Tag: Apartheid Wall

Adeeb Abu Rahma’s release celebrated in Bil’in

13 December 2010 | International Solidarity Movement

Adeeb greeting friends and family in Bil'in
Yesterday, the 12th of December, Adeeb Abu Rahma was released after 18 months of incarceration in Ofer Military prison. Adeeb Abu Rahma, 40 years old, is a leading activist in the struggle of Bil’in. For six years, the village has been holding a weekly demonstration against the Israeli occupation, the illegal settlement of Mod’in, and the annexation wall being built through the village.

Adeeb Abu Rahma, father of nine children, was arrested July 10th in 2009 for his involvement in the weekly peaceful demonstration in Bilin. Charged with “being present in a declared military zone”, “incitement” and “activity against public order,” he was sentenced to 12 months incarceration. The sentence was extended for six extra months. Adeeb is still suspended from political activism for four years – if he breaks this condition he will be fined with 6000 NIS.

Adeeb with his family
The whole village was in a state of euphoria and Adeeb’s release was celebrated enthusiastically despite the bad weather. The village organized a parade through the village up to the house of Adeeb where his friends and family were already waiting. For eighteen months not even Adeeb’s wife was able to get permission to visit him.

Adeeb’s welcome was ecstatic. He was greeted, hugged and kissed by the waiting crowd, and even some tears were shed. Adeeb was lifted by the chanting crowd and carried to his house, where he was able to see his wife and children for the first time in 18 months. In the street, people danced, unhindered by the strong wind. The ceremony continued in a tent, decorated for the occasion, where Adeeb made a speech. Soon after, the celebrating crowd dispersed, leaving Adeeb alone to spend the first night at home with his family in 18 months.

photos by Hamde Abo Rahma

A message from Israeli military prison on International Human Rights Day

9 December 2010 | The Huffington Post, Majida Abu Rahmah

My imprisoned husband Abdullah Abu Rahmah passed the following message through his lawyer:

A year ago tonight, on International Human Rights Day, our apartment in Ramallah was broken into by the Israeli military in the middle of the night and I was torn away from my wife Majida, my daughters Luma and Layan, and my son Laith, who at the time was only nine months old.

As the coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements I was convicted of “organizing illegal demonstrations” and “incitement.” The “illegal demonstrations” refer to the nonviolent resistance campaign that my village has been waging for the last six years against Israel’s Apartheid Wall that is being built on our land.

I find it strange that the military judges could call our demonstrations illegal and charge me for participating in and organizing them after the world’s highest legal body, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, has ruled that Israel’s wall within the occupied territories is illegal and must be dismantled. Even the Israeli supreme court ruled that the Wall’s route in Bil’in is illegal.

I have been accused of inciting violence: this charge is also puzzling. If the check points, closures, ongoing land theft, wall and settlements, night raids into our homes and violent oppression of our protests does not incite violence, what does?

Despite the occupations constant and intense incitement to violence in Bil’in, we have chosen another way. We have chosen to protest nonviolently together with Israeli and International supporters. We have chosen to carry a message of hope and real partnership between Palestinians and Israelis in the face of oppression and injustice. It is this message that the Occupation is attempting to crush through its various institutions including the military courts. An official from the Israeli Military Prosecution shamelessly told my Attorney, Gaby Lasky, that the objective of the military in my prosecution is to “put an end” to these demonstrations.

The crime of incitement that I have been convicted of is defined under Israeli military decree 101 regarding the prohibition of hostile action of propaganda and incitement as “The attempt, verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order” and carries a 10 year maximal sentence. This definition is so broad and vague that it can be applied to almost any action or statement. Actually, these words could be considered incitement if they were spoken in the occupied territories.

