July 12, 2005 THE "PALESTINIAN GANDHIS" OF BILIN 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. Bilin_iii_1 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 fromBilin 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 lBilin_ii and. 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? http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/07/the_palestinian.html
I dunno, maybe the movement is busy supporting the violent ones. I believe most Palestinians are peaceful and just want a normal life, too bad a minority screws all that up.
After WW2, Brittain could not afford to keep India. So it's debateable as to how much affect Gandhi's non-violent protest really had. And of more relevance to Palestine's situation, Brittain needed the actual cooperation of the Indian people in order to gain anything of India. They needed the actual labor and Indian run security forces to reap goods/resources and manage such a large country. This is how Gandhi's 'civil disobiedence' was at all effective in the first place. The Israelis, on the other hand, only want the land and that's it. They could care less whether Palestinians cooperate or protest or whatever. On the contrary, their ideal situation would be if the Palestinians just disappear. Still, it's great that this town is adopting a peaceful method. Hopefully they get more intl press. Of course in the first couple decades of occupation there were already several Gandhi/MLK type movements in Palestine and nothing ever came of those either.
If Israel was not under attack, they would not need the land. What they want is security, not land. These protesters could be very effective.
When these same palestinians turn their ghandi efforts into more violent ones, they are called terrorists and are no longer the victims, but instead they are then seen as the cause of the violence
They could have security on their land, they can build that damn wall on their borders, and not tear apart families, and countrymen. Heck, they can build a fence around the west bank, as long as it dont seperate people and make their daily lives a living hell. you really think that putting the palestinians through more pain is going to lessen the chances of them resorting to violent measures?
I believe they want both security and land. This is evidenced by the fact that they annually claim more West Bank land for the expansion and new creation of Israeli settlements. They have done so consistently for many years and continue to do so - West Bank settlement expansion has not stopped at all. In fact, ironically/coincidental to this thread, Israel recently approved the re-location to West Bank settlements of a remote group of villagers in India that had long claimed to be of Jewish heritage. In addition, whatever concessions Israelis would hypothetically ever give up to Palestinians in any peace agreement would undoubtedly exclude water rights to the main reservoir, which clearly lies in West Bank territory on the border with Jordan. So whether Israel is under attack or not, they are definitely not parting with the water reserve in the West Bank. In the end, I just don't think these protestors are going to make that much difference. Actually I don't think anything is going to make a difference. I have met too many Israelis and Arabs who just absolutely will never give into the other side under any circumstances. I honestly believe this thing will still be going on even well after I'm gone and dead. But by that time I feel the Palestinian population in the region will be much smaller and even more decimated. I foresee them shrinking and dying out much like Native Americans here.
That isn't true. It would be far easier to secure just the Green Zone. However having settlement after settlement spread out all over makes it much tougher to defend. Furthermore Zionists went in and wiped out Palestinian villages to take them over for the land, even before Israel was created in 1948. The Israeli Settlers who are conflicting with Israeli troops in Gaza aren't refusing to leave their settlements because they want a more secure Israel. They are refusing to leave because they want the land.
One of the last examples of colonialism in our world today. Israel is in it for the land, they want land, and the security argument doesn't hold much truth to it anymore because Israel's military is a lot more powerful than any of its current perceived "enemies". Historically speaking, the Zionist movement dreamed of a "Greater Israel" from the Nile to the Euphrates. However, reality struck, and they realized they couldn't kill or occupy all their neighbors, and Arafat was incredibly effective in getting the Palestinian cause major attention on the global stage, and now the Israelis know for a fact that the world (and yes, the US has come around on this one too) won't accept anything less than a Palestinian state composed of the Gaza strip and the West Bank (most want the whole West Bank, Israel intends to keep at least 15-20% of it in the form of illegal settlements. Anyways, this whole conflict won't be solved until Israeli occupation ends for good (and yes, illegal settlements on Palestinian lands ARE a form of occupation) and in return the Palestinians are able to secure their borders and their state and be hopeful for the future. Palestinian militants are a response to Israeli occupation, not the other way around.
I don't agree it's colonization at all. It is a war over disputed territory, not the only one going on in the world today. If the Palestinians would renounce their war against Israel I think Israel would make difficult compromises. In fact, they are already pulling out of some areas. Israel HAS to occupy territory it doesn't even have interest in just for it's own security.
