Path of the Wall in Bil’in to Be Moved
- http://palsolidarity.org/2010/02/11342

Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee

11 February 2010

Two and a half years after an Israeli Supreme Court decision deeming the path of the Wall on the lands of Bil’in illegal, preliminary infrastructure work to reroute the barrier in accordance with the ruling has finally began. Since the ruling, the state has twice been found in contempt of the court, for not implementing the decision.

Mohammed Khatib, the coordinator of the West Bank-wide Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a member of the the Bil’in Popular Committee, said today that “The Supreme Court had already ruled this should happen almost three years ago and it should not have taken so long. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the only reason that this is finally happening now are the five years of persistent struggle and the scarifies the people of my village have made. While we are happy for the lands that do return, we do not forget the lands and crops that remain isolated behind the Wall. Our struggle will continue until all of our lands are returned and the Occupation is over.”

Following initial construction of Israel’s wall on Bil’in’s lands in February 2005, residents organized almost daily direct actions and demonstrations against the theft of their lands. Garnering the attention of the international community with their creativity and perseverance, Bil’in has become a symbol for Palestinian popular resistance. Almost five years later, Bil’in continues to hold weekly Friday protests.

In addition to grassroots demonstrations and nonviolent direct actions, Bil’in has held annual conferences on popular resistance since 2006; providing a forum for villagers, activists and academics to discuss strategies for the unarmed struggle against the Occupation.

Realizing the limitations of the appealing to Israeli court and the legal remedies possible to achieve through them, the village of Bil’in commenced legal proceedings before the Superior Court of Quebec In July 2008. The appeal was filed against two Canadian companies, Green Park International Inc. and Green Mount International Inc., for their involvement in constructing, marketing and selling residential units in the Mattityahu East section of Modi’in Illit.

As part of a recent campaign to quash grassroots resistance to the Occupation, 37 residents of Bil’in have been arrested in connection to anti-Wall protest since June last year. Among those arrested are also five members of the village’s Popular Committee, which organizes the demonstrations. They have all been arrested on suspicions of incitement – a blanket charge for organizing demonstrations. Similar arrest campaigns are carried by Israel across the West Bank, targeting grassroots organizers.

In the West Bank's stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying

In the richest of the Occupied lands, Israeli bureaucracy is driving Palestinians out of their homes. Robert Fisk reports from Jiftlik

By Robert Fisk

January 30, 2010 "The Independent" - -Area C doesn't sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it's part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.

But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results.

Palestinian houses that cannot be permitted to stand, roofs that must be taken down, wells closed, sewage systems demolished; in one village, I even saw a primitive electricity system in which Palestinians must sink their electrical poles cemented into concrete blocks standing on the surface of the dirt road. To place the poles in the earth would ensure their destruction – no Palestinian can dig a hole more than 40cm below the ground.

But let's return to the bureaucracy. "Ro'i" – if that is indeed the Israeli official's name, for it is difficult to decipher – signed a batch of demolition papers for Jiftlik last December, all duly delivered, in Arabic and Hebrew, to Mr Kasab. There are 21 of them, running – non-sequentially – from numbers 143912 through 145059, all from "The High Planning Council Monitoring [sic] Sub-Committee of the Civil Administration for the Area of Judea and Samaria". Judea and Samaria – for ordinary folk – is the occupied West Bank. The first communication is dated 8 December, 2009, the last 17 December.

And as Mr Kasab puts it, that's the least of his problems. Palestinian requests to build houses are either delayed for years or refused; houses built without permission are ruthlessly torn down; corrugated iron roofs have to be camouflaged with plastic sheets in the hope the "Civil Administration" won't deem them an extra floor – in which case "Ro'i's" lads will be round to rip the lot off the top of the house.

In Area C, there are up to 150,000 Palestinians and 300,000 Jewish colonists living – illegally under international law – in 120 official settlements and 100 "unapproved" settlements or, in the language we must use these days, "illegal outposts"; illegal under Israeli as well as international law, that is – as opposed to the 120 internationally illegal colonies which are legal under Israeli law. Jewish settlers, needless to say, don't have problems with planning permission.

The winter sun blazes through the door of Mr Kasab's office and cigarette smoke drifts through the room as the angry men of Jiftlik shout their grievances. "I don't mind if you print my name, I am so angry, I will take the consequences," he says. "Breathing is the only thing we don't need a permit for – yet!" The rhetoric is tired, but the fury is real. "Buildings, new roads, reservoirs, we have been waiting three years to get permits. We cannot get a permit for a new health clinic. We are short of water for both human and agricultural use. Getting permission to rehabilitate the water system costs 70,000 Israeli shekels [about £14,000] – it costs more than the rehabilitation system itself."