On the 11th of October of this year I was sentenced to 12 months in prison, plus 6 months suspended sentence for 3 years, and a fine. My family and I, especially my daughters, were counting the days to my release. The military prosecution waited until just a few days before the end of my sentence before appealing against my release, arguing that I should be imprisoned longer. I have completed my sentence but remain in prison. Though international law considers myself and other activists as human rights defenders, the occupation authorities consider us criminals whose freedom and other rights must be denied.
In the year that I have spent in prison, the demonstrations in Bil’in, Naalin, Al Maasara, and Beit Omar have continued. Nabi Saleh and other villages have taken up the popular struggle. Within this year, the International campaign calling for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel until it complies with International law has grown considerably, as have legal actions against Israeli war crimes. I hope that soon Israel will no longer be able to ignore the clear condemnation of its policies coming from around the world.

In the year that I have spent in prison, my son Laith has taken his first steps and said his first words, and Luma and Layan have been growing from children to beautiful young girls. I have not been able to be with them, to walk holding their hands, to take them to school as they and I are used to. Laith does not know me now. And my wife Majida has had to care for our family alone.

In 2010 children in Bil’in and throughout the West bank are still being awakened in the middle of the night to find guns pointed at their heads. In the year that I have spent in prison, the military has carried out dozens of night raids in Bil’in with the purpose of removing those involved in the popular struggle against the occupation.

Imagine if heavily armed men forced their way into your home in the middle of the night. If your children were forced to watch as their father or brother was blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken away. Or if you as a parent were forced to watch this being done to your child.

This week the door of our cell was opened and a sixteen year boy was pushed inside. My friend Adeeb Abu Rahmeh was shocked to recognize his son, Mohammed, whom Adeeb had not seen since he himself was arrested during a nonviolent demonstration 16 months ago.

Mohammad smiled when he saw his Father, but his face was red and swollen and it was clear that he was in pain. He told us that he had been taken from his home two nights previously. He spent the first night blindfolded and shackled, being moved from one place to another. The next day after a terrifying, disoriented, and sleepless night he was taken to an interrogation room, his blindfold was removed and an interrogator showed him pictures of people from the village. When questioned about the first picture he told the interrogator that he did not recognize the person. The interrogator slapped him hard across the face. This continued with every question that Mohammad was asked: when he did not give the answer that the interrogator wanted, he was slapped, punched and threatened. Mohammad’s treatment is not unusual.

Young boys from our village have been taken from their homes violently and report being denied sleep, food, and water and being kept in Isolation and threatened and often beaten during interrogation.

What was unusual about Mohammad is that he did not satisfy his interrogator and with competent representation was released within a few days. Usually children, just because they are children, will say whatever the interrogator wants them to say to make such treatment stop. Adeeb, myself, and thousands of other prisoners are being held in prison based on testimonies forced or coerced out of these children. No child should ever receive such treatment.

When the children who had testified against me retracted what they said in interrogation and told the military judge that their testimonies where given under duress, the judge declared them hostile witnesses.

Adeeb Abu Rahmah and I are the first to be convicted with incitement and participation in illegal demonstrations since the first Intifada but, unfortunately, it does not seem that we will be the last.

I often wonder what Israeli leaders think they will achieve if they succeed in their goal of suppressing the Palestinian popular struggle? Is it possible that they believe that our people can sit quietly and watch as our land is taken from us? Do they think that we can face our children and tell them that, like us, they will never experience freedom? Or do they actually prefer violence and killing to our form of nonviolent struggle because it camouflages their ongoing theft and gives them an excuse to continue using us as guinea pigs for their weapons?

My eldest daughter Luma was nine years old when I was arrested. She is now ten. After my arrest she began going to the Friday demonstrations in our village. She always carries a picture of me in her arms. The adults try to look after her but I still worry for my little girl. I wish that she could enjoy her childhood like other children, that she could be studying and playing with her friends. But through the walls and barbed wire that separates us I hear my daughter’s message to me, saying: “Baba, they cannot stop us. If they take you away, we will take your place and continue to struggle for justice.” This is the message that I want to bring you today. From beyond the walls, the barbed wire, and the prison bars that separate Palestinians and Israelis.

