Village near Bethlehem protests against the Wall by Alice Grey, IMEMC, 11 May 2007
Prayers held at the land slated for annexation in Wadi Neiss (Photo: Alice Grey)
Approximately 50 protesters gathered in Wadi Niis on Friday to continue the weekly non-violent demonstrations against the construction of the Wall that have been happening in the area over the last few months. The wall, which is allegedly being built for the security of the nearby Efrat Settlement, will annex over 70% of the land belonging to the nearby village of Um Salamoneh.
This weeks action is part of the “Stop the Bleeding of Bethlehem” campaign launched few in April to nonviolently resist the wall in Bethlehem area. Several nonviolent actions have been organzied in Bethlehem area through the campaign since launched.
This week the protest had a dual theme, as speakers called for the release of BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who is being held by an Islamist group in Gaza called the Army of Islam since March 12. Speakers stressed that the group is representing Palestine to the world, and that they should therefore conform to the non-violent ideology of those they claim to represent; and that all Palestinian groups should join hands in struggling against the Israeli Occupation, and that Mr Johnston, who has nothing to do with the Occupation and has in fact been a friend of the Palestinians, should be released without delay.
As usual, prayers were held on the land that is to be annexed. This week, the meeting took place on a field of vine trees that will soon be lost behind the wall; watched over by approximately 30 Israeli soldiers. After prayers, protesters moved to walk along the route the wall will take across the land but were prevented by the soldiers. Despite provocation by the soldiers who pushed and hit protesters, the non-violent character of the demonstration was maintained at all times. As soldiers tried to push the demonstrators back, they sat down on the road, calling “Where is the peace, where is the justice?” A sit-in was maintained for a short time before the demonstration peacefully dispersed.
Israeli occupation forces used excessive violence today in Bil’in to quell the regular Friday demonstration against Israel’s Apartheid Wall, arresting 10 and injuring seven.
Palestinians were joined by international and Israeli solidarity activists after Friday prayers. Abdallah, a resident of Bil’in and member of the popular committee, explained the theme of the demo for today. He stated, “This demonstration today is dedicated to Azmi Bishara. Azmi Bishara was a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament. Israel is accusing him of working with Hizbollah during Israel’s lost war with Lebanon last summer. Azmi is now living in Qatar because, if he returns, Israel will put him in jail for 25 years. But it is Olmert and Peretz who should be in jail.”
“From Bil’in, we are sending out support and solidarity for Azmi Bishara,” rang a chant as the demonstration started.
The demonstration left the mosque and marched towards the gate in the Apartheid Wall. Israeli soldiers and border police from the M’gav unit were already waiting for the non-violent demonstration at the destination.
Photo by Jonas
Demonstrators reached a wall of barbed wire which the occupation forces had constructed on the path. Chants of “End the Occupation” and “Tear down the wall” could be heard. One Israeli border policeman suddenly took aim and shot a Palestinian demonstrator with two rubber-coated steel bullets.
Martinez, and American activist, described the event: “I was just a few feet from Adeeb Abu Rahma when the border policeman shot him. The officer was just about 6 feet away. He took aim for Addeb’s legs and hit him twice on the inner side of his thighs. Immediately, Adeeb fell to the ground screaming. Activists immediately came to his assistance. When they lowered Adeeb’s pants to assess the injuries, I could see two fairly large holes, bleeding.”
Adeeb was taken away by medics with the Red Crescent and driven to the hospital, where he sits at this moment. The rubber-coated steel bullets, because they were shot from such a close range, entered Adeeb’s body. He just finished two operations in a Ramallah hospital where he must remain for at least two days under physician supervision. Rubber bullets are considered deadly by the Israeli army if they are shot at a distance from under 40 meters.
At this point, Israeli activists confronted the Israeli commanders to demand an explanation.
Jonathan Pollock explained, “when we tried to get details from the commander, details which he is mandated to give, the commander instead arrested us. There has been a rapid increase in violence in the last few weeks on the part of Israeli forces. This reflects a desperate attempt to break the non-violent resistance by using unwarranted military force and violence.”
Israeli activist being arrested, Photo by Jonas
In all, 6 Palestinians (Iyad, Abid, Aid, Naser, Issa, Yosef) and 4 Israelis (Jonathan, Sarah, Nir, Gur) were arrested and later released.
Israeli forces invade the village, firing tear gas, Photo by Jonas
Six other demonstrators were wounded by rubber bullets or tear gas when the border police left the site of the wall and entered the village.
Police were shooting projectile tear gas cannisters and firing rubber bullets as they progressed further into the village of Bil’in. Border police were pushing people out of the way with their rifle and throwing activists around.
Israeli forces assaulting Palestinian activist
The border police effectively chased the majority of the demonstrators back into the village by using brute force.
For more information, contact:
Abdallah, 0547-258-210
ISM Media Office, 02-297-1824, 0599-943-157
The Military Police criminal investigations division is to launch an investigation into an incident in the West Bank on Wednesday in which armed Israel Defense Forces reservist soldiers used violence against left-wing Israelis protesters.
