It was such a strange cocktail of relief and anxiety I was trying to balance at Abdullah Abu Rahme’s coming-home party in the village of Bil’in on Monday night. He’d just been released form a military prison cell for having participated in a nonviolent protest against this big-ass wall being built by a foreign government through his village. Meanwhile, there’s a guy who’s sitting in Nablus with a shattered jaw and missing many a bunch of his teeth after being hit in the face by a tear gas canister at close range.

Abdullah and his family have a nice pad, by anyone’s standards, along Bil’in’s main street. From the roof, one can look through binoculars across the farmland at the distant settlements, or at work being done on the nearby wall. On my third day in Ramallah, I took a trip out to Abdullah’s place to see one of the village’s protests (detailed in entries elsewhere on this blog). The home is a three multi-story affair that’s home to a large extended family and some apartments that get rented out.

One of the sections of his home has been turned into the International Solidarity Movement’s Bil’in headquarters, and the townspeople work with ISM volunteers to coordinate creative, colorful protests most every Friday that sometimes seem almost like parades, but usually end in arrests, injuries and the overpowering scent of tear gas wafting through the streets. Imagine a line of old guys in Shriner caps driving those midget cars toward a bunch of teen and twentysomething soldiers waiting for the order to blast them with with rubber bullets — or bullet bullets on occasion — quick so they can take the rest of the afternoon off. These guys, Israel’s proud fighting force, aren’t up for creative troublemakers, because they have to think about them too much. The soldiers know how to deal with the shebab, meaning those boys you always see in the AP photos hurling stones with those “David Vs. Goliath” type slings. In the rock-paper-scissors reality of the world, bullet beats rock. It’s rough dealing with Abdullah, He and and his fellow activists in the Popular Committees Against the Wall just walk toward them. Not that the military isn’t giving it a shot, though. Or several.

It was great meeting Abdullah, a local town activist, a working guy who gives his all during the after hours to protect his town from something that is as inevitable as this Apartheid Wall. It’s difficult to not to lapse into some sort of euphoric pabulum, but I lack the ability to write saccharine prose, so if you’re still reading, you’re going to have to deal with potentially inane observations laced with cynicism. I am after all, a cynic, and Palestine is a great place to feed cynicism. Abdullah and activist like him help dull that a little.

The first time I was at Abdullah’s house, on his roof, watching the soldiers prepare for a scuffle with the unarmed, he was sitting in a prison at Ofer Military Base. that was Aug. 23. He’d been arrested a week before on assault allegations. Somehow, he managed to “assault” a guy in full military armor and toting an M-16. A group of foreigners were arrested along with him. Video footage got them out of a jail cell within hours. But that’s a civil court system. Foreigners and Israelis get access to that system. Any Palestinian living in the occupied territories gets launched into the military court system, meaning, a system meant to keep people behind bars as long as they can no matter whether they’re in al-Aqsa Brigade or in a line of people waving “stop the wall” banners.

Abdullah was released jail Monday afternoon. He was arrested July 17 for taking part a nonviolent demonstration in his own village. The court released him on bail, with the conditions that he will stop demonstrating against the wall. He posted a bail of NIS 6,000 and an Israeli friend signed third-party bail for the sum of NIS 10,000. The latter sum will have to be paid if Abdullah breaks his conditions. All of this money paid — and these conditions — are absurd. Abdullah did nothing more than walk to his village’s land.

That night, fireworks, lots of sugary tea and equally sugary coffee and yet still more sugary snacks were served as the town rolled over to Abdullah’s house for a welcome home bash. He was upset by the conditions of his release, but as he bounced his baby daughter on his knee amid a constant stream of family and friends coming over, it was obvious he was finding strict control of his movements back home preferable to life at Ofer.

Here was a hard working family man who had stood up for his community and had — and again will — pay the price for it. Imagine a gargantuan edifice being smacked down across your own neighborhood. One that would cut you off from your family, friends and livelihood. Say there was really nothing you could do about it. Would you still do nothing? Most people would do nothing. There’s a good chance I might not do much if, say, it cut East and West Olympia in half. I seldom went there anyway. Doing nothing is the default. We like our people who do something to be in the movies or novels. We get less comfortable when they are in our faces because it triggers some sort of self examination about our own action or lack thereof. Abdullah, and a few others in Bil’in and elsewhere in West Bank towns haven’t just done nothing. They don’t go out and get beat up and shot at by soldiers for heroics or because they think that somehow a march here or there is going to wipe out the occupation on its own. They do it because it’s the most effective tool they have to get their case brought to people outside. They do it because it’s their home. It’s for the benefit of the rest of us, who might look up for a minute or two and wonder “what’s going on over there?” What are we doing? I come back with nothing. Prove me wrong.

