Crack! Fizz! Then, even more alarmingly, WOOMF!! We can’t see what’s happening, but for the South African journalists tagging along it sounds ominously familiar.
A pitiless sun above, white dust and plastic litter underfoot, dry-stone walls, prickly pear thickets, ancient olive groves.
All around us on the dirt road are Palestinians, some as young as eight or nine, who seem unfazed by the noise of battle and almost six weeks of almost daily protest. They chant slogans in Arabic and wave Palestinian and green and white Hamas flags.
The turnout disappoints one of our Israeli hosts, Elan Orian from Anarchists Against the Wall. Perhaps 250 villagers from Nilleen are marching, instead of the expected thousand, accompanied by 40 or 50 Israeli sympathisers.
But he takes comfort from the fact that there is some support from nearby Palestinian settlements. “The biggest weakness is that each village protests on its own. It’s much easier for the military to deal with,†he says.
We top the ridge and the battlefield unfolds before us.
Visible through olive groves charred by past confrontations — hot teargas canisters start fires, our hosts say — is the parched valley that marks the route of the “separation barrierâ€. Beyond lies more Palestinian land, from which the barrier will soon divide them.
On the opposite ridge two bullÂdozers are busy uprooting olive trees to create a 70m-wide “exclusion zone†for the fence itself, gravel swathes to highlight footprints and access roads for Israeli security vehicles.
A long line of demonstrators is winding up the opposite hillside; with Israeli activists in the van to moderate security force violence, they plan to veer left and throw themselves in the path of the clanking behemoths.
Yesterday, a Palestinian proudly tells me, a small group of protesters broke through and inflicted some damage on the vehicles.
Nilleen, on the West Bank north-west of Jerusalem, near Ramallah, has just emerged from a four-day siege and curfew and the security forces are pumped for action. Having declared the valley a “closed military zoneâ€, about 100 soldiers and border police — the latter particularly feared for their brutality — are strung out along the ridge.
As the demonstrators toil upwards, they come under a steady shower of teargas canisters and stun grenades, which can blow off fingers if handled, an activist warns me.
There is no retaliation, not even stone-throwing. Wherever we have been on the West Bank the theme has been one of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation and the wall.
We follow through the drifting wisps of teargas; my eyes and nose start to stream. I stop on the ridge and my companions move on.
Unknown to me, the advance guard of the protesters has been beaten back by the troops, who are now driving onwards to clear the ridge. Suddenly, at 50m or less, a khaki-clad, helmeted group is striding through the bushes hurling stun grenades and firing rubber bullets as they come.
Something hisses past my head and through the tree behind me. Just ahead, a vivid flash and thunderclap. Over the rocks, through the thorn-bushes, slip-sliding down the path and I’m at the bottom of the hill again.
Behind me, carried on a stretcher, is a middle-aged American member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which “maintains a violence-deterring presence between Israeli settlers, soldiers and Palestiniansâ€. She has been hit in the buttock by a rubber bullet, indicating that her back was turned to her assailant.
Others are treated in the field by paramedics or moved to the clinic in Nilleen, while two Palestinians with “penetration wounds†are transferred to hospital.
In the past 16 days 220 protesters have been treated for injuries, according to a village spokesperson. In nearby Biddoo, where the wall has been completed, at least two have died.
Now begins the slow, straggling retreat, accelerated by an army flanking movement through the olive trees which harries the protesters back to the edge of the village.
The mood is bitterly defiant. A villager, holding aloft an olive branch, the resistance symbol of the Palestinian fellahin (farmers), proclaims the start of the third intifada. “Fuck you, soldiers!†screams another. An Israeli activist shouts up at the guardians of the bulldozers: “I’m ashamed of you! I’m ashamed to be Jewish!â€
A Palestinian loads a slingshot and hurls a desultory rock or two across the valley; they drop harmlessly short of the soldiers.
An ironic symbol of a grossly unequal contest: David the Palestinian and his slingshot versus the Israeli Goliath. Except that the ruthlessly efficient giant shows no sign of falling.
In many ways it is RSA circa 1988 — stones against guns in an elemental fight against injustice.
There is no compensation for the uprooted olive trees, which are the basis of the Palestinian economy, and we were told in Biddoo that the soldiers use every possible device to obstruct Palestinian access to the groves from which the barrier separates them.
The unstated aim, villagers insist, is dispossession.
There is, too, the larger picture. The International Court of Justice condemned the wall as unilaterally imposing a political boundary between Israel and the West Bank it occupied during the 1967 war.
Designed to secure the Israeli settlements set up on conquered territory in defiance of the Geneva Convention — at Nilleen it balloons around the religious settlement of Modi’in Illit — it will entrench the seizure of another 8,6% of Palestinian land.
But in other respects conditions are far more suggestive of South Africa in the 1960s. With Israel’s economy growing at more than 5% a year and the backing of the world’s superpower, it is buffered from international pressure.
But the obvious difference between the West Bank 2008 and South Africa 20 years back is that the security forces are comfortably holding the line. And this imposes a terrible strain on the strategy of non-violence.
Although many Nilleen villagers are sure to return to the barricades tomorrow, next week and next month, the shrinking turnout worries Orian.
What, in this daunting context, drives the Israeli activists loosely organised under the misleading banner of Anarchists Against the Wall?
A few may be youthful hell-raisers in heavy-metal T-shirts, but many, perhaps most, are not ideological anarchists — they are grown-ups with brains, skills and jobs.
Orian, for example, is a physicist and environmental scientist in his thirties; Kobi Snitz, hit above the ear by a teargas canister during the protest, is a 36-year-old mathematician at Technikon Haifa.
