Tag: Bil’in

Anti-wall Protests: army violence in Bil`in, relative restraint in Walaja

By Ghassan Bannoura/John Smith
IMEMC

September 28, 2007

http://www.imemc.org/article/50679
http://www.imemc.org/article/50677

Video coverage Bil`in at http://mishtara.org/blog/?p=250

Nine injured in the weekly non violent protest at Bil`in

At the weekly non violent protest at the village of Bil`in, located near the central West Bank city of Ramallah, nine civilians were injured due to Israeli army attacks on the protest.

Villagers, Internationals and Israelis marched after conducting the Friday prayers in the village towards the wall which Israel is building on the stolen village land.

Regardless of the fact that the Israeli high court of Justice, at the beginning of the month, ruled that the section of the wall built in Bil`in is an illegal structure and should be removed. The Israeli army nevertheless attacked the civilian protesters with batons, sound bombs and tear gas injuring nine of them.

Among those injured were Mustafa Al Khatib, Abdullah Abu Rahmah and Mohammed Khalil.

==============================================================

Peaceful demonstration at al-Walaja village

One hundred Palestinian villagers, alongside Israeli and international supporters, on Friday conducted a non-violent protest at the construction site of the illegal Israeli Wall that is destroying the village lands of al-Walaja.

At Friday mid-day, the protestors gathered for prayers, shortly after which the demonstrators marched towards the wall`s construction site, holding flags and banners calling for the Wall to be torn down.

Israeli soldiers surrounded the demonstration, marching with it, but not intervening in protest`s progress.

Protestors remained at the site for one-and-a-half hours, while speeches were delivered by local organizers, shortly after which the demonstration peacefully dispersed.

Christian Science Monitor: Nonviolent protest gains in West Bank

By Joshua Mitnick

A Supreme Court decision in favor of one protesting village has inspired others.

from the September 24, 2007 edition

Al Walajeh, West Bank – “All those who love the prophet should lend a hand!”

Ten shouting Palestinians were pushing against one boulder, but the primitive Israeli roadblock cutting off the tiny Palestinian village from Bethlehem was not budging. Then, with the help of two giant crowbars, an Israel protester, and a Japanese backpacker, the group heaved the stone aside, opening the road for the first time in three years.

“Tomorrow they’ll bring a bulldozer and move it back,” sighed Sheerin Alaraj, a village resident and a demonstration organizer. “Then next week we’ll come back again to protest.”

Inspired by the experience of other Palestinian villages, the Al Walajeh demonstrators are part of a small but growing core of protesters combining civil disobedience with legal petitions to fight Israeli policies.

Earlier this month, the village of Bilin, which has held weekly protests since 2004, garnered widespread attention and praise in the Palestinian press when the Israeli Supreme Court ordered a part of the military’s separation barrier near Bilin to be dismantled. Increasingly, other Palestinian villages are following Bilin’s lead, though it remains to be seen whether this kernel of nonviolence will grow into a full-fledged movement.

“Before Bilin, people never had faith it would achieve anything, neither nonviolence, nor the legal system,” says Mohammed Dajani, a political science professor at Al Quds University. “Maybe this will be a response to the skeptics, that, ‘Look, it works.’ ”

Nonviolence means more attention

While Palestinian militants dominate international headlines through suicide bombings and firing rockets on Israeli towns, residents of Bilin and a handful of other tiny farming villages like Al Walajeh have eschewed the armed struggle. Instead, they have linked arms with Israeli peace activists and chained themselves to trees to delay Army bulldozers cutting a swath for an electronic fence severing the villagers from their land.

Though Palestinians glorify the armed militiamen and those killed in battle with Israel, protest leaders say the nonlethal tactics have one crucial advantage: it attracts Israeli and international peace activists, who in turn bring sympathetic media coverage.

The leaders sound like a Palestinian version of Martin Luther King Jr., and their voices have become more prominent in the ongoing debate about whether peaceful or military actions will win their statehood.

“We use nonviolence as a way of life…. We learned from many experiences: like India, Martin Luther [King], and South Africa,” says Samer Jabber, who oversees a network of activists in the villages surrounding Bethlehem.

