11 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
A 55 year old Palestinian man was taken to hospital from Nabi Saleh due to an injury from a rubber coated steel bullet. After two hours of demonstrating the Israeli Occupation Forces invaded Nabi Saleh and arrested one Palestinian, 36 year old Bilal Tamimi, who works for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.
Nabi Saleh tends to its injured – Click here for more images
The demonstration in Nabi Saleh began with the commemoration of Yassir Arafats death seven years ago. A big poster with Arafat was carried in the front of the demonstration and the chanting honored the former leader of Palestine. When the demonstrators reached the outskirts of the village they were met by a truck shooting skunk water while the Israeli Occupation forces shot gas directly at the demonstrators.
After half an hour the Occupation Forces withdrew to the entrance of the village, where they closed the entrance gate with the intention of making the demonstrators reach the open field in front of the military. The demonstrators decided to change direction instead of letting the Occupation Forces decide where the villagers should demonstrate. They went to the direction of the water spring near the illegal Halamish (Neve Zuf) settlement.The Occupation Forces met the demonstrators with a significant amount of gas and rubber coated steel bullets. One man from Nabi Saleh was shot at directly from a distance of 30 meters in his face with a rubber coated steel bullet and was carried to the village. While he was being carried to the village the Occupation Forces came towards the injured and the young boys who carried him, fleeing as the women and internationals carried the injured man to the village. The 55 year old man was taken to the hospital and got three stitches over the right eye and a broken nose. Several young boys were injured at the same time with rubber coated steel bullets and by teargas canisters.
Afterwards the Occupation Forces invaded Nabi Saleh and arrested Bilal Tamimi, a 55 old Palestinian who works for B’Tselem. They arrested him while he was documenting the crimes of the Occupation Forces in his village. An Israeli Btselem worker who also participated in the demonstration said that B’Tselem assumed that Bilal was taken to the nearby military camp in the illegal Halamish (Neve Zuf) settlement, located opposite of Nabi Saleh. He was released later in the evening.
The Occupation Forces occupied two houses in Nabi Saleh and placed the skunk water truck and three jeeps at the crossroad in the village, leaving the demonstrators hiding for a couple of hours in order to avoid arrest and getting their houses sprayed with the skunk water. Several times the military tried making surprise attacks to arrest demonstrators but they did not succeed. The demonstration ended at sunset, greeting the military jeeps with a rain of stones when they finally left the village.
Aida Gerard is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name changed).
9 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
The demonstrations in Nabi Saleh started the 21 of November 2009, after the illegal settlement of Halamish expanded, costing locals in land and their source of water for home and agricultural use, a spring declared holy by the settlers.
Since the beginning of the demonstrations the village faced outstanding repression from the army and the Israeli government, who declared 10 house demolition orders. The Israeli army tried to negotiate with or blackmail members of the village, promising to withhold the demolition orders if they stop the demonstrations.
More then 220 people have been injured since the beginning of their peaceful resistance to illegal Israeli occupation of their land. Some of the injured include an 11 year old boy who was shot with a rubber coated steel bullet in his head and is still paralyzed. Another example is man who was hit by a high velocity tear gas canister, illegal because unlike usual tear-gas canisters, it is made to be capable of breaking through walls, can fly long distances without sound, does not emit a smoke tail, and has a propeller to accelerate the weapon mid-air.
At the moment there are around 90 Nabi Saleh locals still held in Israeli jails.
We met Manal Tamimi, one of the most active women in the village, who made the point that their resistance is not just for her children in Nabi Saleh, but it is a resistance that involves all Palestine.
In this featured interview with ISM, Tamimi stated, “You can plan things for maximum 10 minutes, I’m not able to decide in which school to send my kids, you can’t decide anything about the future. Children shouldn’t live in fear, they shouldn’t pay this price.”
26 July 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
At 10 a.m. we arrived at Nabi Saleh to interview the neighbors about what had happened the night before. We found out on the internet that something was going on, thanks to Tamimi Press, a Facebook page created by a young designer who lives in the village. Walking down the main road our eyes and nose got irritated. We could still breathe the tear gas shot by Israel’s occupation forces throughout the night.
According to the people we interview this is constant; what happened last night is nothing exceptional. The neighbors told us as follows:
Around 6 p.m. a group of settlers tried to enter the village of Nabi Saleh. Seemingly, the reason was a fire started on the lands at the border of the the illegal settlement of Halamish. To be precise the fire was sparked on the side of the new extension where settlers are just now occupying with prefabricated units.
For a couple of hours the youngsters from the village tried to avoid entering through the main street, until the army came. This resulted in various neighborhood vehicles being damaged by the stones thrown by the settlers. At that point, soldiers were blocking the roads.