A drive along the wild roads of Area C – from the outskirts of Jerusalem to the semi-humid basin of the Jordan valley – runs through dark hills and bare, stony valleys lined with deep, ancient caves, until, further east, lie the fields of the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers' palm groves – electrified fences round the groves – and the mud or stone huts of Palestinian sheep farmers. This paradise is a double illusion. One group of inhabitants, the Israelis, may remember their history and live in paradise. The smaller group, the Palestinian Arabs, are able to look across these wonderful lands and remember their history – but they are already out of paradise and into limbo.

Even the western NGOs working in Area C find their work for Palestinians blocked by the Israelis. This is not just a "hitch" in the "peace process" – whatever that is – but an international scandal. Oxfam, for example, asked the Israelis for a permit to build a 300m2 capacity below-ground reservoir along with 700m of underground 4in pipes for the thousands of Palestinians living around Jiftlik. It was refused. They then gave notice that they intended to construct an above-ground installation of two glass-fibre tanks, an above-ground pipe and booster pump. They were told they would need a permit even though the pipes were above ground – and they were refused a permit. As a last resort, Oxfam is now distributing rooftop water tanks.

An empty Palestinian agricultural reservoir near Jiftlik in the West Bank. © AI

I came across an even more outrageous example of this apartheid-by-permit in the village of Zbeidat, where the European Union's humanitarian aid division installed 18 waste water systems to prevent the hamlet's vile-smelling sewage running through the gardens and across the main road into the fields. The £80,000 system – a series of 40ft shafts regularly flushed out by sewage trucks – was duly installed because the location lay inside Area B, where no planning permission was required.

Yet now the aid workers have been told by the Israelis that work "must stop" on six of the 18 shafts – a prelude to their demolition, although already they are already built beside the road – because part of the village stands in Area C. Needless to say, no one – neither Palestinians nor Israelis – knows the exact borderline between B and C. Thus around £20,000 of European money has been thrown away by the Israeli "Civil Administration".

But in one way, this storm of permission and non-permission papers is intended to obscure the terrible reality of Area C. Many Israeli activists as well as western NGOs suspect Israel intends to force the Palestinians here to leave their lands and homes and villages and depart into the wretchedness of Areas B and A. B is jointly controlled by Israeli military and civil authorities and Palestinian police, and A by the witless Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. Thus would the Palestinians be left to argue over a mere 40 per cent of the occupied West Bank – in itself a tiny fraction of the 22 per cent of Mandated Palestine over which the equally useless Yasser Arafat once hoped to rule. Add to this the designation of 18 per cent of Area C as "closed military areas" by the Israelis and add another 3 per cent preposterously designated as a "nature reserve" – it would be interesting to know what kind of animals roam there – and the result is simple: even without demolition orders, Palestinians cannot build in 70 per cent of Area C.

Along one road, I discovered a series of large concrete blocks erected by the Israeli army in front of Palestinian shacks. "Danger – Firing Area" was printed on each in Hebrew, Arabic and English. "Entrance Forbidden." What are the Palestinians living here supposed to do? Area C, it should be added, is the richest of the occupied Palestinian lands, with cheese production and animal farms. Many of the 5,000 souls in Jiftlik have been refugees already, their families fled lands to the west of Jerusalem – in present-day Israel – in 1947 and 1948. Their tragedy has not yet ended, of course. What price Palestine?


West Bank Protests
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: January 28, 2010

NILIN, West Bank — For more than a year, this village has been a focus of weekly protests against the Israeli security barrier, which cuts through its lands. Now, the village appears to be at the center of an intensifying Israeli arrest campaign. o reach farmland.

The New York Times

Nilin has been the focus of protests against the barrier.

Apparently concerned that the protests could spread, the Israeli Army and security forces have recently begun clamping down, arresting scores of local organizers and activists here and conducting nighttime raids on the homes of others.

Muhammad Amira, a schoolteacher and a member of Nilin’s popular committee, the group that organizes the protests, said his home was raided by the army in the early hours of Jan. 10. The soldiers checked his identity papers, poked around the house and looked in on his sleeping children, Mr. Amira said.

He added, “They came to say, ‘We know who you are.’ ”

Each Friday for the last five years, Palestinians have demonstrated against the barrier, bolstered by Israeli sympathizers and foreign volunteers who document the ensuing clashes with video cameras, often posting the most dramatic footage on YouTube.

