Protest in Ma'asara July 17, 2009 (MUSA AL-SHAER/AFP/Getty Images)
We hear too little about non-violent Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Today I was in the village of Ma’asara, south of Bethlehem, and this is what happened.
A friend from Berkeley arrived in Israel yesterday, and asked if I wanted to hang out. I was looking for someone to come with me to this protest, which I’d heared about through emails I receive from Ta’ayush – one of the most effective anti-occupation movements in the Israel left. The ride was organized simply and effectively: one activist receives phone calls and coordinates the rides, others volunteer their cars, meeting times are set outside houses in south Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. Within 40 minutes we pass the checkpoint easily with our yellow-plated Israeli car and enter the territories.
Most Israelis are too scared to go to protests in the territories. This is one of the ways the occupation sustains itself: by isolating the Palestinian protestors from possible allies and witnesses. The media told us they will not report our rally unless some violence occurred: someone needs to pay with their blood so that people around the world know that in Ma’asara (and neighboring villages like Umm Salamuna) Palestinians have been coming out regularly every week for several years to protest the confiscation of their lands, the imprisonment of their children, and to say they deserve freedom like any other people. No one was hurt today (or in most of the previous rallies here), so you’ll only hear about this through blogs like ours.
(When I table for SJP on Sproul Plaza (in Berkeley), someone will inevitably come up and tell me, angrily or patronizingly, that “we people” (Palestinians like me?) need to try non-violence for a change. Husam has brilliant spontaneous reactions, like opening his cellphone and pretending to call all his “close friends” from Gaza who are currently working on the next suicide bomb (because we are obviously all coordinated). I’m a bit slower, so this is my belated reaction).
Yes, it is more dangerous than yelling at the TV or attending polite protests in the heart of Tel Aviv, where few Palestinians from the territories will hear us. But that is precisely the point: meeting people is more effective than a thousand speeches and slogans. You learn all the details firsthand, and you not only argue for an alternative – you are actually creating it, demonstrating how easy it is for Israelis and Palestinians to work together.
You learn, as my friend Haggai Mattar told me, that there is not a single Palestinian movement that hasn’t hosted Israelis for regular non-violent protests, including villages who support Hamas and Islamic Jihad. My inner Zionist was sounding alarm bells when he said this: how can Israelis cooperate with these people, if their movements committed such violence against Israelis? Then I reminded myself that in Tel Aviv there is no violence against Palestinians mainly because there are hardly any Palestinians left: we ethnically cleansed the villages of Sheikh Muwwanis, Summayl (al-Mas’udiyya), Jammasin el-Gharbi, Salama, Abu Kbir, the Fishermen’s village and Irshid, not to mention tens of thousands of Jaffa’s residents, some of whom drowned in the sea as they were escaping. http://www.palestineremembered.com/JaffaTownsSnapshot.html And after that, we used more violence to keep most of them in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, more violence to take their water and land, more violence to prevent them from competing with Israeli industries so that they stayed poor, more violence to enable Israeli real estate moguls to profit from the confiscation of their land (as Gadi Algazi explains in his brilliant essay on Bil’in – http://www.taayush.org/new/fence/matrix-bilin-en.html), more and more and more violence. Ignorance cannot be an excuse for self-righteousness, because self-righteousness is incredibly dangerous http://borderlinecrimes.com/2009/07/10/on-self-righteousness/. My hands are bloody too, and non-violent cooperation with any Palestinians who are willing to work with us is the best alternative.
I learned about the quiet ways the army tries to suppress any form of resistance, including purely political non-violent protests: shootings and beatings, administrative detentions without a trial that can last years, and heavy fines that equal tens of thousands of dollars. And here they were, the people who suffer all this, much more patient than me in the presence of the soldiers who inevitably turn up to the rallies, blocking the proud slogans and the uplifting spirit with their barbed wires and commands. They endure all of this every week and come out again and again, waving huge Palestinian flags, chanting against the wall, speaking loudly about how they deserve freedom just like anyone else, bringing their little children with them so that the soldiers can see they are human beings just like them.
Ma’asara is not adjacent to the separation wall: the villages that are have lost much of their land, and have become dependent on employment in the nearby settlements. As a result they receive explicit threats that if they protest, they will lose their jobs. Ma’asarans are demonstrating out of solidarity with those who cannot.
