Settlers and Shepherds

by Greta B

Saturday, September 3, the day after the demonstration in Bil’in, two of us boarded a bus bound for Hebron, a town of 130,000 Palestinians, 600 lunatic settlers, and thousands of soldiers and police to ‘guard’ the settlers. Arriving at noon on Saturday, the day most settlers run rampant over everyone, we were told to immediately go to the top of the hill that separates settlers from Palestinians.

Within a half hour, several settler boys between 10-17 came strutting down the road toward the small Palestinian children playing in front of us. The children left immediately, and we turned on our cameras as they advanced toward us. The older boys egged the younger ones to pick up stones and throw them at us two women who were sitting on a stoop. Stones came flying through the air, hitting me in the hand and thigh. Two soldiers who had been standing there watching finally called the police.

I screamed at the boys and started up the hill after them, only to be pulled back by the soldier who said, “I’m sorry, but they get very upset when they see a camera. You need to put it away.”

“Put it away? Not on your life. You think I’m going to let those damned thugs get away with throwing stones at two women who were sitting there doing nothing?”

“I know, I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it. They’re under 12 years old.”

“Then take their parents in. Collectively punish them the way you do the Palestinians. Fine the crazy bastards.”

You get the idea of the conversation.

We had taken plenty of video and could clearly see which boy had hit me. The soldiers suggested we take it to the police station the next day, and, if we left, they would stop them right away. Well, these nasty kids began a full-on riot, throwing stones at the police and army, throwing pipes off the top of their settler apartment at homes beneath them, screaming obscenities, throwing garbage and flashing mirrors in the faces of the soldiers. Little settler girls started to come down and throw stones.

It was so disgusting, I finally left. The rioting went off and on for hours, into the night, where they threw boulders onto the homes of the Palestinians.

One Palestinian man called us and asked us to come to his home. The settlers had come in the week before, and they had cut through every single grape vine that he had, vines that were over 100 years old, thick as my thigh. When he called the army, they had come in and said, “Go back in your house or we’ll kill you.” He had no choice, and every single vine has been cut in half. He took us out and pointed at one.

“That one has a shoot growing already. They’ll come back someday.” My God, what could any of us say in the face of that optimism and courage?

I spent all day Sunday and Monday at the police station making out a report and giving them video tape of the attack. One policeman said, “I really sympathize, but there’s nothing we can do. They’re under 12.”

“That hasn’t stopped you from punishing Palestinian families when their kids throw stones… and you have 600 Palestinian children between 13-14 years old in jail.”

After an hour of increasingly hostile conversation, he finally admitted that the last time he had tried to stop them, they had slit all 4 of his tires. Another policeman said that they had broken his windshield.

Nothing will happen. Nothing will be done. These teenagers will grow up to be the worst kind of thugs, and even the police admit that. 600 of them have made life miserable for the Palestinians; they have closed the stores, thrown excrement and stones on the tops of homes, cut the trees, chain sawed the grape vines.

Yesterday, I went to Qawawis, a small village of 40-45 shepherds. We had gone for the day to protect them from the settlers, who have beaten them and killed their sheep. Several settlers had beaten a man who had already been badly beaten last year and had gone to Iraq for surgery. He refused to make a complaint, more afraid of settlers and knowing that, even with 3 internationals, 2 UN observers who check in once in a while, and an Israeli from Tayyush, they will find him and kill him.

I am tired, I am hot, I am dusty, I finally had a shower after three days. I am burned, and I wonder what the hell I’m doing here and if we make one bit of difference. Israel is committing silent genocide on a people who have been ignored and villanized for 57 years. The children look at us with big eyes and ask us why the world doesn’t see what is happening.

What do I tell them? That the police and army refuse to see what they’re doing? The policeman yesterday, a Sephardic Jew, admitted to me that he knew he was a second class citizen in a racist society. “But at least I’m a Jew.” he said. God help us all.

In the Path of the Wall

Here’s a short film showing a non-violent direct action against the Israeli Apartheid Wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in on the 20th July 2005. Four internationals, three Israelis and one Palestinian chain themselves inside a metal cylinder which is placed in the path of the bulldozers that daily come to destroy the land belonging to the village and annex it to a nearby settlement. While the world’s attention is fixed on the so-called ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, the Israeli government is rapidly carrying out settlement expansion and land confiscation and destruction in the West Bank. This film shows the customary force used by the Israeli Occupation Forces when their actions are resisted ( run time is eight minutes).

It’s available at The Internet Archive.

For the story behind this action against the annexation barrier, here’s the original report.

For some photos, check out this blog entry.

Where’s the restraint in Bil’in?

By Haaretz Editorial

After proving their sensitivity and intelligence in dispersing the demonstrations in Gush Katif, the Israel Defense Forces and police could have been expected to apply the same policy in handling the demonstrators against the separation fence in the village of Bil’in.

The IDF and police did not fire at the protesters on the roof in Kfar Darom, even when the latter threw dangerous substances at them, and they refrained from using force even against violent protesters. Similarly, it could have been hoped that the soldiers would hold their fire when facing left-wing and Palestinian protesters.