Israel says the barrier, under construction since 2002, is essential to prevent suicide bombers from reaching its cities; the Palestinians oppose it on grounds that much of it runs through the territory of the West Bank.

While the weekly protests are billed as nonviolent resistance, they usually end in violent confrontations between the Israeli security forces and masked, stone-throwing Palestinian youths. “These are not sit-ins with people singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” said Maj. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli Army’s Central Command, which controls the West Bank. “These are violent, illegal, dangerous riots.”

Other Palestinians are “jumping on the bandwagon,” he said, and the protests “could slip out of control.”

The protests first took hold in the nearby village of Bilin, which became a symbol of Palestinian defiance after winning a ruling in the Israeli Supreme Court stipulating that the barrier must be rerouted to take in less agricultural land. According to military officials, work to move the barrier will start next month.

Like a creeping, part-time intifada, the Friday protests have been gaining ground. Nabi Saleh, another village near Ramallah, has become the newest focus of clashes, after Jewish settlers took over a natural spring on village land.

One recent Friday, a group of older villagers marched toward the spring. They were met with tear gas and stun grenades, and scuffled with soldiers on the road. Other villagers spilled down the hillsides swinging slingshots and pelted the Israelis with stones.

“Israel recognizes the threat of the popular movement and its potential for expanding,” said Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli anarchist and spokesman of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, which is based in Ramallah. “I think the goal is to quash it before it gets out of hand.”

In recent months the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and other leaders of the mainstream Fatah Party have adopted Bilin as a model of legitimate resistance.

The movement has also begun to attract international support. The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee receives financing from a Spanish governmental agency, according to the committee’s coordinator, Mohammed Khatib of Bilin.

“Bilin is no longer about the struggle for Bilin,” said Mr. Khatib, who was arrested in August and has been awaiting trial on an incitement charge. “This is part of a national struggle,” he said, adding that ending the Israeli occupation was the ultimate goal. Before dawn on Thursday soldiers came to Mr. Khatib’s home in Bilin and took him away again.

Israel security officials vehemently deny that they are acting to suppress civil disobedience, saying that security is their only concern. Among other things, they argue that the popular committees encourage demonstrators to sabotage the barrier, which Israel sees as a vital security tool.

The Israeli authorities have also turned their attention to the foreign activists, deporting those who have overstayed visas or violated their terms. In one case soldiers conducted a raid in the center of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority has its headquarters, to remove a Czech woman who had been working for the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group.

Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem and Yesh Din have long complained of harsh measures used to quell the protests, including rubber bullets and .22-caliber live ammunition. The Israeli authorities say the live fire is meant to be used only in dangerous situations, and not for crowd control. But the human rights groups say that weapons are sometimes misused, apparently with impunity, with members of the security forces rarely held to account.

About a hundred soldiers and border police officers have been wounded in the clashes since 2008, according to the military. But the protesters are unarmed, their advocates argue, while the Israelis sometimes respond with potentially lethal force.

Tristan Anderson, 38, an American activist from Oakland, Calif., was severely wounded when he was struck in the forehead by a high-velocity tear-gas canister during a confrontation in Nilin last March.

After months in an Israeli hospital, Mr. Anderson has regained some movement on one side, and has started to talk. But he has serious brain damage, according to his mother, Nancy, and the prognosis is unclear.

The Andersons’ Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard, is convinced that the tear-gas projectile was fired directly at the protesters, contrary to regulations. Yet the Israeli authorities who investigated the episode recently decided to close the case without filing charges.

The investigation found that the Israeli security forces had acted in line with regulations, according to Israeli officials. But witnesses insist the projectile was fired from a rise only about 60 yards from where Mr. Anderson stood. If it had been fired properly, in an arc, they contend, it would have flown hundreds of yards. Nineteen Palestinians have been killed in confrontations over the barrier since 2004. A month after Mr. Anderson was wounded, Bassem Abu Rahmah, a well-known Bilin activist, was killed when a similar type of tear-gas projectile struck him in the chest.

Aqel Srur, of Nilin, one of three Palestinians who gave testimony to the Israeli police in the Anderson case, was killed by a .22-caliber bullet in June.

So far, the activists seem undeterred. Salah Muhammad Khawajeh, a Nilin popular committee member and another local witness in the Anderson case, related that when he was summoned for questioning two months ago, he was warned that he could end up like Mr. Srur.

Mr. Khawajeh’s son, 9, was wounded in the back of the head by a rubber bullet at a protest this month.

But as Mr. Khawajeh put it, “We still come.”