Israel steps-up pressure on Issawiya village with blockades

14 November 2010 | Wadi Hilweh Information Center & ISM

Issawiya, Jerusalem – Today large concrete blocks were laid across Issawiya village’s north-eastern entrance by Israeli troops, marking the second time in three days that the entrance has been physically blockaded by the military. The blocks, aside from severely obstructing village traffic, confirm residents’ fears of what appears to be Israeli authorities’ strategic isolation of Issawiya village.

Thursday, November 10th, Issawiya witnessed clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces. Israeli police, accompanied by troops from the Israeli army, surrounded the village and closed off all but the easternmost entrance to the village, the furthest entrance from Jerusalem, following the clashes which erupted between Israeli troops and residents of the village. In doing so, the police carried out a collective punishment over the more than 18,000 Palestinians who live in the village.

Many of Issawiya’s 18,000 inhabitants, all of whom are Palestinian, fear that the road blocks are indicative of the village’s position being earmarked for a more permanent isolation from the rest of Jerusalem: the route of the illegal Apartheid wall. One resident stated that “what is happening here in Issawiya is a form of collective punishment, meted out by the Israeli authorities. Many people here are subjected to harassment and intimidation by the Israeli tax department, who are waging a campaign of fines and financial punishment on Palestinians in Jerusalem. This new development of the physical isolation of our community comes merely as the next level of pressure applied by the authorities.”

Derisory Supreme Court hearing on the wall in al-Walaja

08 November 2010 | Stella & Jillian

On Monday the 8th of November, after a two hour charade in the Supreme Court of Israel, the decision over the path of the wall in Al-Walaja (near Bethlehem), was adjourned for another 45 days. Their indecisiveness was mainly with respect to the fact that the path on which the wall is already being built is entirely private property belonging to Palestinian villagers. The court needs to wait for the Palestinian’s land to be officially confiscated before they can make a decision, but for now has ruled that bulldozers can continue excavating along their preferred path for the wall while construction is temporarily frozen.

This impermanent decision was made after judges referred to the ‘professional’ agricultural opinion of a representative from the Israeli Army any effects on the land of continuing excavation for the wall. They asked him if he thought the wall could be easily moved somewhere else and the land rehabilitated if the final decision is to build the wall somewhere else. He said, of course, that there would be no problem. There was present an expert from an environmental organization who was far more knowledgeable on the matter, but judges decided not to question her as she had already stated the best option for the agriculture is to only put a fence there.

The villagers left the court room obviously shocked that the bulldozers will continue devastating their land. One woman from Al-Walaja was arrested just for addressing a member of the army, saying she hoped he would sleep well since he obviously doesn’t have any idea about what it’s like to live in ghetto. She was later released with no charges after three hours.

We witnessed the supreme court purportedly taking evidence from both sides regarding the building of the wall around the illegal settlements Har Gilo and Gilo adjacent to Al-Walaja. The only issue discussed was the proximity of the wall in relation to the Palestinian village. The Israeli barrister’s argument presented the settlers as having carefully researched the position, height and necessity for the wall, as well as having carefully examined a number of alternatives both by themselves and by skilled outsiders.

A portion of the wall that has already been built in Al-Walaja, seen from the settlers' perspective

The land is being used illegally by Israeli settlers, and the Israeli barrister justified this illegal appropriation by quoting a law that says that in an emergency land can be taken immediately and the legality discussed later. The issue of land confiscation — or the theft of Palestinian land — goes to the heart of the issue for the Palestinians, but the focus of this hearing was only on the proximity of the wall.

As internationals observing this hearing we saw the court proceedings as a screen veiling Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians through the continual erosion of their land and rights. Palestinians deserve the rights to security, dignity and respect, and acknowledgment of not only their property but their existence as a people who belong to the land of Palestine. The wall is not only an affront to human dignity, but a symbol of Zionist apartheid isolating Palestinians into Bantustans. Such a trial focusing only on the proximity of the wall deflects attention away from the real issue of land theft.

