green Line [pre-Six-Day War border]. Most of this building is going on between the fence and the Green Line as part of the attempt to make the 1967 borders disappear and to annex more territory. Apartheid roads, some of them for Jews only and some of them for Palestinians only, continue to be built. The legal system, with its occupiers’ laws, is continuing to give lip service to ordaining cosmetic changes in places where a deep-rooted change is
needed.

And now, after the court has canceled most of the interim orders that delayed the construction of the separation fence, Sharon has hastened to accelerate its construction (“Defense heads to present PM with timetable for fence completion today,” Haaretz, July 6).

A year ago I believed that the ruling by the International Court of Justice in the Hague was a huge success – a major step on the long road to ending the occupation and the regime of Israeli racism. I still think so, but to my regret, until such time as the international community as a whole and the United States in particular apply real pressure to end the occupation and support the popular struggle, as they did when it suited their interests in Lebanon, the meaning of this step will remain symbolic. Anyone who has been blinded by the dazzle of security arguments for the fence and the false peace promises of the disengagement will discover too late that there is neither security nor peace in them.

These are critical days and the remaining time is short. Only the Israelis have the power to cut through the cries of “anti-Semitism” that are heard every time elements in the world dare to criticize
Israel and its policy in the territories. The power and the moral obligation.

The writer is an activist in Anarchists Against the Fence

Ha’aretz: He simply had a mom and dad

By Yossi Sarid
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/596844.html

By its very nature, an army is not designed to issue justice. As we know, an army marches on its stomach, and a stomach is capable of digesting injustice as well; it is not necessarily guided by justice. Every army, especially during a bloody conflict, has other urgent problems. Justice waits until things calm down, and meanwhile it is invited somewhere else, if at all. We should mention here the famous statement by Georges Clemenceau, “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”

Last week, a military court convicted Israel Defense Forces Sergeant Taysir al-Heib of killing Tom Hurndall, an International Solidarity Movement activist. More than two years have passed since Hurndall was shot in the head in the Rafah region, became a “vegetable,” was hospitalized in England and died a year later.

The first IDF investigation was like every investigation: “The soldiers acted in accordance with standing orders.” According to Al-Heib’s original testimony, Hurndall was armed with a pistol, and therefore he was fated to be shot by a sniper. This version was supported by that of other soldiers who were there. The entire affair, with the fraudulent findings of the groundless investigation, was supposed to be buried along with Hurndall.

But this time the case was not closed, because Hurndall had a mother who did not accept the report, and a father as well. And his parents are not from here, they are from there, from England, and what a mother and father see from there is not always what once wants to and can see from here. The family did not rest and did not remain silent: They gave interviews to all the media organizations, they protested and demanded an additional investigation, they enlisted public opinion in England, they applied heavy pressure on British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And Her Majesty’s government, albeit halfheartedly, explained to the government of His Majesty the IDF that this affair could not be buried.

And surprise, surprise, a truly diabolical twist, the new investigation came up with entirely different findings: Hurndall did not have a pistol, he was even wearing identifying reflective clothing, our soldier only wanted to deter him and the bullet that was supposed to miss happened to hit the mark.

How can one fail to think about other investigations, whose findings are full of holes and don’t have a leg to stand on, but nor do they have a foreign government to tear them to bits, to demand a genuine investigation and to get it, too?

From the start of the intifada in October 2000 through this month, Israeli security forces have killed at least 1,722 Palestinians in the territories who were not involved in the fighting, including 563 minors. During that same period, only 108 investigations were opened by Metzach, the Military Police Detective Unit, and only 19 ended in indictments; only in two cases were soldiers convicted of causing death. These are the statistics of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, which have usually been proven correct. It is easy to guess how this picture would have looked had England and other countries been in the picture the entire time. The U.S. administration, for example, is invited to test its strength in the case of Rachel Corrie, another ISM activist, who was crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer in Rafah.

The administration in Washington will probably not hasten to accept the invitation; it will have difficulties finding time to avenge Corrie’s blood, because it has its own serious problems: It is too busy whitewashing its scandals in Iraq, Guantanamo and Afghanistan.

The bitter story of Hurndall, with its hasty vicissitudes, explains only too well the constant demand to take investigations away from the army, which like any other organization should not and cannot investigate itself. The IDF should carry out the operational investigations in order to learn the necessary lessons, but the investigations into incidents of killing and wounding should be placed in the hands of professional and independent groups.

It is hard to suppress and overcome another forbidden thought: Was it easier to open a closed file, to reinvestigate everything, to indict and convict in the Hurndall affair, because the soldier who fired is a Bedouin?