Dear friends,
you may have already seen the excellent article by Ben Ehrenreich which was published on the weekend by the New York Times Magazine. The article has been described by some in the media as a "pro-Palestine manifesto" and is an extensive and in depth look at the Palestinian struggle against Israel's occupation. In particular, Ehrenreich focuses on the wonderful people of Nabi Saleh, who have been conducting unarmed protests against the occupation and Israeli apartheid since 2009.
The article is long (around 7000 worlds) but wellworth reading and sharing. Over the next week or so, I will post up one or two other articles by Ehrenreich which are equally as good and which address related issues such as Zionism and Israel's theft of Palestinian water resources.
in solidarity, Kim
**
By BEN EHRENREICH: March 15, 2013: New York Times Magazine
On the evening of
Feb. 10, the living room of Bassem Tamimi’s house in the West Bank
village of Nabi Saleh was filled with friends and relatives smoking
and sipping coffee, waiting for Bassem to return from prison. His
oldest son, Waed, 16, was curled on the couch with his 6-year-old
brother, Salam, playing video games on the iPhone that the prime
minister of Turkey had given their sister, Ahed. She had been flown
to Istanbul to receive an award after photos of her shaking her fist
at an armed Israeli soldier won her, at 11, a brief but startling
international celebrity. Their brother Abu Yazan, who is 9, was on a
tear in the yard, wrestling with an Israeli activist friend of
Bassem’s. Nariman, the children’s mother, crouched in a side
room, making the final preparations for her husband’s homecoming
meal, laughing at the two photographers competing for shots from the
narrow doorway as she spread onions onto oiled flatbreads.
On the living-room
wall was a “Free Bassem Tamimi” poster, left over from his last
imprisonment for helping to organize the village’s weekly protests
against the Israeli occupation, which he has done since 2009. He was
gone for 13 months that time, then home for 5 before he was arrested
again in October. A lot happened during this latest stint: another
brief war in Gaza, a vote in the United Nations granting observer
statehood to Palestine, the announcement of plans to build 3,400
homes for settlers, an election in Israel. Protests were spreading
around the West Bank.
That night, the
call came at about 7:30. Twenty people squeezed into three small cars
and headed to the village square. More neighbors and cousins arrived
on foot. (All of Nabi Saleh’s 550 residents are related by blood or
marriage, and nearly all share the surname Tamimi.) Then a dark Ford
pulled slowly into the square, and everyone fell silent.
Bassem, who is 45,
stepped out of the car, straight-spined, his blue eyes glowing in the
lamplight. He seemed a little thinner and grayer than the last time I
saw him, in July. He hugged and kissed his eldest son. Ahed was next,
then one by one, in silence, Bassem embraced family and friends,
Palestinian activists from Ramallah and Jerusalem, Israeli leftists
from Tel Aviv. When he had greeted everyone, he walked to the
cemetery and stopped in front of the still-unmarked grave of his
brother-in-law Rushdie, who was shot by Israeli soldiers in November
while Bassem was in prison. He closed his eyes and said a quick
prayer before moving on to the tomb of Mustafa Tamimi, who died after
being hit in the face by a tear-gas canister in December
2011.
Back at home, Bassem looked dazed. Nariman broke down in his arms and rushed outside to hide her tears. The village was still mourning Rushdie’s death, but the young men couldn’t keep up the solemnity for long. They started with little Hamoudi, the son of Bassem’s cousin, tossing him higher and higher in the air above the yard. They set him down and took turns tossing one another up into the night sky, laughing and shouting as if they never had anything to grieve.
From most
south-facing windows in Nabi Saleh, you can see the red roofs of
Halamish, the Israeli settlement on the hilltop across the valley. It
has been there since 1977, founded by members of the messianic
nationalist group Gush Emunim, and growing steadily since on land
that once belonged to residents of Nabi Saleh and another Palestinian
village. Next to Halamish is an Israeli military base, and in the
valley between Nabi Saleh and the settlement, across the highway and
up a dirt path, a small freshwater spring, which Palestinians had
long called Ein al-Qaws, bubbles out of a low stone cliff. In the
summer of 2008, although the land surrounding the spring has for
generations belonged to the family of Bashir Tamimi, who is 57, the
youth of Halamish began building the first of a series of low pools
that collect its waters. Later they added a bench and an arbor for
shade. (Years after, the settlers retroactively applied for a
building permit, which Israeli authorities refused to issue, ruling
that “the applicants did not prove their rights to the relevant
land.” Recently, several of the structures have been removed.) When
Palestinians came to tend to their crops in the fields beside it, the
settlers, villagers said, threatened and threw stones at them.
It took the people
of Nabi Saleh more than a year to get themselves organized. In
December 2009 they held their first march, protesting not just the
loss of the spring but also the entire complex system of control —
of permits, checkpoints, walls, prisons — through which Israel
maintains its hold on the region. Nabi Saleh quickly became the most
spirited of the dozen or so West Bank villages that hold weekly
demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. Since the
demonstrations began, more than 100 people in the village have been
jailed. Nariman told me that by her count, as of February, clashes
with the army have caused 432 injuries, more than half to minors. The
momentum has been hard to maintain — the weeks go by, and nothing
changes for the better — but still, despite the arrests, the
injuries and the deaths, every Friday after the midday prayer, the
villagers, joined at times by equal numbers of journalists and
Israeli and foreign activists, try to march from the center of town
to the spring, a distance of perhaps half a mile. And every Friday,
Israeli soldiers stop them with some combination of tear gas,
rubber-coated bullets, water-cannon blasts of a noxious liquid known
as “skunk” and occasionally live fire.
