Uri Avnery
8.9.07
BIL'IN! BIL'IN!
WHEN MY friends fall prey to despair, I show them a piece of painted concrete,
which I bought in
It is one of the remnants of the
I tell them that I intend, when the time comes, to apply for a franchise
to sell pieces of the Separation Wall.
Sometimes, when I give a lecture before a German audience, I ask: "How
many of you believed, a week before the fall of the wall,
that this would happen in their lifetime?" No one has ever raised their
hand.
But the
THE BIBLE commands us: "Rejoice not when thine
enemy falleth, and let not thine
heart be glad when he stumbleth" (Proberbs 24,17). It is a very hard
commandment to obey.
The enemy, in this case, is the "Separation Obstacle". It is
hard not to rejoice, even when it is a limited joy, a conditional joy, because we
have won a battle, not the campaign.
First of all, a part of the
Second, Bil'in is only one of many villages whose
land has been stolen by means of the wall.
Third, the wall is only one of the means of occupation, and the
occupation gets worse by the day.
Fourth, in many other places the Supreme Court has confirmed the path of
the fence, even though it steals Palestinian land no less than at Bil'in.
Fifth, the Bil'in decision also has a negative side:
it gives the court an alibi in the eyes of the world. It confers on the
settlers an apparent legitimacy in many other places. It must not be forgotten
for a moment that the Supreme Court is essentially an instrument of the occupation,
even though it tries sometimes to mitigate it.
As if to underline this point, the court itself hastened this week to
issue another ruling, giving retroactive authorization to another neighborhood
that has also been built on Bil'in land.
Yet in spite of all this: in this desperate struggle, even a small
victory is a big victory. Especially since it happened in Bil'in.
FOR BIL'IN is a symbol. In the past two and a half years, it has become a
part of our life.
Here, every Friday, for 135 weeks without exception, a demonstration
against the fence has taken place.
What is so special about Bil'in, a small and
remote village, whose name was known before to just a few outsiders, if any?
The struggle there has become a symbol because of an unusual
combinations of traits:
(a) STEADFASTNESS. The courage of the Bil'iners. In other villages, too, the demonstrators
have shown courage, but here the sheer dogged persistence arouses admiration. Week
after week they came back. The activists were arrested again and again, wounded
more than once. The entire village has suffered from the terrorism of the
occupation authorities.
More than once I was stirred at the sight of this small village's
resistance. I saw the armored jeeps storming in, sirens screeching hysterically,
the heavily armed policemen jumping out and throwing gas and stun grenades in
all directions, young boys stopping the jeeps with their bodies.
(b) PARTNERSHIP. The three-cornered partnership between
the people of the village, Israeli peace activists and representatives of
international solidarity.
This is a kind of partnership that is not expressed in highfaluting
speeches or sterile meetings in luxury hotels abroad. It was forged under clouds
of choking tear gas, under the jets of water cannons, under fire from stun
grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets, and in ambulances of the Red Crescent
as well as army detention facilities. It has given birth to comradeship and
mutual trust, just when these seemed to have been lost forever in our country.
Since the death of Yasser Arafat, cooperation
between Palestinians and Israeli peace movements has declined in several
spheres. Many Palestinians have despaired of the Israelis, who have not
achieved the hoped-for change, and many Israeli peace activists have despaired
in face of the Palestinian reality. But in Bil'in
cooperation has flourished.
The Israeli activists, headed by the resolute young women and men of the
"Anarchists Against the Fence", have proved
to the Palestinians that they have an Israeli partner they can trust, and the
people of Bil'in have proved to their Israeli friends
that they are reliable and determined partners. I am proud of the part Gush
Shalom has played in this struggle.
Now the court has proved that such demonstrations, which many considered
hopeless, can indeed bear fruit.
(c) NON-VIOLENCE. Always and everywhere. Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King would have been proud of such disciples.
The non-violence was entirely on the side of the demonstrators. I can
testify as an eye-witness: in all the demonstrations in which I took part, I
saw not a single instance of a demonstrator raising a hand against a soldier or
policeman. When in one of the protests stones were thrown from among the
protesters, video films conclusively proved that they were thrown by undercover
policemen.
True, there was violence at the demonstrations. A lot
of violence. But it came from the soldiers and the border-policemen who
could not bear, I presume, the sight of Palestinians and Israelis acting
together.
