Monday February 20, 2006

It was a beautiful day in a village just west of Ramallah. It’s where red poppies survive the winter and where unarmed civilians had just taken one of the most powerful militaries in the world by storm. Everyone who was there was zig-zagging through huge plumes of tear gas. Many had taken more than their fair share of blows on the recieving end of frustrated police batons. Friday January 20th was a day the riot shields meant nothing and the soldiers shouted commands that nobody heard. They waved their batons and screamed when the crowd of some two thousand people started to slip trough their line. I rushed through, taking pictures and holding my friends hand as border policemen tried to grap us. It was a kind of charge To Where There’s Know Hope. People streamed through the olive trees and the stolen land. The army gave chase but they had already l! ost control.

The red signs are posted on razor wire entrenchments. They read, “MORTAL DANGER – MILITARY ZONE. ANY PERSON WHO CROSSES OR DAMAGES THIS FENCE ENDANGERS HIS LIFE”. There’s four sections of the fence that have been completely torn apart by local shabab. The last time I walked through one of these rabbit holes someone quoted Through The Looking Glass: “Were you happy in prison, dear child?”. Bil’in is Lewis Carrol’s Jack of Hearts, bouncing from lunatic bureaucrat to another. Nobody is sure what they want from him but there is resolute determination to chop off the man’s head. More than half the land in the village is being cordoned off. The places where old men used to shephard their goats and the agricultural land are being militarized. The view behind the razor wire entails new fences and new roads patrolled by army humvees. Like the Jack of Hearts, Bil’in is arguing on the seat of the condemned for its right to exist. For the past year and a haf, that argument has taken the form of a non-violent uprising and has attracted international praise as an example of Palestinian/Jewish cooperation.

The fence being described here is! not actually a fence ™Eit’s a wall. In Bil’sn and a few other places it’s technically a fence, but sometimes we still call it a wall because it’s a part of the same long nasty dotted line on any West Bank map. In most places it is over twice as high as the Berlin Wall was and it is lined with watchtowers. If you talk to the likes of Netanyahu and Hilary Clinton it is called a Security Wall. Most of the world refers to it as an Apartheid Wall or an Annexation Wall. Whatever you may think about the wall, it is definitely in the process of a de facto annexation of almost half of the remaining West Bank land into Israel. And if that happens, there will be no viable independent Palestine. There will only be invisible ghettos and there may never be an end to the violence for generations.

One of the first people I met in Bil’in was a man with the first name of Roni. He has been a man of few words since the 30th of September of the year 2000; known to Palestinians as one of the first days in the al-Aqsa Intifada. It began dramatically when an Israeli General widely known as the man who oversaw the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon visited the al-Aqsa mosque, sparking clashes on the site of the third holiest site in Islam. Palestinians in the region, including more than a hundred from Bil’in, flocked to Ramallah to protest Ariel Sharon’s visit to the mosque. They attended afternoon prayer services and flooded out by the thous! ands. When the crowd reached the center of Ramallah the snipers were already positioned in buildings, where they had been waiting. Israeli soldiers from the fifth floor of a building starting shelling into the crowd. Roni remembers that the man in front of him was killed instantaneously. That’s the last thing that he saw before blacking out.

A bullet shot through his neck and it came out of his spine. Roni was one of fifty people injured by live ammunition on that day in Ramallah, but he says he’s lucky not to be one of the seven fatalities. Roni spent seven months in a hospital in Jordan and then ! another seven months doing physical therapy in a Ramallah hospital. Today he is very alive, albeit permanently crippled and confined to a wheelchair. Despite this, Roni comes to all the demonstrations in Bil’in. And he keeps coming, despite being injured two more times at the Bil’in demonstrations against the wall. I asked him why he continues to come to every demonstration and he didn’t hesistate, “because it is the duty of every Palestinian to resist”. He continued, “if I knew that they would kill me tomorrow I would come anyways – this is how much I want freedom”

Abdullah Abu Rahma is the coordinator of the Popular Committee Against The Wall in Bil’in. He remembers hearing the news that the wall is to be built through ! land in his village for the first time. “We knew from the first day that the economic situation would be very bad behind the wall, that it would be a new Naqba in Bil’in”. “And now we cannot get to our farms and we can not cross over to Israel to work”. “I feel like i’m in a jail, there’s no places to take our family, we are surrounded by new settlements, we are left with just the homes and the people but without a way for the people to survive”. The Israeli Army first dropped the news in April of 2004. Bil’in, a village populated by about 1,650 people and that owns about 4,000 dunams of land will lose 2,300 dunams, almost sixty percent. This agriculture-dependent village without farms and with severe restrictions on the freedom of movement is dying slowly.

