On Friday the 25th of April at 12.30 pm the weekly prayer demonstration was carried out in Ni’lin. Approximately 100 Ni’lin residents, accompanied by international and Israeli solidarity activists took part in the demonstration. The Israeli army was already present at the usual prayer site before residents arrived. During the demonstration, Israeli forces shot tar gas canisters directly at protesters, causing four to be injured including one who was shot with a canister in the head. Another 22 were heavily tear-gassed and required medical attention. Rubber coated steel bullets and sound bombs were also used by the army, causing one demonstrator to be shot with a rubber coated steel bullet.
After the prayer, demonstrators were prevented from entering the olive fields by the army. A military incursion into the village caused several residents to throw stones in response. Half of the demonstrators remained inside the village and another half proceeded to the construction site of the Apartheid Wall. On the other side of the construction site, next to the checkpoint between Ni’lin and Tel Aviv, settlers living on Ni’lin’s confiscated land gathered. There was no confrontation between the two groups.
After approximately 30 minutes the demonstrators headed back to the village where the army wear shooting teargas at the protesters in the main street of Ni’lin. At around two o’clock one boy was shot with a teargas canister directly at his head while standing in the main street of the village and had to be taken by the ambulance to the local clinic. He was shot just above the right eye and had to be stitched with 10 stitches. The demonstration moved from the main street up to the clinic.
At around four o’clock the army entered the village main street with one hummer and a jeep firing at the demonstrators through the backdoor of the jeep. The demonstration ended up at the entrance of the village and while the protesters moved back to their homes three Palestinians wear detained at the entrance while coming back from Ramallah. The protest ended at 5.00 pm.
The people of Ni’lin have been demonstrating against the illegal Apartheid Wall since May 2008 that will annex 23 hectares of agricultural land from the village. In addition to the wall two tunnels that are planned as the only entrances in and out of Ni’lin will annex 2 hectares. 432 hectares of farming land have already been annexed by the Israeli state since 1948 leaving Ni’lin with only 23 hectares of land including the land the houses are build on. When the Apartheid Wall is completed it will completely encircle the village together with two roads that can only be used by Israelis. Thesw constructions turn Ni’lin into a small enclave closed off from the rest of the West Bank.
Palestinians and international protesters try to escape from teargas shot by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank village of Bil’in. Photograph: Atef Safadi/EPA
27 April 2009
It began calmly enough with a march down the high street after midday prayers at the mosque. Palestinian villagers were surrounded by dozens of foreigners singing and waving flags. They turned and headed out to the olive-tree fields and up towards the broad path of Israel’s West Bank barrier. There, behind a concrete hilltop bunker, the Israeli soldiers looked down on them.
The crowd approached the barrier, still singing. One man flew a paper kite shaped as a plane. “This land is a closed military zone,” an Israeli soldier shouted in flawless Arabic over a loudspeaker. “You are not allowed near the wall.” Then the soldiers fired a barrage of teargas.
It has been like this every Friday in the village of Bil’in for more than four years – the most persistent popular demonstration against Israel’s vast steel and concrete barrier. It is a protest founded on non-violence that is spreading to other West Bank villages. But it has become increasingly dangerous.
On April 17, on the hillside at Bil’in, a Palestinian named Basem Abu Rahmeh, 31, was shot with a high-velocity Israeli teargas canister that sliced a hole into his chest, caused massive internal bleeding and quickly killed him. Video footage shot by another demonstrator shows he was unarmed, many metres from the barrier and posing no threat to the soldiers.
The Israeli military said it faced a “violent and illegal riot” and is investigating. On Friday the demonstrators at Bil’in wore Rameh’s image on T-shirts and carried it on posters.
Last month another demonstrator, an American named Tristan Anderson, 38, was hit in the head by an identical high-velocity teargas canister in a protest against the barrier at the nearby village of Na’alin. He was severely injured, losing the sight in his right eye and suffering brain damage. “To shoot peaceful demonstrators is really horrifying to us,” said his mother, Nancy.
Friday’s demonstration lasted around three hours. The crowd repeatedly surged towards the fence, then retreated under clouds of teargas. The military sounded a constant, high-pitched siren, interspersed with warnings in Arabic and Hebrew: “Go back. You with the flag, go back” and, incongruously, in English: “You are entering a naval vessel exclusion zone. Reverse course immediately.”
