Tag: Bil’in - Page 120 - International Solidarity Movement

SchNEWS: “Wall of Shame – West pushes Palestinians further into crisis”

The remnants of Palestinian civil society, brutalized by the occupation and ongoing encirclement by the apartheid wall, is now reeling under the shock of the sudden removal of all US and EU aid. Their crime? To have voted in free and fair elections for a movement, Hamas, which Bush and Blair argue is ‘terrorist’.

Bank transfers to the Palestinian Authority (PA) have been blocked by the US. Slowly but surely the PA is being starved of the funds needed to maintain basic services and infrastructure. The civil workforce have not been paid for two months and hospitals are desperately short of vital medicines. Jack Straw argued that aid to the PA had to be cut because Hamas refuses to recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist the occupation. Yet the UK is an enthusiastic backer of the Israel whose new Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said “I believe with all my heart in the people of Israel’s eternal historic right to the entire land of Israel.” – meaning a racially-exclusive state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Hamas’s claim to the same territory, with roots in living memory rather than biblical mythology is treated as terrorist rhetoric and attracts crippling sanctions from the West. Are we about to do to Palestine what was done in Iraq during the nineties?

Annual UK arms sales to Israel have doubled over the last year to £25m, and since 2000 the UK has sold £70m worth of arms to Israel, including tanks, helicopters, mines, rockets, machine guns, tear-gas, leg irons, components for fighter jets and surface-to-surface missiles. Over the last 30 years Israel has been by far the largest recipient of US foreign aid.

This sanctions regime is being conducted against an occupied people on behalf of an occupying power. While the West demands that Hamas renounce violence, the low intensity war against the civilian population in Palestine continues. In the months of April and May, over 40 Palestinians have been killed by the army – most of them civilians, at least eight of them children – with the most perfunctory coverage in the western press. Aggressive expansion of settlements together with the building of settler-only roads continues. Israel maintains a stranglehold over the Palestinian economy, meaning that the PA is totally dependent on external sources of funding.

The icon of this oppressive regime is the building of the apartheid wall – some 730km of concrete and steel which will annex huge swathes of Palestinian land and turn towns and villages into gated mini-prisons. If completed it will allow Israel to control all significant movement within the West Bank, allowing further degradation of daily life in the Occupied Territories. A bitter fight to resist this symbol of repression has been growing over the past few months, as SchNEWS’s correspondent in the village of Bil’Iin, near Ramallah, reports…

BIL’IN UP

“Bil’In is a small village close to Ramallah six kilometres inside the Green Line (the 1967 ceasefire line). For over eighteen months the villagers of Bil’In have been resisting attempts by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to build a section of the apartheid wall on village lands.

At a demonstration on Friday 12th May, 300 Palestinians, international and Israelis converged at the gate of the wall, the villagers non-violent protest was met by a hail of plastic-coated steel bullets fired at close range. Two international activists were hospitalised with head injuries (one needing treatment for a brain hemorrhage) and dozens of Palestinians were also shot and injured.

As in other villages, the Israeli government argues that the route of the wall in Bil’in was determined purely for security reasons. However, a visit to Bil’In shows that the work is aimed at the annexation of the villages’ ancient olive groves in order to allow expansion of the illegal ‘Israeli-Jewish’ settlements of Mattiyahu East and Mod’In Illit. The annexation will directly benefit the Israeli real estate developers ‘Green Park’ and ‘Heftsiba’

.The villagers of Bil’In have gained large-scale support from Palestinian, Israeli and activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in their struggle against the construction. Since February 2005 villagers have staged hundreds of demonstrations at the route of the wall. The village has become a symbol of Palestinian non-violent resistance and the demos have become a regular feature in the Israeli press.
Israel has built an incomplete barrier separating the villagers of Bil’In from their olive groves. In 2005 the villagers built an ‘outpost’ on their own land, imitating the Israeli settler tactic of claiming Palestinian land through building illegal outposts, close to the settlement of Mod’In Illit. The outpost is constantly manned by Palestinian and international activists and has become a point where villagers can meet and discuss resistance to the construction.