Last summer, I
spent three weeks in Nabi Saleh, staying in Bassem and Nariman’s
home. When I arrived in June, Bassem had just been released from
prison. In March 2011, Israeli soldiers raided the house to arrest
him. Among lesser charges, he had been accused in a military court of
“incitement,” organizing “unauthorized processions” and
soliciting the village youth to throw stones. (In 2010, 99.74 percent
of the Palestinians tried in military courts were convicted.) The
terms of Bassem’s release forbade him to take part in
demonstrations, which are all effectively illegal under Israeli
military law, so on the first Friday after I arrived, just after the
midday call to prayer, he walked with me only as far as the square,
where about 50 villagers had gathered in the shade of an old mulberry
tree. They were joined by a handful of Palestinian activists from
Ramallah and East Jerusalem, mainly young women; perhaps a dozen
college-age European and American activists; a half-dozen Israelis,
also mainly women — young anarchists in black boots and jeans,
variously pierced. Together they headed down the road, clapping and
chanting in Arabic and English. Bassem’s son Abu Yazan, licking a
Popsicle, marched at the back of the crowd.
Then there were
the journalists, scurrying up hillsides in search of better vantage
points. In the early days of the protests, the village teemed with
reporters from across the globe, there to document the tiny village’s
struggle against the occupation. “Sometimes they come and sometimes
they don’t,” Mohammad Tamimi, who is 24 and coordinates the
village’s social-media campaign, would tell me later. Events in the
Middle East — the revolution in Egypt and civil war in Syria —
and the unchanging routine of the weekly marches have made it that
much harder to hold the world’s attention. That Friday there was
just one Palestinian television crew and a few Israeli and European
photographers, the regulars among them in steel helmets.
In the protests’
first year, to make sure that the demonstrations — and the fate of
Palestinians living under Israeli occupation — didn’t remain
hidden behind the walls and fences that surround the West Bank,
Mohammad began posting news to a blog and later a Facebook page (now
approaching 4,000 followers) under the name Tamimi Press. Soon Tamimi
Press morphed into a homegrown media team: Bilal Tamimi shooting
video and uploading protest highlights to his YouTube channel;
Helme taking photographs; and Mohammad e-mailing news releases to
500-odd reporters and activists. Manal, who is married to Bilal,
supplements the effort with a steady outpouring of tweets
(@screamingtamimi).
News of the protests moves swiftly around the globe, bouncing among blogs on the left and right. Left-leaning papers like Britain’s Guardian and Israel’s Haaretz still cover major events in the village — deaths and funerals, Bassem’s arrests and releases — but a right-wing Israeli news site has for the last year begun to recycle the same headline week after week: “Arabs, Leftists Riot in Nabi Saleh.” Meanwhile, a pilgrimage to Nabi Saleh has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s. For a time, Nariman regularly prepared a vegan feast for the exhausted outsiders who lingered after the protests. (Among the first things she asked me when I arrived was whether I was a vegan. Her face brightened when I said no.)
Whatever success
they have had in the press, the people of Nabi Saleh are intensely
conscious of everything they have not achieved. The occupation, of
course, persists. When I arrived in June, the demonstrators had not
once made it to the spring. Usually they didn’t get much past the
main road, where they would turn and find the soldiers waiting around
the bend. That week though, they decided to cut straight down the
hillside toward the spring. Bashir led the procession, waving a flag.
As usual, Israeli Army jeeps were waiting below the spring. The four
soldiers standing outside them looked confused — it seemed they
hadn’t expected the protesters to make it so far. The villagers
marched past them to the spring, where they surprised three settlers
eating lunch in the shade, still wet from a dip in one of the pools.
One wore only soggy briefs and a rifle slung over his chest.
The kids raced
past. The grown-ups filed in, chatting and smoking. More soldiers
arrived in body armor, carrying rifles and grenade launchers. Waed
and Abu Yazan kicked a soccer ball until a boy spotted a bright
orange carp in one of the pools and Abu Yazan and others tried to
catch it with their bare hands, splashing until the water went cloudy
and the carp disappeared.
Four settlers
appeared on the ledge above the spring, young men in sunglasses and
jeans, one of them carrying an automatic rifle. Beside me, a sturdy,
bald officer from the Israel Defense Forces argued with an Israeli
protester. “I let you come,” the officer insisted. “Now you
have to go.”
The children piled
onto the swing the settlers had built and swung furiously, singing. A
young settler argued with the I.D.F. officer, insisting that he clear
the protesters away.
“What difference
does 10 minutes make?” the officer said.
“Every 10
seconds makes a difference,” the settler answered.
But before their
10 minutes were up, one hour after they arrived, the villagers
gathered the children and left as they had come, clapping and
chanting, their defiance buoyed by joy. For the first time in two and
a half years, they had made it to the spring.
They headed back
along the highway, which meant they would have to pass the road
leading to Halamish. Ahed, her blond hair in a long braid, clutched a
cousin at the front of the procession. As they approached the road, a
border-police officer tossed a stun grenade — a device that makes a
loud bang and a flash but theoretically, at least, causes no bodily
harm — at Ahed’s feet, and then another, and another. Within a
few seconds, the marchers were racing up the hill back toward their
village, tear-gas grenades streaking through the sky above their
heads.
