I want to write you all an email that would express to you all what I've experienced in the past week at a conference I went to, and also help me formulate some of it so I can create an article for the paper at home, but I am not sure where to begin. My hand and arm are scratched up a bit, and my quads are killing me. I should have known to be in better shape before going to a demo in Palestine. I got scratched up (and also lost a shoe) while running from rubber-coated bullets in Bil'in. I read later that they were also firing machine guns into the air. I can't recognize the difference in the percussions, I didn't grow up hearing them; all i remember is that when the guy from Jenin says, "Oh my God, they are shooting us," you run.
Kamleh and I had gone to Bil'in to attend the Second Annual Conference on Popular Resistance, April 18-20th. The conference speakers included the likes of Italian and French Members of Parliament, the French Ambassador to Israel who is a concentration camp survivor and who took part in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Mustafa Barghouti (PA Information Minister), Amira Hass (Haaretz journalist), Ilan Pappe (University of Haifa professor and self-proclaimed failed product of the Israeli education system), and Jeff Halper (Israeli Committee Aganst House Demolitions). The speeches were focused around the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israeli Apartheid that has now been called for by Palestinian Civil Society. Amira Hass mentioned that whenever she writes in the paper about someone getting denied a permit to go to their father's funeral, or to go get medical treatment in Amman or Israel, the next day all of the "security" issues have magically disappeared, and that one person gets their permit. Israelis don't want to know what is going on around them. And when they DO protest inside Israel, nothing happens. They have the right to do so, and so they do, and then they go home and meanwhile Palestinians are harrassed at checkpoints and separated from each other, and more land is confiscated, and occupation, the catchword to describe so much more than a literal occupation, expands and deepens. As one Palestinian woman who spoke up at the conference said, "We need you to stand in front of your soldiers." There are groups that do this, such as Mahsoum Watch (Checkpoint Watch), Israeli women who go and sit at checkpoints to observe and record and ameliorate by their presence the behavior of the Israeli soldiers. There was also some good discussion about the word "Apartheid." Jeff Halper made the point that even though what is happening in Palestine is in many ways actually more insidious than Apartheid South Africa, even though the equivalent word for 'separation' in Hebrew is actually a very accepted word and part of the popular peace movement's campaign, and even though there is a better word in Hebrew meaning 'displacement/dispossession' that describes much better what is going on, Apartheid is the best word to use. It gets across the separation and domination that are integral parts of the word, and there is simply not time to coin a new vocabulary while the displacement and dispossession is ongoing.
Bil'in itself is a village to the northwest of Ramallah, that has become something of a symbol of Palestinian resistance to the Apartheid wall. The wall is built through Bil'in's agricultural land, from which the village makes its living, confiscating the majority of the land on the western Israeli side of the wall. The wall in this area is actually about 30 meters of fence, ditch, road, electric fence, road, ditch, and fence. Orchards on the other side belonging to the village have been bulldozed and Israeli colonies built on the land, the most recent colony, Matityahu East, erected in 2002. The work on the Apartheid barrier here actually began in February of 2005, and popular demonstrations including children, elderly people, internationals, and women occured daily in the beginning. The village has continued since that time to hold two non-violent demonstrations a week, one of them every Friday. The forms the demonstrations take are creative, and often include group prayer in the road on holidays, women on Women's Day, and handicapped on the Day of the Handicapped. These non-violent demonstrations have been met with semi-automatic rifles, sound bombs, tear gas, rubber-coated metal bullets, high-pressure water hoses, and live ammunition, not to mention the soldiers' invasions of homes in the middle of the night to beat and arrest children and youths out of their beds because they took part in the demonstrations, and shooting 10 and 12 year olds in the head. There has also been some other direct action, such as a family moving into one of the houses that was built in the colony, showing the legal deed to the land, but being evicted after five hours, and also legal action in Israeli courts. The demonstrations continue, and the example of Bil'in's non-violent regular and multi-faceted resistance is beginning to be imitated in other parts of Palestine, most notably in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem. (http://www.bilin-village.org/)
The demonstration on Friday, April 20th followed in the tradition of Bil'in's regular display of resistance. The demo was part of the conference, and was attended by internationals, the PA Information Minister and also the Vice Prime Minister and other officials, Israelis, and Palestinians from Bil'in. I was disappointed that many of the Europeans and Israelis who had spoken the previous two days did not stay for the demo. Mairead Maguire did stay, however. She is a 1977 Nobel Peace Price winner for her work in Northern Ireland and while she kind of annoyed me because she was preaching quite a bit during the conference about how they succeeded in Northern Ireland in connecting with people through loving one another, and preaching interpretations of violence in islam and otherwise reminded me of really happy church ladies, she was hardcore enough to stay for the demo. She later got shot in the leg by a rubber-coated bullet. (http://www.imemc.org/artic
There was a press conference near the wall in the morning, and while the Israeli soldiers were busy surrounding the press conference, an international kid somehow in an act of some kind of incredible bravery or stupidity, took a giant Palestinian flag, crossed the 30 meters of Apartheid wall/fence/road, climbed the Israeli communications tower, and put the flag waaaaaaaay at the top of it. At the end of the day we saw him still sitting up there and a bunch of soldiers hanging out at the bottom of the tower waiting for him to come down. I think he took food and water up there with him. It was actually some kind of awesome. ( http://www.imemc.org/article