At 8.30 p.m. more than 50 soldiers entered the village and started shooting tear gas and sound bombs. Then an officer started to shoot real bullets shouting at his subordinates to do the same.
At that moment the village was completely full of gas and 3 people had been hurt by the impact and the burns from the bullets. Among them were two women from the same family, whose house had been shot at directly.
Around midnight the settlers came back to try and burn down the olive trees planted at the entrance of the village, yet the young Palestinians were able to stop them. The settlers marched away, protected by the army.
Nobody was arrested that night. The neighbors gave us a summary of the situation in Nabi Saleh since the protests began. Until now about 75 people out of its 500 residents have been arrested, constituting one sixth of the village. 130 people have been hurt on different levels and right now 21 youngsters are in jail, among them children between 10 and 14 years old.
The culminating moment in this village’s resistance against the theft of its land and water was precisely on December 9 2009 when the villagers decided to get organized against the expansion of the Halamish settlement, also known as Neve Tzuf. This settlement dates officially back to 1977, when various settlers occupied a fortress left by the British Mandate, abandoned since 1940.
Since then, the owners of the lands have suffered a systematic plunder because of the various expansions of the settlement, and they have tried to get the lands back through legal action. They got the recognition of the Supreme Court in 2008, meaning that the settlers cannot trespass the land and the army has to stop them from trespassing. Subsequently the army declared the land military zone, turning the ruling into useless paper.
Another claim is about water. It is controlled by the Israeli firm Mekorot and the principal line passes close to the Halamish settlement. The settlers totally control the supply through a valve situated in the illegal colony.
Since protests have begun, there has been a change in the occupation forces protecting the settlers, now there are special riot police squads settled in the colony and in a base located on its side.
The repression constantly suffered by the villagers is very violent, that’s why the presence of international is considered especially necessary to show in our countries what is happening in Nabi Saleh and in Palesine in general.
When I met Bassem Tamimi at his home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh this January, his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, signs of the innumerable sleepless nights he had spent waiting for Israeli soldiers to take him to prison. As soon as two children were seized from the village in the middle of the night and subjected to harsh interrogations that yielded an unbelievable array of “confessions,” the 44-year-old Tamimi’s arrest became inevitable. On 25 March, the army finally came, dragging him away to Ofer military prison, a Guantanamo-like West Bank facility where he had previously been held for a 12-month term for the vaguely defined crime of “incitement.” His trial before a military court that convicts more than 99 percent of Palestinians brought before it is scheduled to begin on 8 May.
Like nearly all of his neighbors, Tamimi has spent extended time in Israeli detention facilities and endured brutal treatment there. In 1993, he was arrested on suspicion of having murdered an Israeli settler in Beit El. Tamimi was severely tortured for weeks by the Israeli Shin Bet in order to extract a confession from him. Tamimi said that during the torture he was dropped from a high ceiling onto a concrete floor and woke up a week later in an Israeli hospital. In the end, he was cleared of all charges.
With his wife, Nariman, and his brother, Naji, Tamimi has been at the center of Nabi Saleh’s popular resistance against the occupation since its inception in 2009. The village’s unarmed struggle has brought hundreds of Israelis and international activists to participate each Friday in boisterous and theatrical demonstrations that invariably encounter harsh Israeli violence, including the use of live ammunition against children. While other villages involved in the popular struggle have seen their ranks winnowed out by a harsh regime of repression and imprisonment, Nabi Saleh’s protests continue unabated, irking the army and frustrating the settlers of Halamish, who intend to expand their illegal colony further onto Nabi Saleh’s land.
Tamimi and I spoke amid the din of a stream of visitors parading in and out of his living room, from international activists living in the village to local children to a group of adolescent boys from the nearby town of Qurawa, who told me they came to spend time with Tamimi and his family “because this is what the Palestinian struggle is about.” Tamimi is a high school teacher in Ramallah and his professorial nature is immediately apparent. As soon as I arrived at his front door for what I thought would be a casual visit, he sat me down for an hour-long lesson on the history, attitudes and strategy that inform the brand of popular struggle he and his neighbors had devised during weekly meetings at the village cultural center.
Our discussion stretched from the origins of Nabi Saleh’s resistance in 1967 to the Oslo Accords, when the village was sectioned into two administrative areas (Areas B and C), leaving all residents of the Israeli-controlled portion (Area C) vulnerable to home demolition and arbitrary arrests. Tamimi insisted to me that Nabi Saleh’s residents are not only campaigning to halt the expropriation of their land, they seek to spread the unarmed revolt across all of occupied Palestine. “The reason the army wants to break our model [of resistance] is because we are offering the basis for the third intifada,” Tamimi said.