On warm summer
evenings, life in Nabi Saleh could feel almost idyllic. Everyone
knows everyone. Children run in laughing swarms from house to house.
One night, Bassem and Nariman sat outside sharing a water pipe as
Nariman read a translated Dan Brown novel and little Salam pranced
gleefully about, announcing, “I am Salam, and life is beautiful!”
Bassem is employed
by the Palestinian Authority’s Interior Ministry in a department
charged with approving entrance visas for Palestinians living abroad.
In practice, he said, P.A. officials “have no authority” — the
real decisions are made in Israel and passed to the P.A. for
rubber-stamping. Among other things, this meant that Bassem rarely
had to report to his office in Ramallah, leaving his days free to
care for his ailing mother — she died several weeks after I left
the village last summer — and strategizing on the phone, meeting
international visitors and talking to me over many cups of strong,
unsweetened coffee. We would talk in the living room, over the hum of
an Al Jazeera newscast. A framed image of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa
Mosque hung above the television (more out of nationalist pride than
piety: Bassem’s outlook was thoroughly secular).
Though many people
in Nabi Saleh have been jailed, only Bassem was declared a “prisoner
of conscience” by Amnesty International. Foreign diplomats attended
his court hearings in 2011. Bassem’s charisma surely has something
to do with the attention. A strange, radiant calm seemed to hover
around him. He rarely smiled, and tended to drop weighty
pronouncements (“Our destiny is to resist”) in ordinary speech,
but I saw his reserve crumble whenever one of his children climbed
into his lap.
When Israeli
forces occupied the West Bank in 1967, Bassem was 10 weeks old. His
mother hid with him in a cave until the fighting ended. He remembers
playing in the abandoned British police outpost that is now the
center of the I.D.F. base next to Halamish, and accompanying the
older kids who took their sheep to pasture on the hilltop where the
settlement now stands. His mother went to the spring for water every
day. The settlers arrived when he was 9.
Halamish is now
fully established and cozier than most gated communities in the
United States. Behind the razor wire and chain-link perimeter fence,
past the gate and the armed guard, there are playgrounds, a covered
pool, a community center and amphitheater, a clinic, a library, a
school and several synagogues. The roads are well paved and lined
with flowers, the yards lush with lemon trees. Halamish now functions
as a commuter suburb; many of the residents work in white-collar jobs
in Tel Aviv or Modi’in. The settlement’s population has grown to
more than double that of Nabi Saleh.
I first met Shifra
Blass, the spokeswoman for Halamish, in 2010. She talked about how
empty the West Bank — she used the biblical name, Judea and Samaria
— was when she and her husband emigrated from the U.S. in the early
1970s, intent on establishing a Jewish presence in a land they
believed had been promised to them. Relations with the surrounding
villages, she told me, had remained cordial, friendly even, until the
first intifada. (When I asked people in Nabi Saleh about this, no one
remembered it that way.) During the second intifada, three residents
of the settlement, Blass said, were killed by gunfire on nearby
roads. They weren’t near the village, but attitudes hardened.
When I visited her
again last month, she was not eager to talk to me about the conflict
over the spring and the lands surrounding it. “We want to live our
lives and not spend time on it,” Blass said. She dismissed the
weekly demonstrations as the creation of “outside agitators who
come here and stir the pot — internationalists, anarchists,
whatever.” It was all a show, she said, theater for a gullible news
media. “I’ll tell you something: it’s unpleasant.” On
Fridays, she said, the wind sometimes carries the tear gas across the
valley into the settlement. “We have some grown children who say
they cannot come home from university for Shabbat because of the tear
gas. They call and say, ‘Tell me how bad it is, because if it’s
really bad, I’m not coming.’ ”
When the
first intifada broke out in late 1987, Nabi Saleh was, as it is
now, a flash point. The road that passes between the village and the
settlement connects the central West Bank to Tel Aviv: a simple
barricade could halt the flow of Palestinian laborers into Israel.
Bassem was one of the main Fatah youth activists for the region,
organizing the strikes, boycotts and demonstrations that
characterized that uprising. (Nabi Saleh is solidly loyal to Fatah,
the secular nationalist party that rules the West Bank; Hamas, the
militant Islamist movement that governs Gaza, has its supporters
elsewhere in the West Bank but has never had a foothold in the
village.) He would be jailed seven times during the intifada and, he
says, was never charged with a crime. Before his most recent arrest,
I asked him how much time he had spent in prison. He added up the
months: “Around four years.”
After one arrest
in 1993, Bassem told me, an Israeli interrogator shook him with such
force that he fell into a coma for eight days. He has a nickel-size
scar on his temple from emergency brain surgery during that time. His
sister died while he was in prison. She was struck by a soldier and
fell down a flight of courthouse stairs, according to her son
Mahmoud, who was with her to attend the trial of his brother. (The
I.D.F. did not comment on this allegation.)