Civil resistance to bring down the Walls

1 November 2010 | Ayed Morrar, Huffington Post

Budrus, a documentary film now debuting across the US, tells the story of a successful protest campaign by unarmed Palestinian civilians against Israel’s military occupation in my small West Bank village. Our struggle’s success and the consequent expansion of civil resistance to other West Bank communities may provide hope to viewers desperate for positive news from the Middle East, but today an Israeli crackdown on unarmed Palestinian protesters is threatening this growing movement. For our movement to thrive and serve as a true alternative to violence, we need Americans’ to demand that Israel, a close US ally, end this repression.

Budrus depicts our ten month campaign of protest marches in 2003-2004, which included participation by men, women and children, and by representatives from all Palestinian political factions, along with Israeli and international activists, to resist the construction of Israel’s Separation Barrier on our lands. Young women, led by my 15-year-old daughter Iltezam, ran past armed Israeli soldiers and jumped In front of the bulldozers that were uprooting our ancient olive trees. The soldiers regularly met us with clubs, rubber-coated bullets, curfews, arrests and even live ammunition. But we won in the end. The Israeli military rerouted the barrier in Budrus, allowing us access to almost all of our land.

The film ends with Palestinian and Israeli activists heading to the neighboring village of Ni’ilin where the struggle to save Palestinian land continues today. But following Budrus’s success and faced by a growing numbers of civilians protesting the confiscation of their lands, Israel has responded with military might, attempting to quell this new movement. Twenty Palestinians have since been killed during unarmed demonstrations against the construction of the Separation Barrier.

In Ni’ilin, in the dark of night, Israeli soldiers have staged hundreds of military raids and arrests of civilians from the village; hundreds more were injured — forty by live ammunition, and five, including a ten year old, were shot dead. Today, a horrid 25 foot concrete wall stands in Ni’ilin, behind which lie 620 acres of village lands taken for the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.

Through a five-year protest campaign, another nearby village, Bil’in, has become an international symbol of nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation, with world leaders from Jimmy Carter to Desmond Tutu visiting to show support. On October 11th, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, one of Bil’in’s most prominent protest organizers, was sentenced by an Israeli military court to twelve months in jail. His crime — leading demonstrations in his village that were very similar to those I led in Budrus.

During Abdallah’s trial, Israel’s military prosecution repeatedly demanded that an ‘example’ be made of him to deter others who might organize civil resistance. The EU, Britain, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have all condemned Abdallah’s incarceration, yet he remains in prison.

Palestinians’ wishes are simple — we want what is ours, our land, with true sovereignty. We want freedom, equality and civil rights — what Martin Luther King, Jr. called in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail “our constitutional and God-given rights.”

But Israel is sending a clear message — even unarmed resistance by ordinary civilians demanding basic rights will be crushed. It is little known that the second intifada began not with guns and suicide bombings against civilians, but rather with protest marches to Israeli military checkpoints inside the occupied West Bank, and with civil disobedience in the tradition of the US civil rights movement. Israel responded by firing over 1.3 million live bullets in one month into crowds of protesters. When ordinary people could no longer afford to risk protesting, small groups turned, in anger and despair, to armed resistance.

Budrus’s struggle showed that civil resistance can bring down walls, both literal and those of the heart, and set an example for a bright future for Israelis and Palestinians in this biblical land. Today Palestinian and Israeli protesters are together confronting Israel’s military occupation in other villages. But this hopeful possibility is now threatened again by Israeli bullets and arrests.

For this future to materialize, those who are outraged by the violence deployed against protesters must demand an end to the injustice. If Americans want to see the example of Budrus continue to spread, individuals, civil society groups and the US government must act to pressure Israel to end its brutal crackdown on civilian protesters.