The villagers hold a demonstration at the gate to their lands every Friday. On one such demo in April, villagers’ protests centred around the boycott of apartheid Israel. Protesters burned Israeli products in front of border police in riot gear, before breaking down the gate in the wall and trying to access their land. The demonstrators were met with with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Mohammed Khatib, a member of the Bil’In Popular Committee Against the Wall, said… ‘in the face of our non-violent resistance, Israeli soldiers have attacked our peaceful protests with teargas, clubs, rubber-coated steel bullets and other ammunition. They have injured over 400 villagers, they invade the village at night, entering homes, pulling families out and arresting people.’

The IOF have repeatedly arrested youths from the village in attempts to intimidate those taking part in resistance, often demanding large sums of money in bail. In April two children were arrested while herding goats.The two boys picked up one of the pieces of scrap metal that litter the fields next to the construction site. One of the settlers noticed and called the police, accusing them of theft. The police arrested the pair and later made additional charges of entering Israel illegally and throwing stones at a recent demonstration. The boys’ release was secured by the ISM for 5000 NIS (Israeli shekels) each.

Despite IOF repression, the resistance raises the spirits of the people of Bil’In in the face of the brutal Israeli occupation. Tom Hayes, a volunteer in Bil’In with the ISM, an organisation aimed at supporting Palestinian non-violent resistance, said that, ‘the atmosphere in Bil’In is one of hope – the villagers respond to Israel’s apartheid policies with increased resistance and are confident that they will win their fight.’

Similar widespread resistance in the nearby villages of Budrus and Biddu, where other sections of the wall have been built, has lead to Israeli Supreme Court decisions limiting the amount of land which the IOF can annex behind the wall. The villagers of Bil’In are hoping to draw international pressure and media attention to influence the court’s decision.

The villagers of Bil’In have issued three petitions against the wall to the Supreme Court. The most recent, filed on May 14th, states that the route of the wall is specifically designed to benefit real estate companies and should be removed. Supreme Court Judge Salim Jubran ordered the state to respond to the villagers’ request for a temporary injunction within seven days.

The ISM has worked in Bil’In for over a year and is committed to supporting the villagers’ struggle. Contact www.palsolidarity.org to join us in Palestine.”

www.brightonpalestine.org – blog of ISM activist working in Palestine
www.palestinecampaign.org – Palestine Solidarity Campaign
www.ism-london.org.uk – ISM London
www.stopthewall.org – Palestinian anti Apartheid Wall Campaign

Solidarity Events

May 20th – Demonstrate for Palestine, March and Rally, assemble 12 noon, Embankment, London
May 24th – Introduction to ISM – Wednesday 24th May 7.30pm @ The Bread And Roses Pub, Clapham
May 27-28th – ISM Training Weekend – @ The Square, 21 Russell Sq, London, WC1.
May 30th – International Work in Palestine, discussion, 6.30pm, Cowley Club, 12 London Rd, Brighton

Canberra Times: “The Other Aussie Heros”

posted in the Canberra Times May 18th

Every Friday for the last fifteen months Palestinian farmers from the West Bank village of Bil’in and their Israeli and international supporters have marched out of the village to reach their lands on the other side of the “Separation Barrier” Israel is building to confiscate 500 acres of their farmland. When they get to within a hundred metres of the barrier, Israeli soldiers and border policemen have attacked them with clubs, rifle butts, tear gas and rubber coated metal bullets.

The large number of Israelis engaged in these demonstrations is a matter of considerable embarrassment for the Israeli government, which insists the barrier is merely a security measure, intended to protect Israel from Palestinian terrorism.

The Palestinians, their Israeli allies, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations, however, reject this claim, noting that only 10% of the 650km barrier is being built along Israel’s border while the rest reaches deep inside the West Bank to annex precious land and water resources which are being taken over by neighbouring Jewish settlements.

Last Friday ten Palestinians and two international protestors were injured in the protest, including Phil Reese, a Sydney man who was shot in the head by a rubber coated metal bullet while filming the demonstration.

The following day Mary Baxter, a 75 year old human rights worker from Melbourne, was pelted with stones to her head and back by a group of teenagers from the Israeli settlement of Tel Rumeida as she accompanied Palestinian children returning home from school in the West Bank town of Hebron.

Reese and Baxter are both volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – an organisation of international peace activists who travel to the Occupied Territories to help Palestinians resist occupation and dispossession through non-violent direct action.