Max Blumenthal: There are rumors that the Israeli civilian administration will demolish your home if you continue the popular resistance. Is there any truth to that and on what grounds can they carry out the demolition?
Bassem Tamimi: My house was built in 1964 when this area was controlled by Jordan. Back then it was easy for me to get a permit to renovate. Now when I want to add a second level to the house for my family of course I can’t get a permit from the Israelis so I am forbidden to build. In this way they are forcing the next generation of our village to move to Area B in the center of the village. Their goal is to carry out a form of indirect transfer that will make Nabi Saleh into a refugee camp in the near future. The village will then be nothing more than a hotel that provides workers for the Palestinian Authority, maybe with no school and definitely with no relation to our land, since we will be forced off of all the parts we can farm. In the future, Area C will be empty and all of us who live there will have to move to places like Birzeit which are located in Area A.
I wanted to build a wall around my garden and I didn’t do it. The reason I didn’t was that it would have only been demolished since I am not able to get a permit. I didn’t want to risk them demolishing my house. All the new houses built after Oslo were in Area B but we have not been able to build a single new house in Area C.
MB: How has the expansion of the nearby illegal Jewish settlement Halamish influenced the popular resistance in Nabi Saleh?
BT: In 1976, the settlers came to an old British military camp on our land. The next year they built a settlement called Halamish. I asked one of them what right he had to the land. He told me his right was in the Bible. The Labor government blocked construction of the settlement, but a year later when Menachem Begin and Likud were elected, they allowed it to go ahead. During the second intifada, the army made the whole area around our village a closed military zone. This allowed Halamish to expand even more onto our land. Then in 2008 the army demolished the second fence around our village, another step for more expansion. So we see the steps they are taking to push us out of Area C and off our land.
Our problem is not just with the settlement of Halamish. Our problem is the whole occupation. The settlement is merely a face of the occupation. In Bilin and Nilin they set specific goals like moving the separation fence to the green line [Israel’s internationally-recognized armistice line with the occupied West Bank]. That is a problem. Our only goal is to end the occupation. So if the American consul came to us and said, “I am Superwoman; I can immediately remove Halamish,” I would say, “Fine, but we want to end the whole occupation.”
MB: When did Nabi Saleh choose to wage an unarmed popular struggle and why?
BT: This village has a long history of resistance. It is part our culture. We have had 18 martyrs since 1967. Most of our youth are taken away to prison. I have been arrested ten times and placed under administrative detention.
We have experience in military resistance but we decided the best way to resist was nonviolent. We want to build a model that looks like the first intifada, an alternative to military resistance. Our village knows exactly what to do because we were involved in the intifada. And the reason the army wants to break our model is because we are offering the basis for the third intifada.
For my whole life most of the Israelis I met were soldiers and interrogators. But when we started the popular resistance in 2009 I began to see that there were some Israelis who had removed the occupation from their minds. Like Jonathan [Pollack], who was the main person to bring Israelis and internationals here in the beginning. So we became friends.
The occupation is continuous in Israeli society and this is why they lose — because they try to force us to accept them as an occupier, and that will never happen. We don’t have any problem with Jewish people. Our problem is with Zionism. We don’t hate them on the other side; we simply demand that they end the occupation of their minds. The separation between us is between different ways of thinking, not between land. If we change our ways of thought and remove the mentality of occupation from our minds — not just from the land — we can live together and build a paradise.
MB: Your demonstrations have been criticized by outsiders because the throw stones at the soldiers. Meanwhile, the Israeli army claims stone-throwing is an armed attack or a form of violence so the popular resistance is not really nonviolent. What do you make of these claims?
BT: We are building the popular struggle from our culture and our history. Only after we build an authentic struggle do we begin to debate our tactics. And throwing stones is a part of our culture. Historically we threw stones when something frightened us like a snake or a bear. Now, when a soldier comes into our village and shoots tear gas we won’t just sit there like a victim. They are protected from live bullets so we’re clearly not trying to take a life. With stones we are simply saying, “We don’t accept you here as an occupier. We don’t welcome you as a conqueror.”
MB: What is your relationship with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority like?
BT: We had an intifada based on popular struggle but the Oslo accords crushed it. Now the people are tired after the second intifada was crushed. So Fatah talks and talks but they can’t manage to bring [the popular struggle] across the West Bank. Fayyad wants to come here and be seen and use our struggle as a theater to have his picture taken. We know that Fatah could bring thousands of people here but they don’t want to. They don’t order their members to join the struggle. We want to ask them to make popular struggle everywhere. We do all that we can but without them, we can only do so much.