The Bil’in demonstration was always intended to be non-violent, although on Friday, as is often the case, there were half a dozen younger, angrier men lobbing stones at the soldiers with slingshots. The Israeli military, for its part, fires teargas, stun grenades, rubber-coated bullets and sometimes live ammunition at the crowd.
There have long been Palestinian advocates of non-violence, but they were drowned out by the militancy of the second intifada, the uprising that began in late 2000 and erupted into waves of appalling suicide bombings.
Eyad Burnat, 36, has spent long hours in discussions with the young men of Bil’in, a small village of fewer than 2,000, convincing them of the merits of “civil grassroots resistance”.
“Of course it gets more difficult when someone is killed,” said Burnat, who heads the demonstration. “But we’ve faced these problems in the past. We’ve had more than 60 people arrested and still they go back to non-violence. We’ve made a strategic decision.”
Some, like the moderate Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti, hope this might be the start of a broader movement throughout Palestinian society. “It is a spark that is spreading,” he said in Bil’in. “It gives an alternative to the useless negotiations and to those who say only violence can help.”
But it is not so much that all the young men of the village are converted to the peaceful cause, rather that they respect and follow their elders. “I personally don’t believe in non-violent resistance,” said Nayef al-Khatib, 21, an accountancy student. “They’ve taken our land by force so we should take it back from them by force.”
The barrier at Bil’in cuts off the village from more than half its agricultural land and has allowed the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements, including the vast, ultra-Orthodox settlement of Modiin Illit, even though all settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.
The international court of justice said in a 2004 advisory opinion that the barrier was illegal where it crossed into the West Bank, and even Israel’s supreme court ruled nearly two years ago that the route at Bil’in did not conform to any “security-military reasons” and must be changed. But it has not been moved.
Like most of the men in the village, Nayef al-Khatib has spent time in jail. He was arrested aged 17 for demonstrating and spent a year behind bars, taking his final year of high school from his prison cell. That jail term means he cannot now obtain a permit to travel to Jerusalem or across to Jordan and is often held for hours at Israeli military checkpoints inside the West Bank. “But it was an honour for me. Now I’m like the older men,” he said.
Some of those older men are influential. Ahmad al-Khatib, 32, was once a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a prominent militant group, and was jailed for a year for transporting weapons. Now he is committed to non-violence, even objecting to the stone throwers.
“I don’t apologise for what I did, but I’m not going back to it,” he said. “We are an occupied nation according to international law and we have the right to resist, though that doesn’t mean I support suicide bombers. But I don’t want to resist all my life.”
He argues that a non-violent strategy brings fewer Palestinian casualties. “I have no problem dying to get back my land, but I’d say to hell with my land if it just brought back our martyr who died last week. The life of a human being is more important than the land itself.”
Often the most sensitive issue for the villagers has not been whether to take up arms, but whether to accept in their midst so many foreigners, and in particular so many Israeli demonstrators. Ahmad al-Khatib said it was the “most disputed question” and that many feared the Israelis were spying on them until they saw they, too, were being injured and arrested.
One of the first Israelis to join the Bil’in protest in its earliest days was Jonathan Pollack, 27, an activist and member of Anarchists Against the Wall who lives in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv. Although they warmly welcome him now, it was tense at first. “I’m still not one of their own and I don’t pretend to be,” he said.
Unlike most other joint peace initiatives, in this case the Israelis are in the minority and in the background. “I think it is very important that the struggle is Palestinian-led and that the colonial power relations are knowingly reversed,” said Pollack.
We Palestinians are often asked where the Palestinian Gandhi is and urged to adopt nonviolent methods in our struggle for freedom from Israeli military rule. On April 18, an Israeli soldier killed my good friend Bassem Abu Rahme at a nonviolent demonstration against Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land. Bassem was one of many Palestinian Gandhis.
One month prior, at another demonstration against land confiscation, Israeli soldiers fired a tear-gas canister at the head of nonviolent American peace activist Tristan Anderson from California. Tristan underwent surgery to remove part of his frontal lobe and is still lying unconscious in an Israeli hospital. In 2003, the Israeli military plowed down American peace activist Rachel Corrie with a Caterpillar bulldozer as she tried to protect a civilian home from demolition in Gaza. Shortly thereafter, an Israeli sniper shot British peace activist Tom Hurndall as he rescued Palestinian children from Israeli gunfire. He lay in a coma for nine months before he died.
