Got arrested by six Israeli riot police yesterday, for trying to walk down a street with Palestinians

Yesterday in Hebron, the third largest city in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the group I've been working with for the last couple months, Youth Against Settlements, organized a protest in which about 200 Palestinians and 20-30 Israelis attempted to walk down the main street of the Hebron, in peace. We packed a few buses we had rented out for the event, and then drove out to a location chosen at the last minute by the organizers. We then began walking towards the main street of Hebron, Shuhada St., chanting calls for equal rights, side by side, Palestinians and Israelis together. Palestinians, even those whose homes are right on the street, have been banned from using it by the Israeli government, which claims that closing streets to Palestinians, as well as an array of severely restrictive measures including forced evictions, curfews, market closures, military checkpoints, and subjection to military law including frequent random searches and detention without charge, are necessary to protect the few hundred religious fundamentalist Israeli settlers who have forced their way into the heart of Hebron and set up a settlement there. The severe restrictions, along with a lack of protection from rampant settler violence, have pressured thousands of Palestinian residents to flee their homes in the Hebron city center, turning it into a virtual ghost town.

As we approached Shuhada Street, the Israeli soldiers guarding the entrance to the street responded to the 100% non-violent action with a barrage of tear gas and stun grenades, which unfortunately drove many of the protesters back. Myself and the remaining Palestinians and Israelis linked arms, and continued to proceed towards the street despite the choking, nauseating gas, at which point the soldiers began to aggressively push us back, drag us by our shirt collars, and knock people over on several occasions. Eventually we made our way to a point where the road narrowed, and the soldiers, along with their reinforcements, were able to completely block our passage. They then claimed the area was a 'closed military zone', and that we would be arrested if we did not leave. Under Israeli occupation law, we are allowed to request to see an order in writing before being obligated to comply, so we refused to move while they claimed they were retrieving the written order. Neither I nor the organizers of the protest were ever shown the order, and no announcement of its arrival was made. The next thing we knew a truckload of Israeli riot police arrived and rushed into the crowd of protesters to arrest people. I was one of the people targeted, and six riot policemen managed to surround me and take me off. I was taken to a police van, handcuffed, driven off to the police station for fingerprinting, light questioning, and surprisingly pleasant conversation, held for a couple hours, and then released and told that I am no longer allowed in the city of Hebron, and will be arrested on sight and fined heavily if I do not leave the city immediately. Ironically, in following the directions they gave to get to my house to retrieve my belongings before I left, I walked down the very street whose closure to Palestinians I had been arrested for protesting.

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I'm proud to say that during the two hour demonstration, not even a single stone was thrown. After the demonstration had ended and most of the protesters dispersed, a couple teenagers began throwing two or three stones from a distance, but Youth Against Settlements organizers quickly managed to reach them and put an immediate stop to it. This group really gets it, that any form of violence is counterproductive to the Palestinian cause, that what is needed is a large scale, 100% non-violent uprising of Palestinians demanding equal human rights. This, at least, is a start. And it is gathering momentum: we are hoping to begin staging protests of hundreds of Palestinians peacefully demanding their rights in Hebron, side by side with Israelis, on a regular basis in the near future.

Israel cannot have it both ways. If Hebron and the rest of the occupied West Bank are not part of Israel, then why has it been giving its civilians financial incentives to move there and claiming jurisdiction over civilian affairs completely unrelated to its own security, for over 40 years? Purely occupying Palestinians and their land could perhaps be justified as a necessary act of self defense, confiscating land for Israeli civilians to live on in the heart of the Territories most definitely cannot. If Hebron and the rest of the West Bank are part of Israel (and in regards to many areas of the West Bank the Israeli government undeniably acts as if they are, and has for over 40 years), then the question we ask is why don't all its residents have equal rights?

Protesting Land Theft and the Route of Israel's Separation Barrier / What I do on my weekends these days

If you are at all interested in this subject, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, PLEASE download the documentary film Bil'in Habibti, it does a much better job of exposing the injustices of the route of the Separation Barrier than I ever could. (The link above is to a .torrent file, in order to download it you will first need to download a BitTorrent Client, if you don't have one already).