Being an ISM volunteer is dangerous work. In 2003 an activist was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer and another was killed when he was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. Two other Australian activists have been wounded by live ammunition.

Although the Australian government was quick to denounce Hamas for not condemning last month’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, it has consistently refused to protest Israeli violence towards Palestinians and Australian peace activists.

This double standard is regrettable because if Hamas is to acquiesce to the international community’s demands that they “renounce violence”, it will have to be offered an alternative strategy for resisting Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While the militant Palestinian resistance can point to the success of the armed struggle in forcing Israel to withdraw its settlers from the Gaza Strip, no such
successes can be claimed by communities such as Bil’in.

Though for the past 16 months Hamas has scrupulously observed a unilateral Palestinian ceasefire arranged by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, its leaders are acutely aware that they owe their electoral success primarily to the Fateh Party’s disastrous strategy of renouncing violence in favour of the Oslo Peace Process which Israel used as cover to double the number of settlers in the Occupied Territories.

If Hamas is to meet Australian demands that it renounce violence, it is imperative that some form of peace dividend be offered to the Palestinians. At minimum this would mean calling upon Israel to cease confiscating Palestinian land and supporting the work of Australians like Reese and Baxter who daily risk life and limb to uphold international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people.

Encouraging Palestinian restraint, however, does not seem to be a priority in Australian politics. In his address to the Australian Parliament Tony Blair stated that the international community must redouble its efforts to find a solution to the conflict involving a secure state of Israel and a viable, independent Palestinian state. When Greens Senator Kerry Nettle proposed a motion endorsing his statement, government and opposition senators joined forces to defeat it.

According to a report by the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, Israel has created a regime of separation in the Occupied Territories “applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality.”The report concludes that: “This system is the only one of its kind in the world and is reminiscent of the distasteful regimes of the past, such as the apartheid regime of South Africa.”

In the 1980s the Australian government understood that the key to peace in South Africa was to support progressive forces in the country that were working to end apartheid.

Today Australian politicians seem to believe that peace in the Middle East can be separated from issues of occupation and human rights.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider this assumption?

Michael Shaik is a former International Solidarity Movement Coordinator and a member of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine.

BBC: “Villagers fight West Bank Barrier”

By Martin Patience
BBC News website, in Bilin

After prayers at Bilin’s mosque, male worshippers spill from the modest building and begin the short walk to the West Bank barrier running close to the village.

The demonstrations at Bilin have become a weekly Friday ritual

Every Friday for the last 15 months, members of the community have marched along the village’s winding tarmac road past the olive orchards and up a steep hill to where the barrier is protected by helmeted Israeli soldiers in full riot gear.
For the 1,700 villagers, the protest has become an article of faith.

According to Abdullah Abu Rahma, 35, the organiser of the weekly protest, the barrier annexes about 60% of the village’s land, cutting farmers off from their fields, making it almost impossible to make a living.
”The wall is a catastrophe for the village,” says the 35-year-old Arabic teacher. ”We must destroy the wall and we will protest until it falls.”

Tear Gas

Swelled by a number of Israeli and foreign peace activists, the weekly protest is the longest running demonstration against the barrier in the West Bank. Each week, the protesters are met by the Israeli troops and a face-off ensues.

Chanting slogans, the protestors clank stones on a waist-high yellow metal gate a few feet away from soldiers protected by three armoured military jeeps. The demonstrators say they want to access the village’s land on the other side of the barrier.

While billed as a peaceful demonstration, the protest normally ends in violence – with both sides accusing each other of provocation.

The Israeli army says the protesters specifically aim to provoke soldiers

On the Friday I attended the march, it was not clear which side started the violence. But within minutes, the protestors were running for cover from the rubber bullets and stinging tear gas.
Some teenagers, with slings, crouched behind rocks, before briefly standing up and hurling stones at the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the barrier.

The Israeli army only responds to protect the barrier or when stones are thrown at soldiers, says army spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal.
“The protestors are only interested in provoking the Israeli army,” he adds.