The protesters had dismantled a temporary roadblock in the Hebron Hills, close to the town of Dahariyah, provoking the troops’ response.
Around 10 anarchist activists and several Palestinians arrived at the site and removed cement blocks that were blocking an unpaved footpath connecting the town to Route 60, the main road in the West Bank that runs from south of the Hebron Hills to Hebron itself.
The activists then moved to the main road near the Otniel settlement and attempted to block it to traffic. The reservist soldiers who arrived the scene tried to remove the protesters, and which point the clashes erupted.
The footage, filmed by protesters at the scene, shows an officer beating one of the activists, pushing the Israeli protesters away, wrestling with some, shoving a woman and stabbing a young man in the ribs with a rifle barrel.
The demonstrator was seen collapsing to the ground, screaming in pain, holding his chest. It was not known how seriously he was wounded.
Speaking after consultations with IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi later Wednesday, Defense Minister Amir Peretz said that the images apparently showed excessive and serious behavior on the part of the soldiers, and the incident would be investigated and dealt with accordingly.
Peretz urged demonstrators from the right and from the left to act within the confines of the law.
The Channel 2 military reporter said maintaining roadblocks in the area was essential, because several Palestinian suicide bombers have used that route on their way to Israel.
Palestinians and human rights groups complain that the hundreds of roadblocks have ruined economic and social life in the West Bank.
Celebrating 40 Israeli and Palestinian peace builders
Three ISM Co-Founders Celebrated, Huwaida Arraf, Ghassan Andoni, Neta Golan from American Friends Service Committee, 10 May 2007
June 2007 marks the 40th anniversary of the Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. At AFSC, we’re taking this time to reflect on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to appreciate Palestinians and Israelis who have worked for peace and justice.
During May and June, AFSC presents Faces of Hope – Profiles of Peace. Profiles of Peace includes 40 short biographies of Israeli and Palestinian peace builders. A new profile will be added each weekday beginning May 1 and continuing through June 8. Follow the name links on this page to read each profile.
Huwaida Arraf is a co-founder of the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which focuses on grassroots community nonviolent organizing to resist the Israeli occupation.
The founders of the ISM believed that bringing international volunteers to support the Palestinians under occupation would reduce the risk of violent repression of Palestinians by the Israeli military. Since its creation in April 2001, some 3,500 activist volunteers from more than 30 different countries have joined the ISM. The organization has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, in 2003 and in 2004.
“The Palestinian Intifada, the ‘uprising for freedom,’ has got to be an international struggle. . .,” Arraf says. “[It] is a struggle for freedom, a struggle for basic human dignity and human rights. Anyone who believes in freedom, believes in justice, believes in equality for all people not based on religion or nationality, can join in the struggle.”
Arraf works in the occupied Palestinian territories with local leaders and groups, training international activists to face the Israeli military forces unarmed. She has been arrested more than a dozen times for nonviolent protests in the Occupied Territories, including once for delivering food to the people stranded in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, the oldest of five children, Arraf attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she obtained degrees in Arabic, Hebrew, and Judaic Studies, as well as political science. As an undergraduate, Arraf co-founded and facilitated an Arab-Jewish dialogue group on her campus and was active in other conflict resolution and co-existence groups. As a junior, she attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and studied the Hebrew language on a Kibbutz. After graduating, Arraf worked at the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C., promoting the rights of Arab Americans.
In the spring of 2000, Arraf traveled to Jerusalem to serve as program coordinator for Seeds of Peace, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes dialogue and interactions between young people in regions of conflict, in her case, Palestinians and Israelis. While working at Seeds of Peace, Arraf met her husband, Adam Shapiro, another co-founder of the ISM.
In 2004, Arraf co-edited the book Peace Under Fire, a collection of personal accounts by ISM volunteers, and is currently co-editing a book about the Palestinian resistance. She is a law student at the American University’s Washington College of Law, where she is focusing on International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, with a special focus on war crimes prosecution. She also co-chairs the Students for Justice in Palestine at the Washington College of Law, serves on the advisory boards of KinderUSA and Imagine Life, and is a member of the steering committee for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
In 2006, Arraf traveled to Lebanon with her husband to coordinate civilian relief efforts in Lebanon and provide company for refugees returning to the south of Lebanon.
************************* Ghassan Andoni
Palestinian co-founder of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and the International Solidarity Movement. He has been a proponent of nonviolent resistance for decades.
Ghassan Andoni is a physics professor at Birzeit University who has combined his teaching with peace activism since 1988. He is best known for co-founding the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People, but his peace activities began much earlier.
While a college student in Iraq, Andoni dropped out to work in refugee camps in Lebanon during the civil war there. Returning home from Lebanon he was arrested and jailed for two years for his supposed involvement in the military conflict. His Israeli judge refused to believe that he was a hospital worker and sentenced him for alleged membership in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
During the first intifada, 1987-1993, Andoni was an active participant in the tax resistance movement that took place in Beit Sahour, a town in the West Bank. He expanded his understanding of nonviolence from being a personal position to a public one that, if successfully employed, could lead to a mass movement of liberation.