Bassem nonetheless
speaks of those years, as many Palestinians his age do, with
something like nostalgia. The first intifada broke out spontaneously
— it started in Gaza with a car accident, when an Israeli tank
transporter killed four Palestinian laborers. The uprising was,
initially, an experience of solidarity on a national scale. Its
primary weapons were the sort that transform weakness into strength:
the stone, the barricade, the boycott, the strike. The Israeli
response to the revolt — in 1988, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin
reportedly authorized soldiers to break the limbs of unarmed
demonstrators — began tilting international public opinion toward
the Palestinian cause for the first time in decades. By the
uprising’s third year, however, power had shifted to the P.L.O.
hierarchy. The first Bush administration pushed Israel to negotiate,
leading eventually to the 1993 Oslo Accord, which created the
Palestinian Authority as an interim body pending a “final status”
agreement.
But little was
resolved in Oslo. A second intifada erupted in 2000, at first mostly
following the model set by the earlier uprising. Palestinians blocked
roads and threw stones. The I.D.F. took over a house in Nabi Saleh.
Children tossed snakes, scorpions and what Bassem euphemistically
called “wastewater” through the windows. The soldiers withdrew.
Then came the heavy wave of suicide bombings, which Bassem termed
“the big mistake.” An overwhelming majority of Israeli casualties
during the uprising occurred in about 100 suicide attacks, most
against civilians. A bombing at one Tel Aviv disco in 2001 killed 21
teenagers. “Politically, we went backward,” Bassem said. Much of
the international good will gained over the previous decade was
squandered. Taking up arms wasn’t, for Bassem, a moral error so
much as a strategic one. He and everyone else I spoke with in the
village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just
don’t think it works. Bassem could reel off a list of Nabi Saleh’s
accomplishments. Of some — Nabi Saleh, he said, had more advanced
degrees than any village — he was simply proud. Others — one of
the first military actions after Oslo, the first woman to participate
in a suicide attack — involved more complicated emotions.
In 1993, Bassem
told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight
years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a
Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of
them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who
is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh. Though
everyone I spoke with in the village appeared keenly aware of the
corrosive effects of violence — “This will kill the children,”
Manal said, “to think about hatred and revenge” — they resented
being asked to forswear bloodshed when it was so routinely visited
upon them. Said, Manal told me, “lost his father, uncle, aunt,
sister — they were all killed. How can you blame him?”
The losses of the
second intifada were enormous. Nearly 5,000 Palestinians and more
than 1,000 Israelis died. Israeli assassination campaigns and the
I.D.F.’s siege of West Bank cities left the Palestinian leadership
decimated and discouraged. By the end of 2005, Yasir Arafat was dead,
Israel had pulled its troops and settlers out of Gaza and the
Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, had reached a truce
with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The uprising sputtered out. The
economy was ruined, Gaza and the West Bank were more isolated from
each other than ever, and Palestinians were divided, defeated and
exhausted.
But in 2003, while
the intifada was still raging, Bassem and others from Nabi Saleh
began attending demonstrations in Budrus, 20 minutes away. Budrus was
in danger of being cut off from the rest of the West Bank by Israel’s
planned separation barrier, the concrete and chain-link divide that
snakes along the border and in many places juts deeply into
Palestinian territory. Residents began demonstrating. Foreign and
Israeli activists joined the protests. Fatah and Hamas loyalists
marched side by side. The Israeli Army responded aggressively: at
times with tear gas, beatings and arrests; at times with live
ammunition. Palestinians elsewhere were fighting with Kalashnikovs,
but the people of Budrus decided, said Ayed Morrar, an old friend of
Bassem’s who organized the movement there, that unarmed resistance
“would stress the occupation more.”
The strategy
appeared to work. After 55 demonstrations, the Israeli government
agreed to shift the route of the barrier to the so-called 1967 green
line. The tactic spread to other villages: Biddu, Ni’lin, Al
Ma’asara and in 2009, Nabi Saleh. Together they formed what is
known as the “popular resistance,” a loosely coordinated effort
that has maintained what has arguably been the only form of active
and organized resistance to the Israeli presence in the West Bank
since the end of the second intifada in 2005. Nabi Saleh, Bassem
hoped, could model a form of resistance for the rest of the West
Bank. The goal was to demonstrate that it was still possible to
struggle and to do so without taking up arms, so that when the spark
came, if it came, resistance might spread as it had during the first
intifada. “If there is a third intifada,” he said, “we want to
be the ones who started it.”
Bassem saw three
options. “To be silent is to accept the situation,” he said, “and
we don’t accept the situation.” Fighting with guns and bombs
could only bring catastrophe. Israel was vastly more powerful, he
said. “But by popular resistance, we can push its power aside.”
As small as
the demonstrations were, they appeared to create considerable
anxiety in Israel. Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, told me that while the West Bank demonstrations do
not pose an “existential threat” to Israel, they “certainly
could be more problematic in the short term” than a conventional
armed revolt. Eytan Buchman, a spokesman for the I.D.F., took issue
with the idea that the weekly protests were a form of nonviolent
resistance. In an e-mail he described the protests as “violent and
illegal rioting that take place around Judea and Samaria, and where
large rocks, Molotov cocktails, improvised grenades and burning tires
are used against security forces. Dubbing these simply demonstrations
is an understatement — more than 200 security-force personnel have
been injured in recent years at these riots.” (Molotov cocktails
are sometimes thrown at protests at the checkpoints of Beitunia and
Kalandia but never, Bassem said, in Nabi Saleh.) Buchman said that
the I.D.F. “employs an array of tactics as part of an overall
strategy intended to curb these riots and the ensuing acts of
violence.” He added that “every attempt is made to minimize
physical friction and risk of casualties” among both the I.D.F. and
the “rioters.”