For the last few months while I've been out here in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel, I've been going to protests against the Separation Wall/Fence that Israel has been constructing since 2002, which it claims is necessary to protect Israeli civilians from suicide bombers. The only problem is that instead of building it on their own land or the '67 border, they decided to build it deep into the West Bank (which Israel captured in the 1967 war and has occupied and moved its civilians onto since, and on which Palestinians hope to build a future state), in most cases expropriating large tracts of private Palestinian land, without compensation, in order to build it. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that building the barrier on West Bank land was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, yet the construction of the barrier continued anyway. Hundreds of thousands of people living in the suburbs and villages of East Jerusalem have been cut off from their source of employment, the markets where they used to go to sell their produce, the only nearby source of advanced medical care, family members, and the cultural and spiritual center of their lives. The thousands of people living in villages on the 'Israeli' side of the barrier need permits to live in their own homes, and have to pass through security gates every time they want to leave their village, assuming the gate is manned and operating. Many more thousands are arguably even worse off: their villages are on the 'Palestinian' side of the barrier, but much or all of their agricultural lands lie on the other side. For the people of these villages, the route of the Separation Barrier has expropriated their source of livelihood. (In many cases there is an Israeli settlement on the other side only too eager to claim that land for itself).

In response to this situation, several of these villages began organizing weekly unarmed protests, and were soon joined by Israeli and international activist groups. While the protests are self-consciously unarmed, and there as never been an instance of use of arms at one of these protests, from what I've seen they vary in their degree of non-violence from almost entirely stone-throwing protesters such as in Ni'lin, to 100% non-violent such as in Ma'sara (though that doesn't always save the protesters from tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, and arrests), to having the main, organized protest be non-violent, but with small groups of youth who choose on their own to throw stones a little ways off such as in Bil'in.

Bil'in is the village I have been to the most, and it is the most well-known and well-documented case. The protests in Bil'in usually start every week shortly after Friday prayers. A diverse group of people begin gathering at the house of one of the protest leaders: Palestinians from the village, a few Palestinians from elsewhere in the West Bank, occasionally Palestinian politicians such as Mustafa Barghouti that espouse peaceful civil disobedience as the most effective way of resisting the occupation, Israeli activists from groups like Anarchists Against The Wall and Ta'ayush, as well as foreigners from all over the place, many volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). I usually try to get to the protests early just to meet all kinds of interesting people and get updated on what everyone else is working on. The first time i went to Bil'in I met a young woman named Emelia, who is part of the Shministim, a group of Israeli high school seniors refusing to serve in the Israeli army and take part in the occupation. I know that in high school I wasn't yet questioning views I had been ingrained with since childhood, let alone speaking out about them at great cost to myself, and I can't say how much I admire these people for doing so. Emelia and the rest of the Shministim are repeatedly send to jail for their refusal to serve, and she said that except for her closest group of friends everybody she knows sees her as a traitor. Another teenage Shministim friend of hers was disowned by his parents and kicked out of the house. A couple of people I know from Breaking the Silence, a group of ex Israeli soldiers speaking out against the occupation, have also been disowned by parents and some family members, and have a rocky relationship with many of the the rest. One of them, Avigail, told me that with all the shit he gets from his family and everyone around him, sometimes a part of him starts wondering why he is doing this to himself, that maybe he should just give up and live a normal life, but that when he sees what he is doing affecting people and making them open their eyes to what is going on, it makes it all worth it. The deep respect I have for some of these people, who speak out against the injustices they see here at the expense of being shunned by their family and most of their society, is something that I am not able to express in words.

After everyone has gathered, a march, with flags, loudspeakers, and chants in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, starts off towards a gate in the Separation Barrier. Stone throwing teenagers are usually out there before everyone else is, and though they go to a distinct location a good ways off from the non-violent protest, sometimes the army is tear gassing the area where the non-violent protesters go to even before they arrive. People go up to the barrier waving flags and chanting slogans at soldiers. A few people, who I usually try to join, attach ropes to the barbed wire and try to move it out of the way, or take bolt cutters to the chain locking the gate in place while internationals stand in front of them as human shields so they won't get shot by rubber coated steel bullets (or worse). That usually earns a barrage of tear gas from the army, and that's usually when most people have no choice but to get the hell out of there. If you get a direct hit by the gas, you pretty much feel like you are puking your lungs out for about 10 minutes, and your face and eyes burn like hell. After stumbling away after getting hit one time I looked back and saw a disabled Palestinian protester in a wheelchair just sitting in the middle of the gas refusing to move, I have no idea how he can stand it. The tear gas canisters are terrifying in and of themselves, they get lobbed into the middle of the crowd and explode in unpredictable directions mid-flight. Several people have been put in comas or killed when hit in the head with one, especially the high-velocity projectile tear gas canisters that are used sometimes used. Sound grenades are used all the time as well, which pretty much explode to make a sound loud enough that you get out of there for fear of being one of the people who get their eardrums blown out. Rubber coated steel bullets (why not use rubber bullets?) are also used to disperse protesters, and have caused numerous injuries and several deaths, and on occasion live fire is used.