Instead, outrageous images are published week after week of soldiers kicking left-wing demonstrators and firing salt or rubber-coated bullets – showing their general contempt for the right to legitimate protest.

Three different judges have recently castigated the defense forces for the excessive use of force in Bil’in. Despite this, they once again fired at the demonstrators, this time – last Friday – even before they had left the village area toward the fence.

The demonstrations of the West Bank villagers, whose lands have been confiscated for the construction of the separation fence, have been taking place for the past two years. Together with the petitions to the High Court of Justice, they are a legitimate and sometimes effective means of protest against the annexation of land intended to expand settlements, under the pretense of building the fence. The lands taken from the residents of Bil’in, some of which are privately owned, are mostly intended to expand existing settlements, but also to build a new settlement called Nahlat Heftziba.

Expropriating more than half the village’s lands for nonsecurity purposes arouses unnecessary anger, and it is doubtful whether such measures are necessary or wise. The flexible building plans of the settlements are in dispute. In Bil’in’s case, it is doubtful whether there are even confirmed plans.

Demonstrations that took place in other villages have been effective in getting the fence line moved closer to the Green Line. In Bil’in, the residents still hope their protest will reduce the scope of the disaster.

The demonstrations in Bil’in and the adjacent villages have become the Palestinians’ main protest against the continued expansion of the settlements, and they are even dubbed the “fence intifada.” If the authorities are thinking of putting an end to these demonstrations forcibly, and taking protesters into preventive detention, they should also consider the alternative. There is a fear that the legitimate and very restricted “fence intifada” will lead to the eruption of another armed intifada.

The separation fence is a means to stop terror, but all the sides know that its line marks, to a large extent, the future border between Israel and the Palestinian state. The attempt to annex more territories, to build more settlements and to arouse more hatred among those whose land is confiscated is superfluous.

The most obvious lesson from the dismantling of the Gaza settlements is that they should never have been set up in the first place. One day’s settlement success became another day’s political and security millstone. The injustice imposed on Bil’in residents could still be fixed. But, in any case, the village’s legitimate right to protest must not be tampered with.

School, stones and settlers

by Greta B

It was the children’s second day of school in the old city of Hebron. We had been asked to accompany them to prevent settler children from stoning small boys and girls.

Settlers had gone on a rampage yesterday, stoning us, the police and even the soldiers as they came down their ‘settler hill’. The police did nothing except look at these thugs throwing stones at us. When we asked where the teargas, sound bombs and rubber bullets were, they just shrugged.

Ten minutes after we arrived at the bottom of the hill to escort the children, the military showed up. “This is a closed military zone.” They informed us. “We want you to leave.” As we stood there and argued with them, they took out a piece of paper and pointed at it, telling us that the paper said it was a closed military zone.

Since there was no writing on it and no signature, one of the activists told the soldiers we were going nowhere unless the paperwork was filled out and signed. Off he went, then returned ten minutes later with an apparent filled-out form.

By this time, most of the girls had been escorted safely to school and most of the little boys had been able to get through the checkpoint, just one of the eight that rings the area.

One of the soldiers and some of the police told us, CPT and the Interdenominational tear that we were interferring with their jobs, and they could escort the children just fine. But they don’t and they won’t.

So we will be at the bottom of the hill tomorrow morning.

Soldiers In My House

Three Weeks to Freedom: One family’s story of survival under siege

Wafa Abu Shmais is an English teacher, the mother of four children, a wife, daughter, and an aunt. She is also a Palestinian, Arabic and Muslim, her entire life spent in an apartheid state where the simple fact of not being Jewish makes one not fully human, expendable and hated. Wafa and her family endure the type of racism and oppression not seen in the United States since the slave days and briefly glimpsed with the internment of the Japanese during World War II.

Yet surprisingly as you read her diary encompassing the three weeks in April 2002, which saw the invasion of Nablus and the Massacre in Jenin, (which Israeli hardliners still try to deny even with the film footage and testimony of Kurdi Bear, one of the D-9 drivers proving it) you’ll discover Wafa could easily be your neighbor.

She worries about what American mothers worry about. Her children complain about the same things American children complain about and she and her husband support each other, just like American husbands and wives support each other.

The most remarkable aspect of this diary gleans though frustration and justified anger; the hate Americans are told consumes all persons of Arabic or Muslim decent is missing. The hate is missing for a reason. It doesn’t exist as it has been painted. What emerges from her writing is hope, frustration and disbelief. The image Americans have of Palestine, including heinously distorted history, biblical and actual reflects propaganda rather than truth. Wafa’s story will allow you to know what Palestinians are really like. When she wrote this in April 2002, she didn’t plan on having it published. She just wrote what she was feeling, seeing, thinking and experiencing. She wrote what was happening.

With the exception of some very minor grammatical corrections, the diary is just as Wafa wrote it. We are very proud to present Wafa’s diary covering the three weeks of hell she and her family survived. You’ll find her story inspiring as well as disturbing, yet it is a story that must be told.

Wafa Abu Shmais’ entire book, is online. You can read it right here.