We interview them at the Nilleen clinic: Ivan, an Argentinian immigrant struck in the face with a rifle butt; Snitz, who complains that the Israeli vanguard was advancing with arms raised when it was attacked; Jonathan Pollak, with a suspected fracture after a baton was broken across his leg.
Pollak tells us he has sustained at least 10 injuries in wall-related protests, including a brain haemorrhage which prevented him from standing for weeks. But he’ll be back, he says. The others echo him.
Guilt, snorts an Israeli photographer when we return to our hotel, arguing that the activists have a perverse need to suffer. I reflect that guilt can be a fitting response, particularly to rights violations in one’s name.
For Orian resistance to the wall has cemented Israelis and Palestinians in a new and fragile bond. Anarchists Against the Wall may be dismissed as lunatics and traitors by the Israeli mainstream, but like South African whites in the mould of Joe Slovo and Neil Aggett, they have opened a tiny conduit of goodwill between two warring peoples.
There is another motive which one would expect to resonate with Jews everywhere. It was highlighted by Amos Goldberg, our tour guide at Yad Va’shem, Jerusalem’s remarkable Holocaust memorial.
A middle-aged Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of Children of Abraham, which fosters ties between Jewish and Muslim youth, Goldberg was arrested a month ago while confronting Israeli security forces in the conflict-torn West Bank city of Hebron.
His focus is less on the perpetrators and victims of the European genocide than on the millions of ordinary, decent people, many of them not anti-Semitic, who watched from the sidelines.
“We blame the Poles for not helping the Jews,†he says. “I don’t want to be a bystander.â€
End the Siege on Gaza
International Day of Action
Saturday 26th January
The Cape Town Anti-War Coalition will hold a protest at 10am in Adderley Street, Cape Town, on 26th January 2008.
This has been declared as an International Day of Action to End the Siege on Gaza.
Action Palestine is organising a coach from Manchester to go to London
for the protest outside the Parliament
Leaving from outside the Students’ union at 9am
The coach will be returning on the same day.
Tickets: £5
Tickets available from the Campaigns office in UMSU.
Join us in protesting against Israel blocking desperately ill Palestinians from accessing medical treatment and its escalating military attacks on Gaza.
Saturday 26 January, 4-6pm Parliament
We are particularly appealing to medical staff to join us in uniform to visibly express their opposition to Israel preventing Gazans from travelling for lifesaving medical treatment.
‘The human catastrophe deliberately inflicted on Gaza by western policies over the past two years is one of the great crimes of the century so far’. Jonathan Steele, Guardian 11 January.
Israel’s illegal, brutal siege of Gaza is tightening, restricting fuel and electricity, and preventing even medical supplies, food, essential construction materials and paper for UN schoolbooks from entering Gaza . With lethal military strikes being launched on Gaza , and Ehud Barak has warned that an Israeli invasion of Gaza is nearing.
Even those who desperately need medical treatment are prevented from leaving. Over 65 Palestinians have died as a direct result of Israel ’s prevention of access to medical treatment. Miri Weingarten from the Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said ‘ Israel intends and wishes to punish the general population in Gaza , and they’re not hiding it — in fact, they’ve stated it clearly.’
Dr Ahmed Abu Tawahineh, deputy director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, has pointed out that since last June, only a hundred patients have been allowed out of Gaza to seek treatment – less than 10 per cent of the more than 1,000 applicants.
How long can this inhuman treatment continue unchallenged by international leaders?
Collective punishment is being inflicted upon the Palestinians for voting for a government against the wishes of Israel , the US and the EU.
Call on the British government to end its collusion with these policies, which are imprisoning Gazans and attempting to destroy their lives by limiting access to food, electricity, clean water supplies and medical treatment.
Action Palestine
A peaceful event to spread awareness about the wall in Palestine took place in Nottingham University (see video). The university security clamped down very heavily without good reason; violating the rights of students to be politically active. Also the police was called by the university and 2 arrests were made and the protesters were made to take the wall down!
Below is an article covering the incidents in the a local news paper this is Nottingham:
UNI ARREST SPARKS FREE SPEECH ROW
From www.thisisnottingham.co.uk
Footage showing the arrest of a University of Nottingham student during a campus protest has sparked a freedom of speech campaign on the internet.
A video of the arrest is currently posted on the YouTube website, while a Facebook group called Bring Back Freedom of Speech to University has attracted 900 members.
The 22-year-old student, who has asked not to be named, did not organise the event, meant to raise awareness of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and was initially a bystander.
Second-year law student Glen Wright started filming the protest when police were called. The video shows a police officer arguing with the unnamed student before arresting him for alleged breach of the peace.
The student told the Evening Post: “They shouldn’t have arrested me. As the video shows I was being slightly cocky, but that is no grounds for arrest.”
Students blocked a path near the university’s library with a wooden board, to represent the West Bank Wall. Security officers asked them to remove the board, and called police when the students refused.
The protest was organised by Nidal Hajaj, a second-year sociology student who is president of the university’s Palestinian Society. The group was given permission to have a protest stall on the university campus, but not to use the wooden board.
Mr Hajaj said: “I put the wall up and immediately a member of security came over. We said to them there was nothing illegal about it. It was blocking a path, but there was another path going around it.”
Glen Wright became involved after witnessing the argument between students and security staff.
He said: “I’m familiar with the law [being a law student] and realised what was happening was out of order.
“I couldn’t believe what was happening, all over this little ‘wall’.”
A spokesperson for Notts Police confirmed a 22-year-old student was arrested.
A spokesperson for the University of Nottingham said: “The protesters were asked repeatedly by university security staff to take the wall down so that the students could continue with the protest in the manner in which they had agreed.”
The students refused.
The video shows a police officer telling the student now at the centre of the campaign: “You are inflaming the situation.”
The police officer and student are then heard arguing.