In the early morning on Thursday, 30 April 2009, around 2.45 am, the Israeli army invaded Ni’lin. Soldiers entered the home of Hussein Mohammad al Khawadja, 21, blindfolded him and took him away. The soldiers tried to take another man as well, but he wasn’t at home. The army stayed in the center of Ni’lin throwing sound bombs and tear gas until 4.15 am.
The al Khawadja family were awoken by soldiers forcefully pounding at their door. About 10 soldiers entered their home, forcing them, including the small children to get up from their beds, and go into the living room. The soldiers pointed their weapons at them and Hussein was kicked and assaulted while still in bed.
“His studies are very important for him. I’m worried Hussein now will miss his final exams and therefore can´t continue next year.” – Hussein’s mother
After half an hour, Hussein was blindfolded and taken away from his home. An officer, who called himself Captain Foad, made cruel jokes to the terrify the family, insulting them by pretending Hussein would be taken on a joyful trip.
During the invasion, the army fired tear gas and sound bombs, keeping the residents of Ni’lin awake. Several young men decided to go out and protest against the presence of the army by shouting and throwing stones. One young man was hit in his leg with a tear gas canister and had to be taken to a doctor for medical treatment. The invasion lasted until 4.15 am, when the army left the village.
Hussein Mohammad al Khawadja , a university student in Abu Dis, is the 70th resident of Ni’lin to be arrested on allegations of participation in demonstrations against the Apartheid Wall.
The residents of Bil’in gathered today after the Friday prayer along with international and Israeli activists and marched in recognition of May Day. The protesters carried Palestinian flags and banners calling for labor rights. The Israeli occupation doesn’t give even the simplest rights for workers and the Wall prevents workers from getting to their jobs and farmers from reaching their land. Protesters also carried posters for the martyr Bassem Abu Rahmah.
Protesters marched towards the wall calling for the end of the occupation and to stop construction of the Wall. Protesters placed flowers next to the martyr’s memorial for Bassem Abu Rahmah and stood there for a minute of silence out of respect for his spirit and those of other martyrs.
The Israeli army had gathered in big numbers behind cement blocks and used razor wire to prevent the crowd from going through the gate. The army fired tear gas canisters to disturb the crowd, causing dozens to suffer gas inhalation and four were shot with rubber coated steel bullets, the four: Abdullah Aburahma,Yaseen Mohammed Yaseen,Mahmud Al’a Smara,and Nashmi Mohammed Aburahma.
It took the death of a Palestinian at Bil’in last week and the threat of another contempt of court petition to the High Court of Justice, but the state has finally come up with a new proposal for the route of the West Bank security barrier that apparently complies with the original court decision of 19 months ago, attorney Michael Sfard said on Sunday.
Last week, the state submitted a new proposal to the High Court to change the original route of the fence in the area of Modi’in Illit, which was proposed by the Defense Ministry and rejected by the court on September 4, 2007.
Now, Sfard told The Jerusalem Post, the ministry has come up with a new route that gives Bil’in villagers back 700 of the 1,700 dunams, or 170 hectares, that were set to be located on the “Israeli side” of the barrier in the original proposal.
Israel has said the route of the barrier was determined by security considerations only. But in the case of Bil’in, as was true regarding several other sections, the route was originally determined to allow for the construction of a new neighborhood, called East Matityahu, in the urban haredi settlement of Modi’in Illit.
According to the original plan, 3,000 housing units were to be built in East Matityahu in two stages.
According to Sfard, as a result of the state’s proposal to return 700 dunams of land to Bil’in, fewer than 2,000 units will be built.
On September 5, 2005, the head of the Bil’in village council, Ahmed Yasin, petitioned the High Court against the route of the security barrier. Sfard, who represented him, claimed that the state had designed the route in order to expand Modi’in Illit, taking away farmland belonging to the village and to individual villagers.
In its ruling two years later, the court upheld the petition and ordered the state to prepare a new route in accordance with a series of specific constraints.
One condition was that the new route leave the second stage of East Matityahu on the “West Bank side” of the barrier. Another condition was that the barrier itself be established as much as possible on state-owned rather than Palestinian-owned land.
It took nine months for the state to come up with a new proposal. When it finally did, it ignored key conditions established by the court in its original ruling. Above all, it left stage two of Matityahu East on the “Israeli side” of the barrier.
On December 15, 2008, the court rejected the proposal and ordered the state to come up with a new one that complied with its original ruling, “without further delay.”
Nevertheless, four more months went by without a response by the state. Sfard told the Post that after the killing of Palestinian demonstrator Bassam Ibrahim Abu Rahma, from Bil’in, during a protest against the barrier on April 17, he sent a letter to attorney Avi Licht of the State Attorney’s Office, warning that he would file another contempt of court petition unless the state submitted a new proposal within two days. (Abu Rahma, 30, was killed in a confrontation with border policemen.)
The state hurried to submit the proposal. Sfard said that although the Bil’in villagers were still angry over the loss of 1,000 or more dunams that remain on the “Israeli side” of the barrier, it looks like the court will approve the state’s new proposal.
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.