When the first bulldozers arrived in January 2004, so did hundreds of villagers who blocked their movement, some people even pushing with their bare hands. The soldiers were unable to control the crowd and construction was halted – but they came back on February 20th of 2005, giving way to a string of confrontations and crackdowns that remains continuous. The next ten months saw some four hundred and fifty injured people. Almost a hundred and fifty of the injuries happened during the first month. Many people were hit with tear gas canisters that the Israeli Army was in the habit of aiming at people’s bodies. Crowds regularly interfered with construction and were violently dispersed by the army. The creative spontaneity of these demonstratins sometimes gives Bil’in a temporary upper hand over the army. On seperate occasions they have placed themselves in stone cyllanders, in boxes, in barrels, in symbolic jell cells and sat down in front of bulldozers.

They marched with 1,500 Palestinian flags. They marched with a huge, 50-metre long Palestinian flag. They tied twenty people to olive trees that were to be cut down in the path of the wall. The Friday demonstrations have attracted the support of many peace-minded Israelis. Sometimes as many as three hundred Jewish Israelis show up and breathe the same tear gas as the Palestinians. Abdullah recalls the time that military jeeps rolled into the village at five in the morning. It was september 9th, the day of a planned demonstration. They declared military curfew through loudspeakers and confined people to their homes. They encirled Abdullah Abu Rahma’s home, which also houses international and Israeli activists, and demanded that the foreigners leave the village immediately. that prayer in the mosque be cancelled and that the weekly demonstrations stop.

Hundreds of villagers defied curfew and came out into the streets to confront the soldiers. The army made dozens of arrests and saturated the village with tear gas, but the crowd could not be contained, the army had to leave by one in the afternoon and Bil’in held its demonstration on its own terms. Hundreds of people have been arrested in Bil’in, including some five hundred Israelis. Abdullah Abu Rahme himself has been arrested five times, including one arrest in the middle of an interview with Egyptian telivision, although he somehow managed to escape twice after already being handcuffed. I have been present at several of the Friday demonstrations in Bil’in. On some days the demonstrations are relatively calm and the level of confrontation is mellow. Other days the number of explosions and blankets of smoke that rise out of Bili’n are shocking and unreal.

The worst of it happens when the shabab get agitated and start throwing stones at the soldiers, which is a continuous problem for the Popular Committee, which made a decision to keep the demonstrations nonviolent. Not all of the village shabab share their point of view, but whatever you think of throwing stones, its nothing to the capabilities of the Israeli Army. Two Fridays ago thirty masked shabab shoved the razor wire out of its position and soldiers replied with a barrage of live ammunition and virtually swept the whole area with tear gas. The Friday before that I got stuck in an akward position between stone-throwers and soldiers cracking out steel bullets with rubber covering.&n! bsp;I knew enough to crouch behind the nearest rock formation and wait it out but I got dosed with six volleys of painful gas in the meantime.

When two humvees pulled up they caught us all in what should be described as a beautifully rediculous moment. We were thirteen half-crazy people mock belly-dancing in a closed military zone. The lesson was courtosy of an eleven year old Palestinian girl with a meticulous recolection of Shakira lyrics. I’m not the slightest bit ashamed to admit that over the course of my various experiences in the Shakira-obsessed Middle East I have picked up, or obs! orbed through osmosis, some of these very lyrics myself and was singing along. The soldiers demanded to see some identification but started laughing their asses off in mid sentance. We followed suite and there was a moment wherein the kids bearing assault weapons and green uniforms blended in fine with the Palestinians with black checkered kaffiyehs.