Repression of the protests has been extremely harsh. Hundreds of injuries and several deaths have occurred. A few months before I got here, one of the leaders of the protests named Bassem Abu Rahmeh, who ironically was one of the most vocal against violence, even stone throwing, was shot in the chest by a high-velocity projectile tear gas canister, and died a few hours later. You can watch a video of it, where he gets shot standing right next to the cameraman, here, and you can read an obituary written by the father of his Israeli girlfriend here. PLEASE make yourself watch this right now, and tell me that that is an appropriate use of force against an unarmed, non-violent demonstration of people who have been stripped of their land and livelihood. Read the obituary. He was a fucking human being, not some caricatured bloodthirsty Arab who hates Jews just for the fuck of it. A little over a year ago 10 year old Ahmed Mousa was shot in the forehead with live ammunition by Israeli Border Police while he and some friends were trying to destroy a barbed-wire fence outside of Ni'lin with clippers, hours after the protest had finished. Even if the boys had been throwing stones, can shooting at a 10 year old with live ammunition be considered anything other than cold blooded murder? At the boy's funeral procession the next day, the army insisted on establishing a presence in the streets of the town, and 17 year old Yousef Amera was killed after being shot twice in the head with rubber-coated steel bullets in the ensuing riot. About a year and a half ago, also in Ni'lin, an Israeli soldier was convicted of shooting a blindfolded, handcuffed protester, who wasn't resisting in any way, in the foot with a rubber-coated steel bullet after being ordered to do so by his battalion commander (Please watch the video here). No charges were brought against the soldier or the commander until the human rights group B'tselem produced the video, and even then the soldier and the commander initially only received a slap on the wrist until Israeli human rights groups complained. I could go on and on.

Night raids are common both to arrest those accused of throwing stones, people the army wants to interrogate about the protests, as well as the organizers of the non-violent protests. This occurs even in Ma'sara, where from my experience and what I have heard the protests are 100% non-violent. After a protest at Ma'sara one day I went to have tea and lunch with Ahmad, one of the organizers I had gotten to know pretty well. He told me that after he was forbidden from accessing any of his farmland because it lay on the other side of the barrier, he had begun looking for work in the bigger West Bank cities. After he was arrested in a night raid and imprisoned without charge for being one of the organizers of the non-violent protests, he has been banned from traveling outside his district, and since the big cities aren't in his district, he hasn't been able to find any work, and is worrying about how to feed his children, how to buy medicine for his son, who has asthma, and how to fix the open sewage leaking from his septic tank.

Recently, the coordinator of the Bil'in Popular Committee, Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, was arrested during a night raid. He has been indicted with the blanket charge of "incitement", throwing stones, and illegal arms possession for organizing an exhibition of used Israeli gas canisters and stun grenades fired at the village. Judging from his prominent role in organizing the explicitly non-violent protests, the fact that I have always seen him in the middle of the non-violent protest several times armed only with a bullhorn, and that neither I nor other activists I know have ever seen him throw a stone, I find the other charges hard to believe. It wouldn't be the first time stone-throwing evidence was fabricated to imprison one of the protest leaders: a few months ago another leader of the protests, Mohammed Khatib, was arrested on charges of stone throwing only to have a court rule that the evidence against him, which included photos and testimony, was fabricated when it was shown he was abroad at the time the Israeli army alleged he had thrown stones (if it hadn't been for that fortunate coincidence he would probably still be in jail).

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Over half of Bil'in's land currently falls on the Israeli side of the barrier, and is inaccessible to the farmers that depend on them, despite the fact that they are recognized as the legal owners even by Israeli law. The Israeli government claims that de facto expropriating this land is necessary to create a "buffer zone" between Bil'in and the adjacent Israeli settlement of Modi'in Illit. However, looking at the facts, things aren't that simple, even if you accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlements. Here, as in numerous other documented cases, the Separation Barrier runs not along the borders of the Modi'in Illit settlement as it exists, but instead almost exactly along the border of the Modi'in Master Plan (its development plan for expansion), even at the expense of deviating from the route that would be topographically superior from a security and engineering perspective (i.e. the high ground). In light of the fact that this is obviously happening in several documented cases, it makes the Israeli government's claims that the route is based solely on security considerations, and not real estate ones, seem blatantly false.