Generally, it happened like this: The demonstrators marched together from
the center of the village towards the fence. In front there marched young men
and women wearing or carrying symbols of non-violence. On one occasion, they
were handcuffed to each other, another time they were holding high portraits of
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, another time they were carried in cages -
imagination and creativity were given free rein. Sometimes well-known
personalities marched in front, arms locked.
Near the fence, a large contingent of soldiers and border-policemen were
waiting for them, wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests and armed with rifles
and grenade launchers, with handcuffs and sticks dangling from their belts. The
protesters did not stop but advanced towards the gate, banging on it, shaking
it, waving flags and shouting slogans. The soldiers opened fire with gas and
stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets. Some protesters sat down on the ground,
others retreated and then came back again and again. Some were dragged away with
their bare backs scraping along the road and the rocks, choking on the gas.
Arrests were made. Wounds were treated.
When the demonstration came to a close and the participants headed back towards
the village, the local boys would start to sling stones at the soldiers, who
responded with rubber bullets. Chases took place between the olive trees, with
the light footed boys generally having the advantage.
Sometimes, the stone-slinging started even earlier, when the boys saw
from afar the concentration of forces lurking in the village groves and the
demonstrators being dragged brutally towards the army vehicles. But, in accordance
with the standing agreement among themselves, the protesters never joined in the
violence, not even when they were dragged on the rock-strewn ground or were
kicked and beaten while lying there.
This combination of steadfastness, partnership and non-violence is what
turned Bil'in into a beacon of the struggle against
the occupation.
THE BIL'IN affair has another face, which was revealed in all its
ugliness over the last few weeks.
The Supreme Court has decided that the path of the fence in this sector was
not based on security considerations, but was designed to enlarge the
settlement. For us, of course, that was not a startling revelation. Everyone
who has been there, including foreign diplomats, has seen it with their own eyes:
the path was fixed in such a way that the Bil'in land
was annexed de facto to Israel, to serve for a huge new housing project
called "Matityahu East", in addition to the
settlement called Matityahu (and also Modi'in Illit and Kiryat Sefer) that is already
standing.
In a second decision this week, the Supreme Court, for the sake of a spurious
"balance", decided that the
housing project that is already standing in Matityahu,
also on Bil'in land, can remain there and may now be
populated, in spite of the fact that the same court has in the past forbidden
this.
And who built Matityahu?
Some weeks ago, a huge scandal was exposed. The culprit is a building
company called Heftsiba. It collapsed, taking with it
the apartments that its clients had already paid for. Many of them have lost their
entire savings.
The owner of the company fled and was tracked down in
And lo and behold: this is the same company that built the original Matityahu neighborhood, and that intended to build the new Matityahu project on land stolen by means of the
"Security Fence". It also built the monstrous Har
Homa housing project and other neighborhoods in the
occupied territories.
Who can now deny what we have been saying for years, that the settlements
are a huge business of billions upon billions of dollars, which is entirely
based on stolen property?
Everybody knows the hard core of settlers, nationalist-messianic
fanatics, who are ready to drive out, kill and rob, because their God told
them so. But around this core has gathered a large group of gangsters, real
estate operators, who conduct their dirty and hugely profitable business behind
the screen of patriotism. In this case, patriotism is indeed the refuge of
scoundrels.
Talia Sasson,
a lawyer appointed at the time by the government to investigate the setting up
of "illegal" settlement outposts, has concluded that most of the
ministries and army commands have violated the law and secretly cooperated with
the settlers. It may appear that they acted out of patriotic sentiments. I have
my doubts. I dare to guess that there must be hundreds of politicians,
officials and officers who have received large bribes from businessmen who made
billions from these "patriotic" transactions.
P.S.:
The man who invented the wall was Haim Ramon,
then a leader of the Labor Party. Ramon started out as one of the "doves'
of the party (when that was popular). Later he jumped ship to the Kadima Party (when that was profitable).
This week Ramon proposed cutting off the electricity that
Now Ramon proposes cutting off this lifeline, to plunge
If Bil'in represents the struggle of the Sons
of Light, Ramon surely represents - quite literally - the Sons of Darkness.
(Report on and
photos of the victory demonstration that took place in Bil