As the party carried on in the front yard, the air grew cool and the arguila was passed around several times, it was difficult to just kick back and celebrate Abdullah’s recently gained albeit limited freedom. While I was impressed with his drive and his wanting to head right back toward the line of soldiers as soon as he could, I was a little preoccupied about another guy I hadn’t had the chance to meet, but who I had been reading and writing about all day in the ISMedia office.

While we celebrated in Bil’in, 22-year-old Ahmad Al Shakur lay in a Nablus hospital bed with a shattered jaw and minus a number of teeth. This was what he got for joining a demonstration in the West Bank village of Kifl Haris against the destruction of local olive groves for the construction of an Israeli-only bypass road meant to transport settlers quickly and smoothly from the the Ariel settlement to Israel and back. It’s illegal for Palestinians to use any section of this road or to even cross it to get to their lands on the other side.


It’s crazy that people around the word — especially those “freedom lovin’” yanks back home in the U.S. — can get so bent out of shape over Apartheid in South Africa, the crackdown on political freedom in places like Cuba or a few white farmers getting the boot out of Zimbabwe, but seem to have no problem with an entire people being subjugated to this level so long as our “strategic ally” Israel is the one doing the subjugating.

Before the demonstrators had gotten near the settlement road with their banners and signs, before they had even gotten far from the village’s center, a squad of Israeli soldiers raced toward them and opened fire with tear gas canisters. This isn’t you’re Seattle WTO style of response. Soldiers purposefully aimed the canisters at people’s heads and fired straight ahead. The canister that smashed against Ahmed’s face ricocheted and struck his seven-year-old niece in the head as she watched her uncle fall to the ground with blood flying from his mouth.

Another tear gas canister fired directly into the crowd struck 35-year -old Imad Hammad in the chest and he ended up joining Ahmed at the Nablus hospital to be treated for broken ribs. Two others suffered form minor injuries from being struck or getting a throat full of gas.

Firing tear gas canisters directly at individuals or a crowd is forbidden under the Israeli army’s firing regulations. Despite this, Israeli soldiers regularly aim and shoot the canisters directly at nonviolent demonstrators causing serious injuries. These incidents are seldom investigated by the military, fostering an atmosphere where soldiers feel free to use ‘non-lethal’ weapons in more dangerous and potentially deadly ways.

Imagine the fire hoses shot at marchers during the civil rights movement. Think about the British soldiers that beat back the nonviolent marchers during England’s colonial experiment in India. If you think there’s a difference in those situations and this one, don’t take it out on the Palestinians. Stop and wonder what screwball logic you might be carrying around that refuses to let you see them in the same light.

Some day, years or so from now, Hollywood filmmakers will produce big budget, Oscar nominated cinematic brilliance starring whoever that era’s Tom Hanks happens to be alongside a bunch of CGI Palestinians. Maybe they’ll lament the tragedy of the situation after a century or so passes, the way people do when they buy “Dances With Wolves” or “Last Samurai” movie tie-in meals from Burger King. As they let the last greasy fry slide down their gullet, they might even happily think that it’s a good thing they live in an age where such things could never happen. Who are this era’s American Indians? Who will be the next era’s Palestinians? What if people didn’t wait for a Daniel Day Lewis epic to hit movie theater trailers before starting to care about an entire people’s existence?

“Disengagement” in Gaza, So-called “security fences” in the West Bank, keeping over a million Palestinians living in squalid refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, etc. in a state of permanent exile, these are the acts of a government, allegedly representing a people formerly landless, attempting to create another landless people. We pay for it right now. It might be a good idea to learn more about these people we’re paying another government to drive into exile before we have to buy $15 movie tickets to learn about them. They’re paying enough as it is, so it’s the least we owe them.

Visit Palestine.

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