Every Friday in Bilin for the past three years the protesters have faced tear gas, rubber bullets, and beatings that have caused hundreds of injuries. Demonstrators sometimes threw rocks, one of which caused a soldier to lose an eye. (While leaders say they’re against such violence, followers don’t always hold the line.)

“The belief in one’s rights is more important than anything else. If I am confident about my rights, nothing will make me despair,” says Iyad Burnat, a Bilin resident and one of the protest leaders. “When you resist an Israeli soldier by peaceful means, their weapons become irrelevant.”

The strategy paid off when the Supreme Court ruled that the current path of the fence around Bilin offered no security advantages. Villagers will now be able to reach their crops without having to pass through gates in the fence manned by soldiers.

In Al Walajeh, Ms. Alaraj says the protests would be meaningless without a challenge in the Israeli courts. Villagers fear that the construction of the separation wall – set to be more than 400 miles long total, affecting 92 Palestinian communities – will leave the hamlet completely surrounded.

Praise from the Palestinian press

Even though the Bilin ruling was not the first time the court ordered a portion of the barrier moved, it has resonated widely among Palestinians.

“It has become obvious that popular civil resistance has become the best way for national resistance from the occupation,” wrote Waleed Salem in an Al Quds newspaper op-ed.

The civil disobedience taps into Palestinian nostalgia for the first intifada in the late 1980s, marked by grass-roots participation and stone-throwing.The current uprising is led by a network of underground militias, most of which have ties to political parties.

A way to heal Palestinian rifts, too

Just three months after Palestinians watched Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip from the Fatah-run militias, nonviolent protest against Israel is being seen as a way to heal rifts among Palestinians.

“Armed struggle has a side effect on the occupied people. Palestinians start to use this tool against the occupation, but in the end they use it against themselves,” says Jabber. “Violence has become part of the culture. We realize that we have to reform.”

In 2002, an open letter by Palestinian intellectuals against the use of suicide bombing failed to trigger a change in the uprising. Now, the demonstrations draw, at best, several hundred protesters – possibly because the protests are taking place in poor and isolated villages.Last Friday, only several dozen came out to move the boulders in Al-Walajeh. Palestinians say that after seven years of daily conflict, people are exhausted. “It’s because of frustration,” says Alaraj. “There’s been real poverty in the last two years. And when you’re not eating, then you don’t think of anything else.”

The opening of the road, organizers hope, will encourage more people to join the protests. “If everyone moves forward toward that objective it will be most effective,” says Abdel Hajajreh, a demonstrator. “Don’t forget, Gandhi liberated an entire country.”

Znet: Bil’in will continue to struggle against the wall and settlements

by Mohammed Khatib
On September 4, after nearly three years of nonviolent protests by our village of Bil’in, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Israel’s wall here must be moved further west, returning 250 acres of our farmland. In Bil’in we celebrated, along with our Israeli and international supporters.

But Israel’s Supreme Court demonstrated both the power of nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation, and its limits. On September 5 the court rejected our petition to stop the construction of another Israeli settlement, Mattiyahu East, on our land even further to the west. Israel, with US support, appears determined to retain major West Bank settlement blocs, including one west of Bil’in, that carve the West Bank into bantustans.

Bil’in is a West Bank agricultural village with 1600 residents located just east of “the Green Line”, the pre-1967 border between the West Bank and Israel. In Bil’in, as in tens of Palestinian villages, Israel exploited security justifications to build a wall deep inside the West Bank and seize Palestinian land for illegal settlements. Israel trapped 60% of our land behind the wall, mostly olive groves that we depend on.

In December, 2004 when the Israeli army started bulldozing our land and uprooting olive trees to build the wall, we went to our fields to protest. We learned from other West Bank villages that nonviolently resisted the wall, and we studied Gandhi, King and Mandela.

We developed creative activities for our weekly protests. One Friday, activists locked themselves inside a cage, representing the wall’s impacts. Another time, we built a Palestinian “outpost” on our village’s land located behind the wall and next to an Israeli settlement, mimicking the Israeli strategy of establishing outposts to expand settlements.

Another Friday we handed the Israeli soldiers a letter saying, “Had you come here as guests, we would show you the trees that our grandfathers planted here, and the vegetables that we grow… There will never be security for any of us until Israelis respect our rights to this land.”

