THE "PALESTINIAN GANDHIS" OF BILIN

by Doug Ireland, July 15, 2005

The small Palestinian village of Bilin is just one of many communities being rent asunder by Israel's Wall of Shame, the 650 kilometer apartheid barrier meant to separate Palestinians from Israel, and which slices through many communities and completely encircles others. But Bilin is remarkable for the creative non-violence with which its residents have carried out demonstrations against the destruction of their community and the confiscation of their lands to build it. They have conducted demonstrations while placing themselves in handcuffs, as the Lebanon Star reported -- so it could not be said they were throwing stones at the Israeli occupying army. They have sent their minor children to demonstrate in front of the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem -- since their mothers and fathers were not allowed to enter Israel. They have chained themselves to trees about to be uprooted to make way for the Wall.

Demonstrators have sealed themselves in large metal water barrels placed in the way of the construction crews erecting the Wall of Shame. They have held mock funerals of white-draped coffins, each inscribed with the name of human values that should be respected -- Justice, Fairness, Humanity, Courtesy, and the like. They have created a mock security fence (LEFT), placed themselves under it, and handed out leaflets in Hebrew to the Israeli soldiers begging them not to destroy their village and answer non-violence with violence. Israeli peace activists from groups like Gush Shalom (the Israeli Peace Bloc) have flocked to Bilin to join in these peaceful, nonviolent protests. The response to this nonviolence by the Israeli army has been disproportionately violent -- tear gas, rubber bullets, live bullets, night-time raids of homes in Bilin. When attacked in this way, the Bilin protesters have responded with balloons filled with chicken dung -- an insulting, but hardly lethal response. Children have been killed -- just last week, a 16-year-old from Bilin, Muheeb Assi, was shot to death by the Israeli army occupiers.

Today, in an op-ed for the International Herald-Tribune, "Help Us Stop Israel's Wall Peacefully," Mohammed Khatib -- secretary of the Bilin Village Council and a leading member of the Bilin Popular Committee Against the Wall -- tells the story of the "Palestinian Gandhis" of Bilin:

"...Bilin is being strangled by Israel's wall. Though our village sits two and a half miles east of the Green Line, Israel is taking roughly 60 percent of our 1,000 acres of land in order to annex the six settlements and build the wall around them. This land is also money to us - we work it. Bilin's 1,600 residents depend on farming and harvesting our olives for our livelihood.

The wall will turn Bilin into an open-air prison, like Gaza. After Israeli courts refused our appeals to prevent wall construction, we, along with Israelis and people from around the world, began peacefully protesting the confiscation of our land. We chose to resist non-violently because we are peace-loving people who are victims of occupation. We have opened our homes to the Israelis who have joined us. They have become our partners in struggle. Together we send a strong message - that we can coexist in peace and security. We welcome anyone who comes to us as a guest and who works for peace and justice for both peoples, but we will resist anyone who comes as an occupier.

"We have held more than 50 peaceful demonstrations since February. We learned from the experience and advice of villages like Budrus and Biddu, which resisted the wall nonviolently. Palestinians from other areas now call people from Bilin "Palestinian Gandhis." Our demonstrations aim to stop the bulldozers destroying our land, and to send a message about the wall's impact. We've chained ourselves to olive trees that were being bulldozed for the wall to show that taking trees' lives takes the village's life. We've distributed letters asking the soldiers to think before they shoot at us, explaining that we are not against the Israeli people, but against the building of the wall on our land. We refuse to be strangled by the wall in silence..."

Prof. Marcy Newman, an American who teaches English at Boise State University and is one of the International Solidarity Movement activists who've joined the nonviolent Bilin demonstrations, wrote a moving diary of the July 9 demonstration in which a teenager was killed by the Israeli forces: "I saw Muheeb Ahmad Assi, and in fact filmed him as he was wounded and taken away in the ambulance. His funeral is in a half hour. For the first time I witnessed with my own eyes the aggressiveness of the Israeli military Occupying a land that they have no legal right to be on."

Last Wednesday, Ariel Sharon's government adopted a policy to speed up construction of the Wall of Shame -- one year almost to the day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague declared the Wall to be illegal and ordered it torn down in terms that brook no finagling:

"Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breaches of international law," said the ICJ. "it is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the Wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated, and to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto." In Jerusalem alone, the Wall of Shame will cut off 55,000 Palestinians from the rest of the city, the New York Times reports.

And yet, even as it steps up building the Wall of Shame (now scheduled to be completed by the first week in September), the hypocritical Sharon government has the chutzpah to ask this week for an additional $2.2 Billion in aid from the U.S. for "disengagement" -- money that will simply go to reinforce the Israeli military,already armed to the teeth by Washington's subsidies and arms sales.

There is no "disengagement" for those in Bilin whose lands and livelihood are being expropriated by force. Where is the vast outcry of support for the nonviolent Palestinian Gandhis of Bilin from the U.S. anti-war movement?

RELATED READING: Check out the article in the new online English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique on "Palestine: The Economy of Despair"

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