MB: Do you see any role for the peace process in ending the occupation?
BT: In thirty years the Europeans and the United States paid 5 billion dollars for normalization projects but they give us no steps towards a solution. If they want to do something to stop the occupation they should stop these initiatives that put people up in five star hotels to do dialogue. It’s not common sense! And all these academics who come here to study us and then go and write about how throwing stones is violent — that means nothing to us! Popular resistance is a way of life that means being close to the ground. I’ve been in the dialogue workshops and they are a complete waste of money. Both sides are suffering under the occupation but in a different way. [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit was captured but who sent him to occupy and kill? The normalization initiatives never address questions like this.
MB: One of the key differences between the demonstrations in Nabi Saleh and in a place like Nilin is the role of women. Every time I come here on a Friday the women are at the front of the protest while in Nilin they are not always that visible. Is this deliberate?
BT: From the beginning of our struggle the Israelis targeted the women of our village. For example, my wife, Nariman, was arrested and jailed for ten days. The army targets the women here because they know our culture; they know that we see women as 50 percent of our struggle and no less. Women [raise] our children. Women can convince people more easily than men. When our men see the women being brave, they want to be more brave. Women are in the center of our struggle because we believe women are more important than men. It’s that simple.
MB: What do you think army’s long-term objective is?
BT: The army is determined to push us toward violent resistance. They realize that the popular resistance we are waging with Israelis and internationals from the outside, they can’t use their tanks and bombs. And this way of struggling gives us a good reputation. Suicide bombing was a big mistake because it allowed Israel to say we are terrorists and then to use that label to force us from our land. We know they want a land without people — they only want the land and the water — so our destiny is to resist. They give us no other choice.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author working in Israel-Palestine. His articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al-Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute. His book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller.
Demonstrators begin marching in An Nabi SalehThis past Friday, May 14, the town of An Nabi Saleh held its weekly demonstration. Overly aggressive Israeli military tactics started a colossal brushfire, which reaped viable farmland. The weekly demonstration confronts the illegal expansion of Halamish settlement onto village land. Great local support brought out over 100 Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals.
The overwhelming drive and enthusiasm for justice rang through megaphones as chants and arms raised in pride as the demonstration moved down the valley. Israeli soldiers began to move forward from highway 465, and the peaceful demonstration soon got pushed back into the village as the Israeli military surrounded it on three sides. The use of excessive amounts of tear gas, percussion grenades, and rubber-coated steel bullets pushed villagers into a dangerously blind situation. Tear gas fired illegally from An Nabi Saleh’s hilltop ridge downhill was aimed directly at village demonstrators. Small brush fires started by tear gas canisters were fanned by the wind and engulfed the land in a massive brushfire.
As villagers retreated, soldiers chased demonstrators with tied attack dogs. Nobody was caught or injured from this unusually violent tactic. Tear gas rained down into the narrow streets of An Nabi Saleh, smoking out residents, causing great amounts of gas inhalation and setting fire to the private plots of local land owners. After many hours of holding back the Israeli military from invading the village, burnt fields smoldered and soldiers retreated while villagers dispersed with heads held high.
Tear gas canisters caused extensive brushfires in An Nabi SalehTwo Israeli activists were detained during the demonstration, one of whom was dragged down the road and then beaten in the police car while in custody.
The hilltop village of An Nabi Saleh has a population of approximately 500 residents and is located 30 kilometers northeast of Ramallah along highway 465. Today and every Friday since January 2010, around 100 un-armed demonstrators leave the village center in an attempt to reach a spring which borders land confiscated by Israeli settlers. The District Coordination Office has confirmed the spring is on Palestinian land, but nearly a kilometer before reaching the spring, the demonstration is routinely met with dozens of soldiers armed with M16 assault rifles, tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and percussion grenades.
The demonstrations protest Israel’s apartheid, which has manifested itself in An Nabi Saleh through land confiscation. The illegal Halamish (Neve Zuf) settlement, located opposite An Nabi Saleh, has illegally seized nearly of half of the village’s valuable agricultural land. In January 2010, hundreds of the village residents’ olive trees were uprooted by settlers. Conflict between the settlement and villagers reawakened due to the settlers’ attempt to re-annex An Nabi Saleh land despite an Israeli court decision in December 2009 that awarded the property rights of the land to An Nabi Saleh residents. The confiscated land of An Nabi Saleh is located on the Hallamish side of Highway 465 and is just one of many expansions of the illegal settlement since its establishment in 1977.