One senior
military commander, who would agree to be interviewed only on the
condition that his name not be used, told me: “When the second
intifada broke out, it was very difficult, but it was very easy to
understand what we had to do. You have the enemy, he shoots at you,
you have to kill him.” Facing down demonstrators armed with slings
and stones or with nothing at all is less clear-cut. “As an Israeli
citizen,” the commander said, “I prefer stones. As a professional
military officer, I prefer to meet tanks and troops.”
But armies, by
their nature, have one default response to opposition: force. One
soldier who served in Nabi Saleh testified to the Israeli veterans’
group Breaking the Silence about preparing for Friday protests. “It’s
like some kind of game,” he said. “Everyone wants to arm
themselves with as much ammo as possible. . . . You have lots of stun
grenades . . . so they’re thrown for the sake of throwing, at
people who are not suspected of anything. And in the end, you tell
your friend at the Friday-night dinner table: ‘Wow! I fired this
much.’ ”
According to a
leaked 2010 U.S. State Department memo, Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi of
Israel “expressed frustration” with the West Bank protests to
American diplomats, and “warned that the I.D.F. will start to be
more assertive in how it deals with these demonstrations, even
demonstrations that appear peaceful.” The memo concluded that
“less-violent demonstrations are likely to stymie the I.D.F.,”
citing the Israeli Defense Ministry policy chief Amos Gilad’s
admission to U.S. officials, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”
Sagi Tal, a former
I.D.F. soldier, who was stationed near the villages of Bil’in and
Ni’lin, which also held weekly demonstrations, explained to me that
his unit sometimes conducted night raids to gather intelligence or
make arrests and sometimes simply so “that they should feel that we
are here and we are watching them.”
After dinner one
Sunday, Nariman put on a DVD shot both by her and Bilal, the village
videographer. (“From the beginning,” Bilal told me at the march
on the previous Friday, filming calmly as tear-gas grenades landed
all around us, “we decided that the media is the most important
thing in the popular resistance.”) We watched a clip shot in the
house in which we sat: soldiers banged on the door late at night;
they rifled through the boys’ room as Salam and Abu Yazan cowered
beneath the covers and Nariman yelled in Arabic: “What manliness
this is! What a proud army you’re part of!” The soldiers
confiscated a gas mask, two computers, Waed’s camera and two of his
schoolbooks — geography and Palestinian history. (In an e-mail, an
I.D.F. spokesman described such night raids as “pre-emptive
measures, taken in order to assure the security and stability in the
area.”)
We watched footage
of Nariman being arrested with Bilal’s wife, Manal, early in 2010.
Soldiers had fired tear gas into Manal’s house, Nariman explained.
Manal ran in to fetch her children, and when she came out, a soldier
ordered her back in. She refused, so they arrested her. Nariman tried
to intervene, and they arrested her too. They spent 10 days in
prisons where, they say, they were beaten repeatedly, strip-searched
and held for two days without food before each was dumped at the side
of a road. (The I.D.F.’s Buchman said, “No exceptional incidents
were recorded during these arrests.” He added that no complaints
were filed with military authorities.)
We watched a clip
of crying children being passed from a gas-filled room out a
second-story window, down a human ladder to the street. Early on, the
villagers took all the children to one house during demonstrations,
but when the soldiers began firing gas grenades into homes, the
villagers decided it was safer to let them join the protests. We
watched footage of a soldier dragging a 9-year-old boy in the street,
of another soldier striking Manal’s 70-year-old mother. Finally,
Nariman shook her head and turned off the disc player. “Glee” was
on.
One Friday,
shortly after the marchers had barricaded the road with boulders
and burning tires in order to keep the army out of the village
center, a white truck sped around the bend, a jet of liquid arcing
from the water cannon mounted on its cab. Someone yelled, “Skunk!”
and everyone bolted. Skunk water smells like many things, but mainly
it smells like feces. Nariman wasn’t fast enough. A blast of skunk
knocked her off her feet. Moments later, she was standing defiantly,
letting the cannon soak her and waving a Palestinian flag at the
truck’s grated windshield. An hour or so later, smelling of skunk
and shampoo, she was serving tea to a dozen protesters.
Every Friday was a
little different. Some demonstrations were short and others almost
endless. Some were comic, others not at all. Some days the I.D.F.
entered the village, and others they stuck to the hills. Sometimes
they made arrests. The basic structure, though, varied little week to
week: a few minutes of marching, tear gas fired, then hours of the
village youth — the shebab, they’re called — throwing
stones while dodging tear-gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets
until the sun set and everyone went home. Or failed to make it home.
It was strange,
asymmetric combat: a few dozen masked shebab ranging in age
from 8 to 38, armed with slings and stones, against 20 or more
soldiers in armored vehicles and on foot, dressed in helmets and body
armor, toting radios and automatic weapons. Theshebab put a
great deal of thought into tactics, trying to flank and surprise the
soldiers. But even when their plans were perfectly executed, they
could not do much more than irritate their enemies. The soldiers,
though, would inevitably respond with more sophisticated weaponry,
which would motivate the shebab to gather more stones
Friday after Friday despite — and because of — the fact that
nothing ever seemed to change, for the better at least.
