The Israelis of Bil’in

Ok gang, here is the latest on my string of West Bank tear gassings. Should be controversial and fun as usual. Enjoy.

The Israelis of Bil'in
First published by the Ma'an news agency

For over four years the international media has reported on the weekly protests in the small West Bank village of Bil’in. They report that Israel has moved the separation wall so it annexes over 60% of the village, that the residents of Bil’in once worked the confiscated land as a source of livelihood and that after every Friday prayer there is a non-violent protest that gets dispersed by tear gas. What is left out from such accounts is that many who attend these West Bank protests are Israelis Jews.

So what are these Israelis doing? They are breaking Israeli law by entering the West Bank, not to mention the newly relabeled “closed military zone” of Bil’in.” And perhaps even more daring, these Jewish protesters are breaking from the Zionist glue that professes that Israel can do-no-wrong—especially when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians.

A wall within

“You first have to cross a wall within yourself,” says Inbar, a 22 year-old student at Tel Aviv University referring metaphorically to the separation wall Israel has constructed around half of the West Bank.

“I lost friends the first time I came... I was an outcast. And when the solders saw me they pushed me and called me a whore. I only tell a few people [Israelis] what I do on my Fridays now. Not everyone is, how shall we say, open?”

Many Israelis who to attend the anti-wall protests in Bil’in, or those in the villages of Ni’lin or Al-Ma’asara, say they come on a regular basis. Some say they have been attending these rallies for over four years.

Inbar continues, “Just because I was born Jewish does not make me different. I consider us all people who work this land… as our ancestors did together for so many years before. You cannot change history.”

“But you also can’t push facts on people if they don’t want to hear it. They will reject it outright. Still, I am willing to have that argument.”

Inbar studies agriculture and says that despite her unpopular views, she still has an active social life in Israel.

“The Israeli government has a lot invested in this wall. I think eventually it will move. Not come down, but move… which is a still bad because nothing has done more to separate Israelis from Palestinians… than this,” she said pointing at the wall.

“I come to show my solidarity. If protesting this wall is something we can do together, then so be it.”

Some in regular attendance of these West Bank protests estimate that up to half of the international participates are Israelis Jews. Many come with an organization, or car-pool from hubs like Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

The refuseniks

“We are not the left-wing,” says Dany, a 29-year-old artist and activist from Netanya. “They hate us because people confuse us with them. I refused to serve in the army.

“I come out [to Bil’in] for many reasons—land-theft, basic human rights and injustice in my own name. For 18-months I have been getting tear gassed by my own people.”
“That speaks loudly to Palestinians. They know our history. And I will be back next Friday.”

All Israelis must serve in the Israeli army; postings include everything from checkpoint duty to organizing social events for troops on their off days. While most assignments do not require combat, they do require being part of an occupational force. That is unacceptable for some Israelis. Such are called refuseniks.

Commonly, there are two categories of Israeli who refuse army service. The first kind is an already enlisted reserve solder that signs a letter refusing to serve in the occupied territories. The second is an Israeli that simply does not want to be part of the occupation force and refuses to serve in any post mandated by the army.

Refusing the Israeli army is punishable by imprisonment.

Two sides to every wall

Meet Assaf. He is a 24-year-old Israeli, a self-proclaimed “lover of peace” and a former medic for the Israeli army who served in the West Bank. “I have seen violence and I hate it,” he says. “I hate it more than anything. It is a disease of humanity.

“When I was a medic in the IDF [Israeli army forces] I was on the other side of these protests. The other side of this wall.”

Assaf went on to suggest that the Palestinians should get giant posters of Gandhi and read Marin Luther King speeches over a loud speaker at the next Friday protest. “They [the protests] are in the right direction, but they need more organization. More structure.

“I didn’t like it [throwing rocks at the solders] when I was in the IDF and I don’t like it now. It encourages the solders to react.” Violence breeds more violence, he said.

“As [Israeli] solders we are told by our commanders that ‘the world hates us’ and that ‘if it was up to these people the holocaust would be nothing.’ Our IDF commanders used the Jewish narrative to put fear in us.

“It is just crazy to think that beyond the gas, beyond the wall and beyond the armor, they [the Israeli soldiers] are actually terrified of the 50 unarmed people here. Simply crazy.”

The gassing at Bil’in

When Bil’in’s Imam concludes the weekly Friday prayer, a group forms outside the main mosque. They begin to beat their chests and chant anti-occupation slogans. “One, two, three, four, occupation no more,” is a normal cry. And the protest comes to life.