We hosted two international conferences on nonviolent resistance, and many Israeli and international activists responded to our call to join us in a “joint struggle.” Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners suffered patiently together as the soldiers met our nonviolent actions with teargas, rubber-coated steel bullets, and clubs. Over 800 activists were injured in 200 demonstrations. An Israeli attorney and a Bil’in resident both suffered permanent brain damage from rubber-coated steel bullets shot from close range. Another Palestinian lost sight in one eye. 49 Bil’in residents, including some protest leaders, were arrested. Some spent months in prison.

Our achievements are due to our persistence, the worldwide media attention we attracted, and the support we gained from committed Israeli activists.

We never expected much from the occupier’s courts. The Israeli official who planned the wall told the Washington Post last month that he lost only three legal challenges to the wall’s path, out of 120 appeals filed, this though the wall isolates 10% of the West Bank and was ruled illegal where it is built inside the West Bank by the International Court of Justice.

All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. Still, Israel’s Supreme Court legalized the settlement of Mattiyahu East on our land, even though Mattiyahu East appeared to violate even Israeli law because it lacked an approved building permit.

The rush to build followed President Bush’s April, 2004 letter to then Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon stating that, “new realities on the ground, including already existing population centers” make it unrealistic to expect Israel to withdraw completely to the Green Line. Israel responded by expanding “existing population centers”, building huge apartment complexes, like Mattiyahu East, for hundreds of thousands of people, and calling them neighborhoods in existing settlements.

These expanding settlement blocs fall conveniently on Israel’s side of the wall. Strategically situated, the settlement blocs divide the West Bank into four isolated regions. Therefore, their annexation to Israel will render any Palestinian state unviable. Yet annexation of the settlement blocs is reportedly central to new Israeli government peace proposals to Palestinian President Abbas.

We will continue to challenge these expanding settlements because they threaten the futures of Bil’in and the Palestinian people. And we will put our experience at the service of other communities struggling against the wall and settlements. From Bil’in, we call on Israeli and international activists to join us as we renew our joint struggle for freedom.

Mohammed Khatib is a leading member of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and the secretary of Bil’in’s Village Council.

Thanks to the (Cowardly) High Court

[ selected comments by the representative of the People’s Committee of Bil’in, Basel Mansour, to Israelis that participated in the demonstration in the village after the decision by the Israeli High Court ] FOr the Hebrew version click

Lovers of peace, friends of freedom and justice… our partners in the struggle and in the creation of this partial victory — I bless you in the name of our Palestinian people, in the name of the residents of Bil’in, that you came to know, and that came to know you, and that you stood by
their side ever since they began their opposition to the fence and the settlement that squats on a large part of their land. You came to us without considering the consequences — the Zionist occupational government attempts to implant the deceptive and distorted idea that the
Palestinians are your enemy and want to kill you. By way of this shared journey, we proved the opposite and together we demonstrated the truth –that Israelis can stand beside Palestinians and live with them in peace and security, and even struggle with them against injustice and
occupation, on the fundamental basis that this occupation is an enemy of humanity.

You succeeded in overcoming the army’s roadblocks in order to arrive here through a difficult mountainous path and were vulnerable to its shooting attacks. In this way many of you were wounded by bullets that originated from the unmerciful occupation army — and not from Palestinians, that the occupation attempts to distort and portray as a vicious animal that wants
to devour Israelis or throw them into the sea.

You were braver than your fearful government. You participated in the struggle actively and in every way — morally, physically, in the courts and in the media. In the battlefield, you were on the frontlines, calling with us for freedom, in your belief that only the manifestation of justice
will guarantee the creation of peace and security for our two peoples, and not the building of walls and the expanding of weapons warehouses.

You have been real partners — awake with us late at night, in confronting the almost daily invasions of village homes by the army; together with us you opposed many attempts to arrest, and you yourselves were injured and arrested — and you conveyed the true picture to the Israeli society. You disputed the positions of the government and the army in every arena —
until the entire world was a witness to this special connection that was created on the land of Bil’in, that united the conversation and the meeting between cultures, creeds and religions. A connection like this must be victorious, history must immortalize it.