I asked one of the
boys why he threw stones, knowing how futile it was. “I want to
help my country and my village, and I can’t,” he said. “I can
just throw stones.”
“We see our
stones as our message,” Bassem explained. The message they carried,
he said, was “We don’t accept you.” While Bassem spoke
admiringly of Mahatma Gandhi, he didn’t worry over whether
stone-throwing counted as violence. The question annoyed him: Israel
uses far greater and more lethal force on a regular basis, he pointed
out, without being asked to clarify its attitude toward violence. If
the loincloth functioned as the sign of Gandhi’s resistance, of
India’s nakedness in front of British colonial might, Bassem said,
“Our sign is the stone.” The weekly clashes with the I.D.F. were
hence in part symbolic. The stones were not just flinty yellow rocks,
but symbols of defiance, of a refusal to submit to occupation,
regardless of the odds. The army’s weapons bore messages of their
own: of economic and technological power, of international support.
More than one resident of Nabi Saleh reminded me that the tear gas
used there is made by a company based in Pennsylvania.
One afternoon, I
visited the family of Mustafa Tamimi, who was 28 when he died in
December 2011 after being shot at close range with a tear-gas
canister from the back of an Israeli Army jeep. (An I.D.F.
investigation concluded, according to Buchman, that when the soldier
fired the canister “his field of vision was obscured.”) The walls
were covered with framed photos: an action shot of Mustafa in
profile, his face behind a red Spider-Man mask as he slung a stone at
soldiers outside the frame.
In the weeks
before her son’s death, Ekhlas, his mother, told me that soldiers
had twice come to the house looking for him. When she got a call that
Friday asking her to bring Mustafa’s ID to the watchtower, she
thought he’d been arrested, “like all the other times.” Beside
me, Bahaa, a tall young man who was Mustafa’s best friend, scrolled
through photos on a laptop, switching back and forth between a shot
of Mustafa falling to the ground a few feet behind an I.D.F. jeep,
and another, taken moments later, of his crushed and bloody face.
Ekhlas told me
about a dream she’d had. Mustafa was standing on the roof, wearing
his red mask. There were soldiers in the distance. She called to him:
“Mustafa, come down! Everyone thinks you are dead — it’s better
that they don’t see you.”
He turned to her,
she said, and told her: “No. I’m standing here so that they will
see me.”
“This is the
worst time for us,” Bassem confided to me last summer. He
meant not just that the villagers have less to show for their
sacrifices each week, but that things felt grim outside the village
too. Everyone I spoke with who was old enough to remember agreed that
conditions for Palestinians are far worse now than they were before
the first intifada. The checkpoints, the raids, the permit system,
add up to more daily humiliation than Palestinians have ever faced.
The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank has more than
tripled since the Oslo Accords. Assaults on Palestinians by settlers
are so common that they rarely made the news. The resistance, though,
remained limited to a few scattered villages like Nabi Saleh and a
small urban youth movement.
I sat down one
afternoon in Ramallah with Samir Shehadeh, a former literature
professor from Nabi Saleh who was one of the intellectual architects
of the first intifada and whom I met several times at Bassem’s
house. I reminded him of the car accident that ignited the first
uprising and asked what kind of spark it would take to mobilize
Palestinians to fight again. “The situation is 1,000 times worse,”
he said. “There are thousands of possible sparks,” and still
nothing has happened.
In the 1980s,
youth organizers like Bassem focused on volunteer work: helping
farmers in the fields, educating their children. They built trust and
established the social networks that would later allow the resistance
to coordinate its actions without waiting for orders from above.
Those networks no longer exist. Instead there’s the Palestinian
Authority. Immediately after the first Oslo Accord in 1993, the
scholar Edward Said predicted that “the P.L.O. will . . . become
Israel’s enforcer.” Oslo gave birth to a phantom state, an
extensive but largely impotent administrative apparatus, with Israel
remaining in effective control of the Palestine Authority’s
finances, its borders, its water resources — of every major and
many minor aspects of Palestinian life. More gallingly to many, Oslo,
in Said’s words, gave “official Palestinian consent to continued
occupation,” creating a local elite whose privilege depends on the
perpetuation of the status quo.
That elite lives
comfortably within the so-called “Ramallah bubble”: the bright
and relatively carefree world of cafes, NGO salaries and imported
goods that characterize life in the West Bank’s provisional
capital. During the day, the clothing shops and fast-food franchises
are filled. New high-rises are going up everywhere. “I didn’t
lose my sister and my cousin and part of my life,” Bassem said,
“for the sons of the ministers” to drive expensive cars.
Worse than any
corruption, though, was the apparent normalcy. Settlements are
visible on the neighboring hilltops, but there are no checkpoints
inside Ramallah. The I.D.F. only occasionally enters the city, and
usually only at night. Few Palestinians still work inside Israel, and
not many can scrape a living from the fields. For the thousands of
waiters, clerks, engineers, warehouse workers, mechanics and
bureaucrats who spend their days in the city and return to their
villages every evening, Ramallah — which has a full-time population
of less than 100,000 — holds out the possibility of forgetting the
occupation and pursuing a career, saving up for a car, sending the
children to college.