We marched all together from the village to the wall, internationals at the front. When we got somewhat close, maybe 20 yards, and the soldiers were pointing their guns at us, we all raised our hands high into the air and just stood there. Mohammed, Kamleh and I were staying all together. I was not allowed to lose Kamleh, and Mohammed would not lose us. So somehow the Jenini ended up squatting in front of me after stopping a few yards back saying, "They will shoot me!" I yelled at him under my breath for coming so far and went a few more steps with Kamleh. Two foreign women in their 60s were standing in front of me. We were all just standing with our hands up. Then suddenly the soldiers started firing, and the women in front of me were hit with something. I started shouting for Mohammed, thinking he's the one who has medical training what the hell am i gonna do if this woman is shot? I looked at her stomach and it was just a bit pink. A rubber-coated bullet had bounced off the water bottle of one of the women and hit the other in the stomach. Then, they started firing more and Mohammed said "Oh my God, they are shooting us." (This was apparently when they started shooting machine guns into the air.) There was also tear gas but I didn't see it. So, we ran. I made friends with a rock, and then made friends with the guy from Bil'in who was making friends with the same rock. He gave me some onion for the tear gas. They continued firing, and there was an even bigger sound that we couldn't recognize and that Mohammed guessed was some kind of cannon, and so we ran back to the village. I lost my shoe, got it again, and skinned my hands. Some PRCS emt's ran past us with a stretcher, and on the stretcher was an international kid who'd been shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet and was unconscious and bleeding from the head. That can kill you.
That was the scariest part of the day. We went slowly again toward the front, but I didn't go again to the front front. I'm sorry to say I was not gutsy enough to put my body there again. We would walk forward (Mohammed, Kamleh and I), watching what was happening and learning how to look up to see where the tear gas is going to land. For a long time they fired one tear gas canister, one rubber-coated bullet, gas, bullet. At one point the gas canister fell in between Mohommed and me, and Kamleh who was standing about 12 steps ahead of us taking pictures. She fell and so breathed a lot of it, and injured her leg on a rock. She couldn't see for about 20 minutes after that and was trying not to throw up but otherwise that was the worst thing that happened to the three of us. We saw other people getting carried by on stretchers who were vomiting or couldn't breathe. Tear gas is not so bad when you're some distance from the source, but it's quite effective in making people scatter everywhere and causing chaos. I am a little bit disappointed in myself that i didn't go again to support the people in the front, but i felt like it was a bit futile. I didn't want to be stupid. Every time people regrouped, they fired more rubber-coated bullets. Move forward, fire, run. Move forward, fire, run. There needs to be something more creative. I'm at a loss as to what. It didn't matter where you were standing with regards to the gas, though. They fired it to the back of the demo and to all different places in between. I've heard from others who have spent more time in the villages that it's a problem because the Palestinian women attending demonstrations are most often at the back behind the men, where most of the tear gas lands.
So that afternoon we went back to Ramallah, made arayes, and went out to get knafe and coffee. We were all three better friends after that day, unsurprisingly. I can't help but think, though, that there is something incredibly wrong with the fact that the demo was met with that kind of violence, of course in general, as we were standing with our hands in the air, but also that day in particular. People said it was the worst military response in two years in Bil'in. What is wrong when they save the worst military response in two years for the weekend that has over 500 internationals and Israelis present? What is wrong when they save that response for all the media (well, more media than usual) that comes with Nobel Peace Prize winners? Why do they calculate that it is in their interest to show their power and brutality to the internationals by shooting old ladies with rubber-coated bullets? There is something really, really wrong here. Maybe they are calculating that essentially people like me will not be as willing to stand in the front, to come to demos or villages where the wall is. It worked, for now. Our embassies don't care when their citizens are shot for peacefully protesting. The media doesn't care, either. But the entire premise of the international presence is that our passports give us a protection and a certain power. Protection in that they can't shoot us and get away with it so we are effective human shields, and power because when the soldiers see our passports, they won't be as nasty because they don't want us telling the world what they do. My Palestinian friends look at my American passport as if it is something more valuable than most things you can get in life. They tell me that when i show it to the soldiers, it will be very easy for me and they will also be nicer to other people there because they don't want to show me their nastiness. That is the idea. But clearly, it has limits that reveal themselves when rubber-coated bullets strike the stomachs of old white grandmother ladies from about 20 yards or less. It was less than that actually. Did i mention there was also a high pressure water hose? Just like the pictures of the civil rights era.
So, this is what I'm writing for now. That was the conference. Don't worry, I don't intend to put myself in those kinds of situations excessively Tear gas is fine but I'm personally opposed to being shot by any metal object, rubber-coated or not. I didn't expect it to be as bad as it was actually. I was in the same village a year and a half ago and the demo was like a party, mostly because it was Eid and the Israeli army likes to make itself feel good every now and then by respecting a holiday and putting off the home invasions for about a week ( http://www.flickr.com/photos
Just Peas Please, (i know, i know)
Emily
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:)
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