Farm Land

Two settlers from a nearby settlement standing on the Israeli side of the barrier, provoked a furious response from some of the protestors. ”It’s our land, it’s our land,” one man cried, as he ran up the hill to get closer to the settlers.
But for many Palestinians, the 685 km barrier, which annexes 8% of the West Bank and puts East Jerusalem on the Israeli side, amounts to a land grab of territory earmarked for a future Palestinian state.
The International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling in 2004 that the barrier breached international law where it is built on occupied territory and should be dismantled.
”All over the world people think that the Palestinians are terrorists,” says Rateb Abu Rahma, 40, a university lecturer. ”All we want is our rights.”

Walks of Life

In the last year, Bilin’s villagers have seen some successes. Represented by Tel Aviv lawyer, Michael Sfard, the residents have challenged the route of the barrier round their village. Their case will be heard by the Israeli High Court later in May.

They have also secured a temporary ban on a nearby settlement continuing its construction work on 750 new housing units. The villagers say the construction is taking place on their land.
By aligning the villagers with Israeli and foreign peace activists, many of the protestors believe that the success of the demonstration has been in its broad appeal.

“People turning up from all walks of life is the heart of this demonstration,” says Israeli Yuval Halperin, 26, a book editor from Tel Aviv.

For some of the protestors, the Bilin demonstration represents a new way of tackling the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Mansour Mansour, 29, believes that the protests at Bilin can be repeated successfully across the West Bank.

”Palestinians believe that ending the occupation is their right,” he says. ”But it is only when we start asserting our right that the occupation will end.”

The “Only Democracy in the Middle East”

By Raad

In the last week we had two decisions by the Supreme Court of the Zionist state which reveal how racist this regime is. The first one is the citizenship law which will affect thousands of Palestinian families on both sides of the Green Line and the second is the Bil’in court case.

Citizenship Law
No one (including me) would have believed that Israel would take such a crazy step as this until the last few months. There is no country in the western world that has taken such a step, even the countries where terror attacks have occured on their civilians within their borders. Isreal is the only country that uses terror attacks as an excuse for legislating an apartheid law. There is no one in the world who can ethically say that if there is someone from a racial or religious minority who took a violent action against a country’s citizens that the entire community should be collectively punished. However, this was the reason that Isreali secret services used in court, and their game they love to play talking of the security of Isreal suceeded at convincing the judges.

It is known, though, that the real issue they are concerned with is the demographic issue. The president of Supreme Court even noted that since 1993 there was just 16,000 applications submitted from Palestinians to unite families, suggesting that there is no large demographic danger. But no one mentions the reality behind this law, which is that the Israeli state is a Jewish state. There is no place for anyone who is not Jewish!

This is the only democracy in the Middle East who builds their constitution on racist principles .

However the Israeli Supreme Court wasn’t going to approve a law such as this, despite the support from the international mainstream community and their disgraceful silence, which made Israel feel supported even in such a racist step as this. The silence that the international community continues, especially after 58 years of occupation to the historical Palestine, encourages Israel to continue to refuse to take responsibility for the refugees and the massacres that happened at that time. They have fallen silent in forcing Israel to recognize the UN security council resolutions 194, 242 and 338. They have been turning away as Israel declared the “unification” of Jerusalem as a capital for Israel, formally annexing it, even though East Jerusalem is an occupied territory according to international law. To consolidate their occupation, Israel continues building settlements in the West Bank and finally the Wall, or what is so-called the “security fence”, with full Western support. All of these facts on the ground makes me not really surprised to see the Supreme Court in Israel approving one more racist law which is just one piece in a series of acts that aims to “evacuate” or “transfer” the local and the legal owners of the land from their lands by making their life and existence impossible.

An Israeli friend stated accurately, “We are living in the 21st century and we can’t do the same things that we did in the past to continue the transfer. There are more inelegant ways for that by making life impossible for people so they leave without terrifying them in the way the Haganah and other Jewish milita groups did during the so called ‘war of independence’ “.

Bil’in court case
After I talked about the citizenship law and its consequences it’s obvious that Israel will continue the big story of security .