As if it wouldn't be bad enough if the Israeli government were preferring the interests of real estate development companies who own land in occupied territories over the human rights of Palestinian farmers to access agricultural lands that they legally own, that have been in their families for generations, and on which they depend for a livelihood, much of the land included in the Modi'in Illit Master Plan and consequently put on the Israeli side of the barrier is privately owned by the people of Bil'in. The fact that this Palestinian-owned land is being de facto expropriated also cannot be explained solely as a security-related buffer zone for the settlement, or even for its planned expansions: the fact that Palestinian-owned land was included in the settlement's development plan, and the fact that they have already started building large apartment complexes and roads on it that the state has refused to demolish makes it hard to believe that the desire to expropriate that land and annex it to the settlement was not a motivating factor in planning the route of the barrier. (Approximately 30% of the land on which Israeli settlements are situated are recognized by the Israeli government as privately owned Palestinian land according the the human rights group Yesh Din. This is not a group of hippies and anarchists, this is a group of former Israeli generals, ministers, attorney generals, diplomats, and the former mayor of Tel Aviv). Not to mention that even the land supposedly owned by the development companies (on which they have also started building apartment complexes) was 'purchased' from the residents of Bil'in under dubious circumstances at best. Basically two Israeli attorneys, one of which had been convicted of corruption charges and involved in settler-Palestinian land deals that were later ruled in court to be fraud, signed a sworn testimony that the head of Bil'in had verbally approved the sale of the land to them, but that they couldn't get his actual signature because it would be dangerous for them to visit him in the village. I guess that's good enough to legally claim a Palestinian's land under Israeli West Bank law... I wonder if it would work the same way if the ethnicities of the buyer and seller were reversed? Unfortunately, land fraud of this kind is not unusual in the West Bank. On top of all of that, the land on which much of the existing settlement was built was confiscated from residents of Bil'in and neighboring villages in 1991 and declared "state land" by the Israeli government, through the application of the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, which states that the "sultan" (which the Israeli government interprets to be itself) can confiscate any land that is uncultivated for 3 years (This law applies only to Palestinians, and not to settlers in the West Bank. They get modern, non-feudal Israeli civil law.) The land was then turned over to a settler group to create the settlement. This is how most of the settlements get much of their land, and the fear is that this is exactly what will happen to Palestinian lands on the Israeli side of the barrier when the villagers are unable to cultivate them. What I think about Israel presuming itself to be the state in the area in every possible way, including moving in its civilians and claiming the right to control civilian matters in the area, and then administering two sets of law to people living in the area depending on their ethnicity, only giving one of those ethnicities a vote in how the state and even local government is run, and using "state land" solely for the benefit of one of those ethnicities, I'll leave to your imagination for the sake of staying on topic.

With the help and cash of Israeli human rights groups, the villagers of Bil'in were able to hire a human-rights lawyer and sue the state of Israel in the Israeli High Court. In 2007, the High Court ruled unanimously that the route of the barrier near Bil'in could not be justified purely on security grounds, and should be demolished and moved to a different route less harmful to the villagers. One might be tempted to say this is proof that the Israeli system is working, but I would respond that the fact that Palestinian villagers have to put up with this bullshit for years until being lucky enough to be noticed by Israelis with the money and legal know-how to challenge the situation is injustice enough. Also, that decision was over two years ago, yet the barrier is still there, and the people of Bil'in are still barred from their agricultural land. The Israeli state has been dragging its feet since, proposing an alternative route that only gave back 10% of the land it had confiscated, which was also struck down unanimously by the High Court as not based on security concerns. In a simultaneous decision however, the Israeli High Court also ruled that the settler apartment complexes that were built on Palestinian private property, which it also turned out were built illegally without a building permit, would be allowed to stay and become part of the settlement, reasoning that the lawsuit was raised too late. To anyone familiar with the situation of Palestinian home demolitions and evictions, that decision is infuriatingly hypocritical. I can't tell you how many times I have seen the homes, and even the caves and tents, of Palestinians diligently demolished for being built without a permit (which are next to impossible for Palestinians to get), yet if Israelis build without a permit, on land that even Israel recognizes they don't own, then they get to keep it. Saying that the lawsuit was filed too late is also hypocritical: as I've written about here, the Israeli government is currently evicting hundreds of refugees and descendants of refugees from homes the U.N. built for them in East Jerusalem back in the 50's, because the land on which the homes were built supposedly belonged to a Jew before 1948 (records from the Turkish national archives show that the land was only leased to a Jew). If being constantly confronted with this hypocrisy and straight out oppression is this maddening to me, I can only imagine what it must be like for a Palestinian who is affected by it...