Visiting Ramzi

By Philippe Eli Fabrikant

Today three of us went to visit Ramzi Yasin in Muqassed Hospital in the Intensive Care Unit. Ramzi was shot in his head by a rubber bullet on the Friday demo in Bil’in. It eventually caused an internal brain bleeding. He was operated and moved from Ramallah to the Jerusalem hospital. The hospital is very well equipped, but Ramzi’s family cannot visit him, so he is alone. He is under strong sedetion, unconsciouss and, due to the medications, cannot breath by himself. The doctor we talked to said his situation is still unclear. We left him a note, wishing him to get better fast signed by his Israeli friends from the Bil’in demo. It was really horrible to see what a rubber bullet can do. Let’s hope he will get better as soon as possible and will get back to his family.

Second child from Balata refugee camp died

On Monday Balata residents endured their second child martyr’s funeral in five days. Fourteen year old Noor Faris Njem was shot in the head late last Wednesday evening when the Israeli army came to Balata Refugee Camp and, without warning, opened fire on unarmed civilians. Noor (meaning light) was peering round a wall to see if the jeep was still there when a soldier shot him in the top of his head. After the best efforts of medics, he died on Sunday afternoon, the second child to die from injuries inflicted by the Israeli army that night. In retaliation for Noor’s shooting, two sixteen year old fighters lay in wait to fire at the army when they entered the camp. Khalid Mohammed Msyme was shot dead and the other boy is critically injured.

Balata is a refugee camp in the heart of the West Bank, tens of kilometers from Israeli towns. There was no reason for the Israeli soldiers to come to Balata that night. There was no Israeli military operation, no claim of any risk to any Israel civilians, settlers or soldiers. There was no reason for the Israeli soldiers to shoot Noor, an unarmed child. There was no reason for them to subsequently drive further into Palestinian streets late at night, where they knew they would find youths angered and hurt by the shooting of one of their friends. There was no reason for them to drive round the camp firing until they drew out two more boys, only leaving when they had shot them too. Two more children have died needlessly, added to the hundreds who have already died here.

Noor’s death was announced over the mosque at 7am by a man who could barely speak for the emotion. Although we had expected this news for several days, the death of a child is always disturbing. I am sorry to say we have lost count of how many funerals we have attended here. It doesn’t get easier. On the contrary, I feel the weight of this more now. At first I was relieved to find that I could bear the emotion of the occasion. With time, and deepening bonds to the community, I feel closer to tears with each martyr. Not tears of grief, these people are not my own family, tears of frustration at the futile waste of life here. With these latest two deathsI also feel a loss of hope for peace here. For the last four months Palestine is supposed to have enjoyed a ceasefire. It doesn’t feel like peace in Balata. In that time there have been countless incursions, dozens of injuries of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, scores of arrests, an invasion, curfew, assassinations of two residents of Balata and now the shooting of three children, causing the death of two.

On Thursday morning Al Aqsa Martyrs and the other Palestinian resistance brigades in Balata announced an end to their part of the ceasefire. That means they will now retaliate for the Israeli occupations force’s attacks on them. I hope that the world’s media reports this honestly, explaining that the Israeli forces had never kept to their part of the ceasefire.

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

Israeli army invades West Bank village

Soldiers use a 16 year old boy as human shield and beating 2 women, including one 8 months pregnant
By IWPS

HARES, WEST BANK At approximately 1:00 a.m. on Thursday July 7, an estimated 60 Israeli soldiers entered Hares, a village in the Salfit district of the West Bank, on foot. Beginning at approximately 2:00 a.m. they entered at least 5 houses, breaking windows, firing sound bombs and live ammunition. They forced families including small children to sit outside at gunpoint while they searched the houses using dogs.

At least 13 jeeps and one large military vehicle were observed entering the village. During the operation soldiers used 2 people as human shields, including one 16-year old boy. They also beat several residents, including a woman who is 8 months pregnant. The army captured and took four men. The location and reason for the detentions are unknown. The incursion lasted approximately 5 and one half hours, from 1:00 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.

Soldiers committed several acts that are in contravention to international law including the use of civilians as human shields. Additionally they ordered a Palestinian woman to take off her clothes, but she refused. They threatened to kill her if she didn’t tell where her husband was.

In another home a woman reported that the army took a gold ring and over $1,000 Jordanian dinars from her handbag.