The girl tried to get them to dance and an older man tried to offer them tea. They declined the tea but I could swear that I saw someone’s hips shacking just a little bit. (Maybe I should mention that dancing in public is uncharacteristic of the conservative Palestinians I have come to know in heavier places like Nablus and Hebron, but even in the latter ! city I have danced to clammy pop music in the privacy of someone’s house at a family party…). Incidents like this come as no surpise in Bil’in, however, where power flows from the barrel of the heart. They are often in the habit of practicing joy and resistance at the same time. This is what I discovered around a campfire near one of the towering settlement outposts, where Bil’in established small outposts of their own that quickly became like bugs in the face during a bicycle ride for the state of Israel’s plans for the area.

The quarter mile journey to the new Palestinian outpost,&! nbsp;the place that the Popular Committee coined The Center For The Common Struggle For Peace, can take the form of a game of cat and mouse. Getting there requires evading army patrols and settler security and dashing through the olive groves and making it over the hills and towards the Israeli settlement. Firstly you must make a decision whether to pass to the militarized zone through one of the holes in the fence or to take the time going around since the fence isn’t finished. Once a white pick-up truck pulled up to me and my friend William as we were on our way to pass through one of the holes in the fence and a man in a weird jumpsuit leaned out of a window and started making philosophical inquiries; “who are you?” and “where are you going?”. We continued walking and he barked, “come here!”. To this I responded that we would rather not. The way is easy if you can think fast and if you are like m! e and spent your most educational moments in High School telling off the assistant principal.

When the Popular Committee sent a caravan across the fence and built a building of their own they made a public ridicule of Israeli settlement policy in the occupied territories. When soldiers visited the curious new building for the first time, they shouted and cursed at the Palestinians inside and demanded to know how they brought a caravan through. Their first response was, “we dropped out of an airplane piloted by the state of Palestine”. December 22nd, only a day after the first Bil’in outpost was established, the army showed up and tore it town. They arrested the people inside and dispersed hundreds of people with tear gas. Arabic and Israeli media ! ;carried the story that detailed how Palestinians are not being allowed to build something small and harmless on the land they have inhabited for generations. This while nearby Israeli colony block Modi’in Illit undergoes rapid expansion despite and injunction by the Israeli High Court of Justice to freeze its construction.

Bil’in waited until Christmas to send another caravan across the fence and rebuild the Center. They withstood continuous harassment from the army and populated the place with as many people as possible to&nbs! p;make things inconvenient. Two weeks ago, the army announced that it is going to build a watchtower close to the fence and the Popular Committee responded by erecting another outpost on the site of the would-be tower. Both of these outposts stand at the time of writing and are peopled twenty-four hours a day to ensure that the soldiers could not take them down without a good news story in the Palestinians’ favor. The ultra-orthadox settlement block enjoys a much easier time building anything it wants. The Neot Ha’Pisga colony is expanding to include 2,748 new apartments and the Matityahu East colony is growing a new 3,008 housing units. It’s doubtful that most of these units will be filled but if they were, there would be more settlers moving in to land belonging to Bil’in than the total sum of the withdrawl from Gaza.

In the early evenings I liked often sat down to eat hummos and avecado on a specific hilltop where you can see the sun go down over those settlements that are like trailer parks and the ones that are box neighborhoods like to Levittown and the fabulous fifties. It’s easy to see how the colonies are strategically placed to make the natives feel squeezed. It’s like being trapped in an elevator with a ranking member of the Texan and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association who does something strange to the air. If that’s happened to you then you know.

For transportation to Bil’in, first go to Ramallah. Look for the shoddy white minivans at the service station. These are old Ford Police vans that were handed down to Palestinians when they became so beaten up that nobody in their right first-world mind would touch them. When you get in one you might realize that it’s constantly on the brink of falling apart. That wont bother you because you are running on empty like everyone else in Palestine. It’s the type of exhaustion where you need at least two large cups of cheap coffee just to get motivated in the morning. You overdose on black coffee and black humor because you, like everyone else here, are dealing with Israel’s problem with unwanted intimacy. Adrenaline may keep you up at night. It may help to do a ”damn it man, wake up” if it’s two or three PM and life hasn’t caught up with you. The driver takes you half the w! ay to the village but you don’t get there. There’s a roadblock and a temporary ”flying” checkpoint. A soldier stops the car. Everyone gets out and soldiers take their time to collect ID-cards and call in everybody’s names for security clearance. You wait there for almost two hours. The group gets back in the vehicle and it turns around.