It is impossible for me to convey how many times I was told how much the villagers yearn for peace, how glad they were to see Israelis and internationals come to support them, how they saw this cooperation as the opposite of their strangulation by settlements, surrounding them from all sides on their confiscated land, how our support was clearly contributing to their morale and ability to sustain this protest week after week, in spite of everything. Thankfully, both the army and the protestors in Ma’asara largely refrain from violence during the rallies, and there is actually an opportunity for us to speak to them, to attempt the impossible and try to convey our message. Palestinian women and men spoke fervently about their confiscated land and their desire for freedom, chanted “yes we can” and “down with the wall”, and promised that all the violence in the world would not deter them. Some French internationals sang songs from the French Revolution and waved their flag. And at some point one villager came up to me and asked me if I could speak in Hebrew to the soldiers!
I looked round to see if he was really speaking to me, and when I realized he was, I managed to walk closer to them and address them, on the other side of the barbed wire they placed in front of us. I was too scared to look them directly in the eye, but I did manage to convey some of my thoughts, and quite incredibly, they didn’t shout back or disturb or address me: they actually listened.
I told them they have no reason to fear us: the Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals here aren’t a threat to the security of the state. We aren’t violent and we’re not anti-Semites, and we don’t hate them, or the settlers, or anyone else. We are all here together, because we think what they are defending isn’t just: people just want to live their lives and to keep their livelihood, and the wall is deeply harming their ability to make a living. There are capitalists profiting from the settlements that the wall has enabled – their interests are neither ours nor the soldiers’. There is no reason for them to defend them. One day, I said, after you’ll end your service, you’ll be sitting in India or somewhere else and wondering why you did all this. Why not make a difference now? Why not cross the barbed wire and join us? It’s more fun on our side.
Being an effective activist is a bit like learning to play a musical instrument. Your only real choice is to practice again and again, until you succeed. The soldiers didn’t cross over. But I’ll be back next week to try again.
I didn't have the energy to repeat this, but if anyone in asking themselves "isn't the wall important for Israeli security?", the answer is that the ROUTE of the wall, deep within the territories and not along the Green Line, was set not for security reasons but for political ones (to enable the expansion of settlements).
Don't listen to me – listen to the Israeli Chief of Staff:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005914.html
I didn't have the energy to repeat this, but if anyone s asking themselves "isn't the wall important for Israeli security?", the answer is that the ROUTE of the wall, deep within the territories and not along the Green Line, was set not for security reasons but for political ones (to enable the expansion of settlements).
Don't listen to me – listen to the Israeli Chief of Staff:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005914.html
I didn't have the energy to repeat this, but if anyone is asking themselves "isn't the wall important for Israeli security?", the answer is that the ROUTE of the wall, deep within the territories and not along the Green Line, was set not for security reasons but for political ones (to enable the expansion of settlements).
Don't listen to me – listen to the Israeli Chief of Staff:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005914.html
I read your post a week or so ago,and I want to thank you for writing it. I am really interested in your point of view on all this talk of economic peace, of "hopes for change" in the territories and what your impression of these statements is. I feel incredibly disconnected here in the US, and disappointed by almost every major coverage of the situation.
you know, the whole issue of economic peace sounds like what we call in Hebrew ביצה שלא נולדה – an egg that hasn't been created yet. If they were really going to take serious steps on the ground to generate growth we could discuss how that reltes to all the political issues, but since they haven't done anything concrete in this direction, as far as I've heard, I don't think Netanyahu's spins are worth our time – beyond pointing out their absurdity, as you did very well in your post.
However, there are plenty of real things happening – weekly demonstrations in several locations that the army is trying desperately to shut down (for example by harassing the villagers in Bilin in the middle of the night) – I posted their letter onto the soldiers on Facebook; a new report by shovrim shtika/breaking the silence about atrocities in Gaza is making a lot of waves and has put the foreign ministry, the chief of staff and other very serious players on the defensive; Norway is examining investments in companies linked to the occupation http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1103417.html as a direct result of a letter by Israel activists http://coalitionofwomen.org/home/english/articles... Britain has revoked licenses to sell arms to Israel as a result of the attack on Gaza http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/13/israel-a... Even the Obama administration's pressure to freeze the settlements, with the support of many Jewish American orgs, is encouraging.
The pressure is building up, we just need to figure out more ways of sustaining it.
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