Despite the killing of these unarmed civilians and documented evidence of systematic human-rights abuses, the U.S. continues to supply Israel with approximately $3 billion in military aid annually, allowing Israel to continue abusing Palestinians and preventing any meaningful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The Israeli government orders the confiscation of Palestinian land for one of two main purposes: to build or expand illegal colonies or to construct the Wall that the International Court of Justice ruled illegal in 2004. In the case of Bassem’s village of Bil’in, even the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the Israeli government to change the route of the Wall, though Israel has yet to comply. Consequently, Palestinian farmers cannot reach their crops and they are devastated economically. Israel’s policy is intended to force Palestinians to give up and leave in order to survive.
When village residents gather weekly to protest, they use various creative methods of nonviolent resistance, including carrying mirrors up to the soldiers to show them “the face of occupation” or dressing as various politicians and wearing blindfolds to symbolize the world’s blind eye to their struggle. The Israeli military meets them and their Israeli and international supporters with tear gas, grenades, and bullets.
Eyewitness accounts and a YouTube video of Bassem’s killing attest to the fact that Bassem was not engaged in any kind of violent action when a soldier decided to fire a high-velocity tear gas canister — designed to be shot in the air or from a great distance — directly at his chest, fatally wounding him. In fact, just before he was shot, Bassem is heard calling to soldiers to stop shooting as a woman had been injured. Far too often, Israel tries to silence dissent by using disproportionate and sometimes lethal force against demonstrators.
In February, I led a delegation of American lawyers to the Gaza Strip to investigate Israel’s conduct in its 22-day military offensive during which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed and more than 5,300 injured, most of them civilians — a rate of more than 60 killed per day. We found disturbing evidence of willful killing of civilians, wanton damage to civilian property and deliberate blocking of humanitarian aid. These are violations of international law that may constitute war crimes. During the offensive, Israel attempted to avert international outrage by refusing to let foreign journalists enter Gaza.
The United Nations has appointed a team of experts, led by a renowned human-rights advocate — Richard Goldstone, a Jewish, South African judge — to investigate the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. Hamas has agreed to cooperate, but Israel has indicated an intention to block the investigation. Israel tries to silence the human-rights community by preventing access to the occupied territory and refusing to cooperate with U.N.-mandated inquiries.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman claimed recently, “Believe me, America accepts all our decisions.” I do not believe, however, that the United States condones the killing of my friend Bassem. But if President Obama is serious about true peace in the Middle East, he must demonstrate that Lieberman is wrong, break the American silence, and heed the voices of those calling for justice.
Huwaida Arraf, J.D., specializes in international human rights and humanitarian law. In 2001 she co-founded the International Solidarity Movement.
Last Friday, 17 April, during a demonstration in Bi’lin, in the Ramallah District, a soldier fired a tear-gas grenade from an increased distance at Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, 30. The grenade left a hole in his chest, causing massive internal bleeding, which led to his death. Two video clips filmed at the site prove that Abu Rahma was standing on the eastern side of the fence, about thirty meters from the soldiers, when he was hit. The video clips also show that during the incident, he did not throw stones, did not damage the fence, and did not endanger soldiers in any way whatsoever.
B’Tselem wrote to the Judge Advocate General (JAG), Brig. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit on 21 April 2009, demanding that he immediately order a Military Police investigation into the circumstances of Abu Rahma’s death, and that he make it clear to security forces that it is absolutely forbidden to fire tear-gas grenades directly at people. In a previous letter that B’Tselem sent to the JAG on this matter last month, following the severe injuries sustained by the American, Tristan Anderson, when he was struck in the forhead by a tear-gas grenade fired from an increased distance, no response has been received.
In its letter of last week, B’Tselem attached video clips of demonstrations in Ni’lin, Bi’lin, and Jayyus filmed in recent months. The clips document repeated firing of tear-gas grenades directly at demonstrators, proving that, contrary to the army’s contentions, security forces in the West Bank have commonly practiced this unlawful act.
B’Tselem also noted that, at the location of the demonstrations in Bi’lin and Ni’lin, senior army and border patrol officers are always present. Whether they turn a blind eye to the extensive breach of the Open-Fire Regulations or give express orders to security forces to violate regulations, they bear responsibility for the lethal consequences of this forbidden practice. Furthermore, for some time, and at least since the extensive media coverage of the serious head injury to Tristan Anderson, on 13 March 2009, mentioned above, senior officers of the army and border police have known about direct firing of grenades at demonstrators. Since they were in a position to end this practice, they too bear responsibility for the lethal shooting.
Bil’in buries Basem Abu Rahme and residents discuss the lethal use of a high velocity tear gas projectile by Israeli forces against unarmed demonstrators.