In 1988, after another jail term for his participation in the tax revolt, he co-founded the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between People. The center’s aim was to allow those in conflict to acknowledge each other’s humanity and to work together for a world in which they could peacefully coexist. It did this through dialogue and joint activities between Israelis and Palestinians. As the Israeli military occupation wore on, Andoni and the Rapprochement Center moved from dialogue to direct nonviolent action intended to end the occupation.
As part of this work he co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), coordinating international volunteers with Palestinians and Israelis in nonviolent actions that called attention to the oppression created by years of occupation. In working with ISM he has insisted that all international participants commit themselves to nonviolence, both physical and verbal.
“Conflicts are fueled by the tendency of the powerful to exploit the power and the anger and frustration of the powerless, which turns into violence,” Andoni says. “ISM activists are attempting to confront the exploitation of power and to bring back hope to the powerless.”
As he continued his peace work and organizing among Palestinian youth, Andoni demonstrated an ability to think strategically and tactically. He realized that a nonviolent movement must always be creative and experimental, not staying with patterns of behavior that once may have been successful but that, if made routine, run the risk of becoming rigid and mechanical.
His creative, proactive responses contributed to a growing prominence within the peace community, even as he turned from international work back toward a focus on Palestinian civil society. For this work, the AFSC nominated him and Israeli activist Jeff Halper for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He currently works for Birzeit University as Director of Communications.
Read Andoni ’s statement after being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize:HERE
***************************** Neta Golan
Israeli co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, which brings international solidarity activists to the West Bank and Gaza to engage in nonviolence resistance. In 2002, Golan was voluntarily stranded in Yasser Arafat’s compound that was besieged by Israeli forces. She wrote reports to the outside world about what she was experiencing.
Neta Golan was born in Tel Aviv and is a third generation Israeli. She describes her childhood as scary, loaded with fears instilled by her parents and fueled by the media. While she met Palestinian people working in construction and sanitation in Tel Aviv, barriers between the two peoples did not allow her to interact with Palestinian peoples as equals. She first heard of the occupation at the age of 15 during the first Palestinian Intifada.
This was her first venture into learning more about the Palestinian people and Israeli policies toward them. Having been raised with an awareness of oppression and dispossession in Jewish history, Golan’s first instincts were to question how Israel could be maintaining the oppression of another people.
She started to enter the West Bank to facilitate dialogues and meetings between Palestinians and Israelis. Through these trips into and around the West Bank, she came to understand the reality of Palestinian life under the occupation, and her fear transformed into action to help the Palestinian people.
At the start of the second intifada between 2000 and 2001, Golan helped to found the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which brings international solidarity activists to the West Bank and Gaza to engage in nonviolent resistance. The international activists support the Palestinians in staging nonviolent demonstrations, confronting Israeli soldiers who violently suppress the Palestinians, and documenting human rights abuses and making those abuses public.
“What we want to do with the ISM is keep an avenue for popular struggle open,” Golan said in an article in the magazine Frontline (Vol. 19, Issue 17) published in 2002. “When we accompany Palestinians, because of the racism of the whole system, the army doesn’t treat us as targets the way they treat Palestinians. We want to expose the racist nature of the conflict by doing this, and also simply try to protect people so they can try to resist politically.”
In 2002, Golan was voluntarily stranded in Yasser Arafat’s presidential compound in Ramallah when it was besieged by Israeli forces. From within the compound, Golan wrote reports to the world outside of the compound about what was happening. She was hoping to reach the international community and move them to action, writing that “In the compound we are left wondering, not without fear, whether the international community will allow the permanent expansion of the already illegal occupation and the exile if not assassination of the Palestinian leader.”Focus on Trade, No. 76, 4/2002
Some of her other actions include chaining herself to olive trees to stop the Israeli military from uprooting them, and questioning the actions of Israeli soldiers at demonstrations,
While her family remains in Israel, Golan married a Palestinian man and lives with him and their children in the West Bank. She constantly deals with the ironies of her life: a resident of the occupied Palestinian territories, she can travel back and forth to Israel to visit with her family, but neither her husband nor her Palestinian friends can visit with their families if they are outside of the West Bank.
As she traveled to Israel to see her dying father for the last time, she recalled her Palestinian friend Amal, who “will never see her father again. Many thousands of Palestinians share her fate.” (Nablus to Tel Aviv, June 24, 2003).
Israeli army bulldozers demolished a Palestinian owned building that host disabled children’s society located in Wadi Al Joze neighborhood in east Jerusalem on Tuesday morning.
Palestinian sources reported that Israeli army troops stormed the neighborhood in the morning then two bulldozers destroyed a building that belongs to Hanni Totah from Jerusalem. The building was used by a Palestinian NGO called Al Nojom ( stars) society that works with fiscally challenged children.
Israeli authorities used the same excuse that the building was built without needed documents; documents that after Israeli occupied the city of Jerusalem in 1967 rarely gave to Palestinians living in the city.
Human rights organizations in the city stated that since the beginning of the year Israeli have destroyed 48 Palestinian owned buildings and houses under the pretext of built without permits.