Palestinians, internationals (Israelis included) and a small army of press cross the sunken wadi, or valley in Arabic, and approach the wall that has annexed over half of the land of the village. Israeli soldiers pour out of their armored barracks in anticipation.

The protesters continue to shout and take pictures; a daring few opt to abuse the barbwire fence. Many of the Israeli civilians look through the crowd to their nation’s solders, with Bil’in’s occupied land as a painful background.

Out of nowhere, rocks start to fly from the hands of teenage Palestinians who crouch behind ancient boulders and olive trees. The Israeli soldiers on the other side of the fence watch, occasionally flinching in their expensive armor.

And then, like a monsoon, tear gas comes raining from the sky. The crowd falls back through the wadi and back into the village of Bil’in.

On the pavement is a young Israeli protester. He is faint from the gas and red in the face. His tear ducts are in overdrive, tying to rid his eyes from his own country’s gas. The Israeli is alone.

An elder from the village calmly approaches him. Recognizing the situation, the elder says in an Arabic-accented Hebrew, “shalom aleichem,” or peace be upon you, and he extends his hand.

The young Israeli is slow, but he gets up. The Palestinian elder waits. And the Jew and the Arab walk back to the village. Together.

And so is the Friday drama in the West Bank village of Bil’in.

"But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians"

Wow, sixteen plus comments on the Sabra and Shatila piece. Not bad gang. Here is a passage I came across last night while reading a bit more on the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Perhaps the most famous Beirut-based journalist once soberly wrote:

"When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a
massacre?..."

"But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were
certainly Christian militiamen - from which particular unit we were still unsure
- but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the
killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them,
given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment.
Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military
assistance - the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men
who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila - and they had
established military liason with the murderers in the camps."

Can you guess who wrote this? Yes, Robert Fisk--the same guy whose old bar stool I sat on last month in the famous bar Beiruti bar, the Duke of Wellington.

Sabra and Shatila is history. But what is not are the people who still live in the fenced-off camps. And may they not be forgotten in a Middle East peace deal. Just because Palestinian refugees can't vote for Abbas (Abu Mazen) does not mean that he is not responsible for them.

Click here to read the lattest news on the subject.

Getting a Sandwich

The West Bank is a calm place these days. In fact so much so that I leave my apartment in Bethlehem at 11pm—even after a few post work beers--to go grab some food without pausing to think for my own safety. You just don't need to.

But tonight was interesting. I left my apartment and headed up the steep wadi to the main road to find a taxi. Eventually I found one. The driver was about 6'5 and only God knows how many pounds. He was for sure the buffist Palestinian man I have ever seen—muscles bulging out of his shirt and everything. He had a deep voice and his normal volume was something short of a roaring thunder. Simply, the guy was a beast.

We raced up a hill to the round-a-bout on the main drag. And there to great us was around 30 Palestinian Authority troops with machine guns standing by their fortified vehicles. "Wow," I said involuntarily. "It seems like a little much for Bethlehem. What's going on?" The buff driver said that it was nothing. "Only a show of force. They come out only to show a presence."

He then went on to tell me about the various Fatah militias he had served with over the years. "Last week I was guarding a VIP for the Palestinian Authority. We were going to Ramallah. Now we are more afraid of Hamas than of the Israelis. Bullets fly and you don't know what way they are coming from."

Then he briefly told me about some special-opts military training he did in Virginia, but he didn’t go into details. And I didn’t push him.

He then asked me to buy him a special XXL workout shirt in California. He wanted me to send it to him. "The ones in the West Bank are are too small."

In conclusion he said something that was a bit jolting. It was without political motivation (keep in mind this guy is a taxi driver/militia man). He said: "I hate guns. It scares away the tourists. We don't want Bethlehem to turn into another Jerusalem.” (What was this supposed to mean? A place that is in a sort of permeate martial law? A place where "normal" is to have lots of guns in the public view?) Again, I did not push him.

And that was that. I found this interaction unusual because this guy seemed like such an immortal badass, yet he thought that Islamists where a bigger threat than Zionists and that Jerusalem was infested with guns--which it is.

After 20 seconds in the cab I felt a bit threatened. Yet when I got out of it—sandwich in hand—I felt safer than I have felt for a while.

After the Massacre: Sabra and Shatila, 27 years later

In remembrance of those who lost there lives in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in south Beirut 27 years ago, I thought I'd write up a piece for the Ma'an news agency. If you not familiar with Sabra and Shatila, take a moment to brush up on the wiki before you charge through the piece. I took the photos and gathered the quotes from my visit to these camps last month.