Last Sunday May 14th , the Supreme Court in Jerusalem was discussing one more important issue – the wall case in Bil’in, a small village west of Ramallah in the West Bank. Fortunately there is no final decision yet, even after a discussion which continued untill 9:00 pm local time. From the discussion there was an important thing that was mentioned, which again amounted to more racism and discrimination under the name of security. The thing the judge said was that the reason for building the wall was to protect the Jewish citizens from terrorist attacks with no regards to if the wall is built on the green line or not and with no regard to the legal rights of the owners of the land. However, the wall in Bil’in like in many places is built to protect settlers, who according to international law have no right to be there since they “settle” in a land that is stolen by force from its legal owners.

Building the wall to protect Jewish citizens conceals a dangerous fact: Israel has started with its own unilateral plan. Its an introduction to building the wall around the main settlement blocks such as Ma’ale Adumim, Gush Azion, Alfe Menashe and Ariel. The plan calls for the settlement blocks to be annexed to Israel under the name of “security” and “protection”, again with no regards to their legal status. This will set a horrible precedent allowing for the building of the wall in any place in the West Bank for the same reasons. It’s obvious to all that this is one more way to force the people to leave their homes.

I don’t know how far they can go using these justifications, but I would like to point out that from the Palestinian side, I don’t think the Palestinians want any more hassles in their life. We know the meaning of being a refugee – living in another country as a foreigner. The people have decided that they aren’t going to leave Palestine again. On the other hand, the international community should wake up and take their responsibilities to guarantee human rights and the application of international law, and sanction Israel for making more racist laws that transfer Palestinians from their homes.

Bil’in Protest: Journalists Targeted, Many Injured

Hitham al-Khateeb, who was filming the demonstration, suffered a skull fracture from a tear gas canister

Today Friday May 19, 2006, the army escalated its violent tactics against non-violent protestors in Bil’in, leaving 26 people injured, including Hitham al-Khateeb, who was filming the demonstration, suffered a fracture in his skull from a tear gas canister to the head and is in the intensive care unit of Ramallah Governmental Hospital. Israeli soldiers often aim teargas canisters directly at demonstrators, a practice against the Israeli militaries regulations. The soldiers also regularly target people filming the demonstration.

Seven Palestinians were arrested; two Israelis and two internationals, all have been released.

The people of Bil’in, with international and Israeli peace activists, marched to the Apartheid Wall to protest the confiscation of their land by the Wall. Non-violent demonstrators carried a banner and held signs illustrating the connection between the villages that were destroyed in 1948 Nakba, and the villages that are being torn apart by the building of the Wall today.

Using a large carpet thrown over the fence, thirty protestors crossed the barbed wire that separates Bil’in villagers from their land and entered onto the patrol road. They attempted to exercise their right to enter their own land and sit on the road, but the Army and the Border Police immediately responded with sound grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets and beating. The protestors were forced to spread out, but continued to stand their ground for one hour despite many arrests and serious injuries.

They continued to fire tear gas and sound bombs at the crowd as they evacuated the patrol road and as they were leaving the area. And at 6pm the army continued to fire at people in the area, wounding Amer Hisham, 21, and Abnafez Abdel Karim, 15, with a rubber-coated steel bullet in the legs and back, who were also taken to the hospital in Ramallah.

The names of the 7 Palestinians that were taken to the hospital are: Hitham Al-Khateeb, Akram Khateeb, Ahmad Mohammad Hassan, Ratib Abu Rahme, Samer Burnat, Mohammad Monsour, Adeeb Abu Rahme. Others that were injured are: Mazen Ahmed Yasin, Mujahed Abdul Rahman Said, Jowad Amran Khateeb, Fuad Mohammad Samara, Jabber Muhammad Abu Rahme, and Nimer Abu Rahme.

Four children were injured, all 14 years old: Karasam Barakat Khateeb, Ali Omar Khateeb, Mohammad Fathi Abu Rahme, Salem Abdul Kareem Mansour.

The journalists that were injured are Eyad Hammad from AP, Musheer Karakrah from Ma’an News Network, and Abbas Almomani from AFP. The two internationals injured were Victor from Sweden and Allan from Scotland.

The Palestinians that were arrested were all released, and names are: Muhammad Khateeb, Abdul Fattah Burnat, Mujahed A’ashal, Muhammad Khaleel Abu Rahme, Basem Ahmad Aisa, Ahmad Zohad A’ashal, Naseer Samara. 5 Israelis and 2 internationals.