Honorable audience, one of the biggest difficulties in this campaign was how to organize and manage the connection with the Israelis in solidarity, after our Palestinians people have always suffered injustice from the Zionist occupation. This was done while Palestinians aspire to lives of
freedom, respect, and culture, and the mobilization of the most amount of Israelis possible and international representatives to stand up to the injustice. Once the Israelis in solidarity understood all of this, they became dedicated to the work and became real warriors that earned the trust of all. They contributed much by revealing the true face of the occupation — its tactics, its lies and its organized terror against Palestinians — in opposition to those that attempt to normalize and whitewash the occupation.

These people were always willing to take upon itself whatever was asked of it by the People’s Committee, and more than this, often took the initiative, offering ideas and suggestions. In this way, they demonstrated that they were true fighters — not only fans or friends, or cogs in the machine of the occupation. They are heroes in the non-violent campaign of the brave.

Honorable audience, recently a decision was taken by the body called the Israeli High Court of Justice, to cancel sections of the fence in Bil’in and to return a small amount of the stolen lands. This decision was taken after a long campaign with the participation of peace workers from every land, and the shooting injuries of almost a thousand demonstrators, in addition to tens of arrests and many more assaults.

We went to this occupational court not out of faith in it, but to prove that these courts are nothing but tools of the occupation. They are like a soldier that shoots you in the head and kills you, and then wraps your head in a white cloth, to be portrayed as a first aid worker. In its
decision, this court proved to be cowardly and causes injustice, and we turn your attention to the fact that our campaign was against the principle of the wall and not opposition to its route.

Therefore we will continue in our struggle, until the occupational government destroys the wall and the settlements in all of Palestine, and we will build together, with our bodies, real bridges of love and security and peace, in order to conquer the wall and we will crush all of the plans
of the occupation until we reach the ocean that knows no border — and on its safe shores, we will sing the song of freedom and peace, together — far from the injustices of the occupation and its roadblocks and barriers.

Blessings and respect to all of the Israelis, each and every one individually, that believe in peace and our legitimate rights, and welcome to Bil’in.

Tear Gas and Sound Grenades replaced with Music and Dancing: Bilin Celebrates…


To view the CNN report on the BIl’in victory celebration see: www.americanhummus.com

On Friday, September 7th, the villagers of Bil’in were joined by international and Israeli comrades. Normally they come together every Friday to express their outrage of the unacceptable Apartheid Wall. Normally the day is filled with military violence, tear gas, sound bombs, and billy clubs are common. Once the military begins to fire gas into the crowds, the non-violent protesters tend to back off eventually leaving only the Palestinian children throwing rocks in anger. A mild response in comparison to the rubber coated steel bullets used against them.

This day was different, one can say it was not a demonstration, but a celebration. There was still a reason to demonstrate, the Israeli Occupation Forces were still standing en masse behind the gate, guns ready and cameras recording. The wall was still there and though due to be moved, it will still be re-located onto Palestinian land, blocking the area to the illegal Matityahu East settlement, also on Palestinian land. There is also the knowledge that though this is a clear victory, it is also a rare victory. Around 120 cases have been brought to court about the Apartheid Wall and the its devastating effects on Palestinian land, water, economy, and culture, but only four have not been rejected.

But this was a victory, and a day to be victorious. Of the now four cases of success in Israeli courts, three of them have been fought with joint non-violent struggle. Activists, demonstrators and participants gathered at the International House in Bilin where baklava, a traditional Palestinian sweet, was served to the guests passing through. At the entrance was an arrangement created out of tear gas canisters collected over the many demonstrations laid out to acknowledge the brutality that has been faced by the village and the demonstrators over the three years it has been going on.

The villagers and their supporters marched towards the wall today, committed to non-violence, stopping people before the gate and telling them not to speak, provoke, or argue with the soldiers. This was not a day to run from tear gas, but to speak, listen, and dance freely.

During the celebrations speeches were given, songs sung and music and dancing ensued. In the midst of this, the appointed Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad made an appearance, undertaking a speech and further walking up to the gate where Israelis held their position on the other side.

The celebration lasted around two hours, at the end of which a couple of children threw a few stones. The organizers, keen to ensure the demonstration would not escalate into aggression and violence, quickly called off the celebrations and told everyone to return to the village. They stopped the children they could while the army gathered to pass through the gate once more into the village land. Only a few stones were thrown and the villagers put a stop to it as quickly as they could. Celebrations continued back at the village.