After the Massacre

(First published by the Ma'an news agency)

“That is the old Israeli watchtower and entrance to Sabra,” a man on the street pointed, standing in front of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camps. Below the tower, quarantined like a civil war time capsule, were the camps left to fend for themselves on the outskirts of Beirut.

No more than 20 meters past the former Israeli watchtower, in an empty lot, is the memorial for the victims of the 1982 Lebanon Civil War massacre. Camp residents say the site was once a mass grave for the slain. The memorial was a single-track dirt path linking a series of billboards with images of the dead.

The massacres perpetrators were of the predominantly Christian Phalange party: supplied, supported and supervised by on-looking Israeli soldiers.

The Phalangist pogrom was clear. What was not, however, was the extent of the crime. At the time of the massacre, the Director of Israeli Military Intelligence said that between the days of September 16 and 18, 1982, a minimum of 700 “terrorists” had been killed. Yet, reporter for the Independent Robert Fisk wrote in his book, Pity the Nation, “Phalangist officers I knew in east Beirut told me that at least 2,000 ‘terrorists’—women as well as men—had been killed in Chatila.” The real number, according to Fisk, is thought to be higher.

Leaving the mass grave memorial and moving into the open-air market of the Sabra camp, a bullet-ridden wall stands separating a camp dump from its market. In all likelihood the half-block dumping ground was once on the fringes of the camp, but not anymore. The camp had no urban planner, so it grew until the market fully encircled the awful collection of stench, sewage and a sore reminder that nobody really intended to be living in the Sabra camp some sixty-years after the Nakba- the Palestinian exodus of 1948.

At the far end of the bullet-chafed wall stood a child of about ten years, a refugee. With little hesitation he immersed himself into the filthy heap, heaving his woven sack of valued rubbish over the rotting mounds. For all the archetypes of the poverty-ridden Palestinian refugee that exists in a foreigner’s consciousness, this is surely it. There was to be no school for this boy. No passport, no rights and no state.

Beyond the heap hung layers of political propaganda posters: A keffiyehed militant with the bold letters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine plastered next to a green-tinted portrait of Hamas’ founder Sheik Yassin with the party logo “Martyrs of Freedom & Victory;” a weathered PLO poster of Arafat; even one of a masked fighter on a tank, clutching a Kalashnikov with the brand of Islamic Jihad. And the posters were not just of Palestinian parties, but of the Lebanese Amal and Hezbollah as well. As a nearby shopkeeper who sold Hezbollah DVD’s put it, “The camp is mixed now… mixed with Palestinians and [Lebanese] Shias… United by resistance...”

Despite appearances, however, inside the Lebanese Army’s encirclement of the camp a surprisingly calm business-as-usual air prevailed. The streets weren’t crowded, but populated. The buyers, the sellers, and of course the children, were everywhere, looking to relieve the gnawing boredom of a lifetime’s confinement to the camp. “We are not allowed to leave [the camps],” one of the sellers said, “No papers.”

United resistance aside, the camp was in shambles. Everything the Lebanese government might do in Sabra and Shatila—urban planning, paving streets, coordinating an electrical grid, sewage—was left to the Palestinian residents. At the beginning, however, the camp played host to the bigwigs of the Palestinian leadership in the Palestine Liberation Organization, who organized camp life and connected the residents to the Palestinian struggle.

The powerful PLO, back in 1982, provided the motive of the massacre’s perpetrators, the Christian Phalange militia, who sought to take revenge against PLO leaders—which had in fact already fled Lebanon—for the alleged assassination of the Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel. But the only people who remained in the camps that summer of 1982 were unarmed Palestinians.

What happened at Sabra and Shatila is still considered the bloodiest single event in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is also among the most egregious and underreported aspects of the Palestinian calamity to date.

On the anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, 16 September, the issue of the refugees and the right of return reaches again for the surface of Palestinian politics. With the newly-charged peace process being pushed by the United States, and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s recently released strategy to establish Palestinian state in two years, the issue of returnees has been subsumed by talk of settlements in the West Bank.

American efforts, and Fayyad’s plan focus more on securing infrastructure and borders than focusing on the estimated 500,000 refugees without rights in Lebanon, or the hundreds of thousands of others in Jordan, Syria, Iraq and in the Gulf.