But the
checkpoints, the settlements and the soldiers are waiting just
outside town, and the illusion of normalcy made Nabi Saleh’s task
more difficult. If Palestinians believed they could live better by
playing along, who would bother to fight? When Bassem was jailed in
decades past, he said, prisoners were impatient to get out and resume
their struggles. This time, he ran into old friends who couldn’t
understand why he was still fighting instead of making money off the
spoils of the occupation. “They said to me: ‘You’re smart —
why are you doing this? Don’t you learn?’ ”
At times the
Palestinian Authority acts as a more immediate obstacle to
resistance. Shortly after the protests began in Nabi Saleh, Bassem
was contacted by P.A. security officials. The demonstrations were
O.K., he said they told him, as long as they didn’t cross into
areas in which the P.A. has jurisdiction — as long, that is, as
they did not force the P.A. to take a side, to either directly
challenge the Israelis or repress their own people. (A spokesman for
the Palestinian security forces, Gen. Adnan Damiri, denied this and
said that the Palestinian Authority fully supports all peaceful
demonstrations.) In Hebron, P.A. forces have stopped protesters from
marching into the Israeli-controlled sector of the city. “This
isn’t collaboration,” an I.D.F. spokesman, who would only talk to
me on the condition that he not be named, assured me.“Israel has a
set of interests, the P.A. has a set of interests and those interests
happen to overlap.”
Bassem saw no easy
way to break the torpor and ignite a more widespread popular
resistance. “They have the power,” he said of the P.A., “more
than the Israelis, to stop us.” The Palestinian Authority employs
160,000 Palestinians, which means it controls the livelihoods of
about a quarter of West Bank households. One night I asked Bassem and
Bilal, who works for the Ministry of Public Health, how many people
in Nabi Saleh depend on P.A. salaries. It took them a few minutes to
add up the names. “Let’s say two-thirds of the village,” Bilal
concluded.
Last summer, my
final Friday in Nabi Saleh was supposed to be a short day. One of
theshebab was getting engaged to a girl from a neighboring
village, and everyone planned to attend the betrothal ceremony. The
demonstration would end at 3.
Four armored cars
waited at the bend in the road, the skunk truck idling behind them.
Manal pointed to the civilian policemen accompanying the soldiers.
“There is a new policy that they can arrest internationals,” she
explained. Earlier that month, as part of the effort to combat what
Israelis call the “internationalization” of the conflict, the
defense forces issued an order authorizing Israeli immigration police
to arrest foreigners in the West Bank.
About half the
marchers headed down the hillside. Soldiers waiting below arrested
four Israelis and detained Bashir, the owner of the land around the
spring. Everyone cheered as Mohammad raced uphill, outrunning the
soldiers. (Three months later they would catch up to him in a night
raid on his father’s house. He was imprisoned until late December.)
I saw Nariman standing in the road with a Scottish woman. I walked
over. Two soldiers grabbed the Scottish protester. Two more took me
by the arms, pulled me to a jeep and shoved me in. I showed my press
card to the driver. His expression didn’t change. Two frightened
young women, both British, were already locked inside. After almost
an hour, the soldiers brought a Swede and an Italian who had been
hiding in the convenience-store bathroom. More soldiers piled in. I
showed one my press card and asked if he understood that I was a
journalist. He nodded. Finally, the driver pulled onto the road. As
we passed the gas station, the shebab ran after us.
“They were so
beautiful a few minutes ago, right?” the soldier beside me said as
theshebab’s stones clanged against the jeep. “They were so cute.”
They drove us to
the old British police station in the I.D.F. base in Halamish. While
I was sitting on a bench, an I.D.F. spokesman called my cellphone to
inform me that no journalists with press cards had been detained in
Nabi Saleh. I disagreed. (The next day, according to Agence
France-Presse, the I.D.F. denied I had been arrested.) A half-hour
later, an officer escorted me to the gate.
As I walked back
to Nabi Saleh, the road was empty, but the air was still peppery with
tear gas. I made it back in time for the engagement party and flew
home the next day. The five activists detained with me were deported.
Two nights after I left, soldiers raided Bassem’s house. The
following week, they raided the village five days in a row.
This past
October, the popular resistance movement began to shift tactics,
trying to break the routine of weekly demonstrations. They blocked a
settler road west of Ramallah, and the following week staged a
protest inside an Israeli-owned supermarket in the settlement
industrial zone of Shaar Binyamin. Bassem was arrested outside the
market — soldiers grabbed at Nariman and dragged Bassem off when he
stepped forward to put his arms around her. Less than two weeks
later, Waed was arrested at a Friday demonstration. Soldiers beat
him, he said, “with their fists and their rifles.” When he
appeared in court, Waed was still bruised. The judge threw out the
charges. But while he was detained, he was in the same prison as his
father and saw him briefly there. “When I said goodbye to him,”
Waed told me with obvious pride, “he had tears in his eyes. I was
stronger than him.”
On the day of
Waed’s arrest, a camera caught Ahed shaking her fist, demanding
that soldiers tell her where they were taking her brother. The
Internet took over: video of the tiny, bare-armed blond girl facing
down a soldier went viral. She and Nariman were invited to Istanbul,
where, to their surprise, Nariman said, they were greeted at the
airport by dozens of children wearing T-shirts printed with Ahed’s
photo. They drove past billboards displaying Ahed’s image.
Reporters followed them everywhere. Crowds gathered when they walked
in the streets. They were taken to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in the southeastern city of Urfa, Nariman said, and flew back
with him to Istanbul on his plane.