Palestinians in the camps have a precarious relationship with the current peace initiatives, particularly the older generation who still recall the villages they fled in 1948 and 1967.

“Sure I would support Obama’s plan,” an old man reflects on the US President’s push for a two-state solution. “But what kind of solution is it? I have nothing in this West Bank… it would make me a foreigner in my own land… I would only go back to my village. And I don’t even know what is there now.”

He picks up an old hatchet from his coffee table and continues, “They [the Zionists] chased us and hit us on the head with these. I left my small village near Acre [Akko] because of it.”

Haifa and Hezbollah

I'm going to leave Bethlehem for a few days and go hangout on the sandy beaches of Haifa, Israel. My route is going to be Bethlehem to Ramallah, Ramallah to Nablus, Nablus to Jenin, Jenin to Nazareth and Nazareth to Haifa. It shall be quite a day tomorrow.

So on my two-day vacation, I have decided to assign some "Casbah homework." Oh yeah, can you believe it? Well, believe it. Because this is Mohamad Bazzi's manifesto on the last year of Hezbollah history.

Though he does not seem to make any real concrete points--like for example what to do in spite of all of this "history"—he writes for a good read on recent events.

Remember that we posted a good clip the same speech (in the south Beirut) that Dr. Bizzi talks about in the article.

Click here and here to watch.

Nasrallah claims that if Israel hits Beirut, well, he will "hit" Tel Aviv in return. The plot thickens. Especially since everyone in the media seems obsessed with “the next Israeli-Hezbollah war.”

In his speech, Nasrallah advanced the idea that Hezbollah's weapons buildup and overall military capability is a deterrent to Israel -- trying to convince the Lebanese that a stronger Hezbollah will prevent a war. "You might ask, 'Do we have the power to prevent a war?' I will reply, 'Yes, there is a very real possibility that, if we cooperate with one another as Lebanese, we will be able to prevent Israel from launching a war against Lebanon,'" Nasrallah told the crowd, which included members of most Lebanese political factions. "I stress to you that there will be surprises in any new war with Israel, God willing. By saying this to the Israelis, we can deter and prevent them. Let them think a million times before waging a war on Lebanon. Let them look for other ways to confront us, but not war."

The Gassing at Bilin, round II (West Bank)

For the past four and a half years those in the media have been reporting on the weekly protests in the small West Bank village of Bilin. They report that Israel has moved the wall across the green line to annex over 60% of the village. They report that the people of Bilin once to worked this land for income and are now without it. And they report that after every Friday prayer there is a non-violent protest that gets scattered by tear gas.

So, as a service to The Casbah, I will post the best of my pictures from it:

(Half of the non-Palestinian crowd was made up of Jewish Israelis. They come from all over Israel out to the West Bank to see what their government is doing in their name. I will post a feature article on this in a few days.)

(The guy in the wheelchair shows up every week. The “We want peace” sign was also made by Jewish Israelis.)

(Just a great shot of a Palestinian man with his flag.)

(This is the latest piece of West Bank technology to hit the market. The plastic bag over the head technique is precisely what my mother told me not to do in elementary school. Yet, it seemed to give this man a good 30-seconds of tear gas free air. What was I going to tell him? “No, that is a bad idea. Just get gassed instead? Ha.)

(Flags of protest.)

(The first smoke bomb of the day. Across the fence you can see the Israeli solders that launched it. They are slowly retreating.)

(I ran up the wadi, or creek-like valley in Arabic, to get some pictures of some Palestinian kids getting gassed on another front. People probably have been chasing each other in war on this piece of land for over 10,000 years. Think so?)

(And it came raining down like an oriental monsoon. In Arabic it is pronounced, Gaaz.)

(20 seconds earlier there was not a cloud in the sky. Wow.)

(Yes, I got hit. I could not see when I took this picture of myself. Perhaps it was the journalist in me who somehow thought to turn the camera around and snap a good face shot. It is not just the eyes and mouth that it burns, but the skin as well.)

(I think this is the best picture of the day, though it was not of the protest. They watch. They sit. They are entertained.)

For further reading as to why they protest, click here. Enjoy!

For past posts on Bilin click here, here and here.

J Street makes it big

The New Israel Lobby. Huh. A nice article on J Street, indeed.

During the July meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama that “public disharmony between Israel and the U.S. is beneficial to neither” and that differences “should be dealt with directly by the parties.” The president, according to Hoenlein, leaned back in his chair and said: “I disagree. We had eight years of no daylight” — between George W. Bush and successive Israeli governments — “and no progress.”