Not everyone
reacted so enthusiastically. One right-wing blogger dubbed Ahed
“Shirley Temper.” The Israeli news site Ynet took the images as
evidence that “Palestinian protesters use children to needle I.D.F.
soldiers in the hope of provoking a violent response.”
In mid-November,
Israeli rockets began falling on Gaza. Protests spread throughout the
West Bank. “We thought it was the start of the third intifada,”
Manal told me. The demonstrations in Nabi Saleh stretched beyond
their usual Friday-evening terminus. One Saturday in November,
Nariman’s brother Rushdie — who worked as a policeman near
Ramallah and was rarely home on Fridays — joined the shebab on
the hill. He was standing beside Waed when he was hit by a
rubber-coated bullet. Then the soldiers began shooting live
ammunition, but Rushdie was hurt and couldn’t run. As he lay on the
ground, a soldier shot him in the back from a few meters away.
Nariman ran to the hillside with her video camera and found her
brother lying wounded. “I wanted to attack the soldier and die with
Rushdie right there, but I knew I had to be stronger than that,”
Nariman said. “Why is it required of me to be more humane than they
are?” Rushdie, who was 31, died two days later. An I.D.F.
investigation found that soldiers fired 80 shots of live ammunition
and neglected to “control the fire.” The unit’s commander was
reportedly relieved of his command.
When the
fighting stopped in Gaza, the protests in the West Bank ceased.
I went back to Nabi Saleh in January, three weeks before Bassem was
expected home. The village seemed listless and depressed, as if
everyone were convinced of the futility of continuing. On my first
Friday back, the demonstration ended early: the shebab had
a soccer match in another village. It rained the next week, and
everyone went home after an hour. “We are still living the shock of
Rushdie’s killing,” Mohammad told me.
Elsewhere in the
West Bank, though, momentum was building. In late November, Netanyahu
announced plans to build 3,400 settlement units in an area known as
E1, effectively cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank. Just before
I arrived in January, popular-resistance activists tried something
new, erecting a tent “village” called Bab al-Shams in E1,
symbolically appropriating the methods of land confiscation employed
by settlers. “The time has come now to change the rules of the
game,” the organizers wrote in a news release, “for us to
establish facts on the ground — our own land.” The numbers were
relatively small — about 250 people took part, including Nariman
and a few others from Nabi Saleh — and, on direct orders from
Netanyahu, soldiers evicted everyone two days later, but the movement
was once again making headlines around the globe. Copycat encampments
went up all over the West Bank — some in areas where the popular
resistance had not previously been active.
The day after his
release, Bassem told me that even sitting in prison he had felt “a
sense of joy” when he learned about Bab al-Shams. The popular
resistance was finally spreading beyond the village demonstrations.
“We have to create a sense of renewal,” he said, “not only in
Nabi Saleh but on a larger scale.” The village’s losses — and
his own — he acknowledged, were daunting. “The price is now
higher,” he said, but “if we don’t continue, it would mean that
the occupation has succeeded.” It would take constant creativity,
he said, to hold onto the momentum. He didn’t know what it would
look like yet, but just talking about it seemed to add inches to his
height.
Within days,
thousands of Palestinians would protest around the West Bank, first
in solidarity with prisoners on hunger strikes to demand an end to
the indefinite detention of Palestinians without trial, later in
outrage at the death of a 30-year-old prisoner named Arafat Jaradat.
Once again, the words “third intifada” were buzzing through the
press. Avi Dichter, the head of Israeli domestic security during the
second intifada and the current minister of Home Front Defense,
cautioned in a radio interview that an “incorrect response by the
security forces” might push the protests into full-out revolt.
When I saw Bassem
in February, I asked him whether he was worried that the uprising
might finally arrive at Nabi Saleh’s moment of greatest self-doubt,
that it might catch the village drowsing. “It doesn’t matter who
is resisting,” he said. “What’s important is that they are
resisting.”
On the last Friday
I was there, the wind was against the demonstrators. Nearly every
grenade the soldiers fired, regardless of how far away it landed,
blew a cloud of gas up the road right at them. A dozen or so
villagers watched the clashes from the relative safety of the
hillside. Bassem’s cousin Naji was sitting on a couch cushion.
Mahmoud, Bassem’s nephew, poured coffee into clear plastic cups.
Bright red poppies dotted the hill between the rocks. The way was
clear, but no one tried to walk down to the spring.
When the
demonstration seemed over, I trekked back to the village with a young
Israeli in a black “Anarchy Is for Lovers” T-shirt. He told me
about his childhood on a kibbutz bordering the Gaza Strip. His
parents were “right-wing Zionists,” he said, “hard-core.”
They didn’t talk to him anymore. A group of soldiers appeared
behind us, and we ducked into Nariman’s yard as they tossed a few
stun grenades over the wall. Later that evening, at Naji’s house, I
watched Bilal’s video of the same soldiers as they strolled down
the drive, lobbing tear-gas grenades until they reached their jeeps.
They piled in and closed the armored doors. One door opened a crack.
A hand emerged. It tossed one last grenade toward the camera. Gas
streamed out, the door closed and the jeep sped off down the road.
Ben Ehrenreich won
a 2011 National Magazine Award in feature writing. His most recent
novel is “Ether,” published by City Lights Books.
Editor: Ilena
Silverman
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