I’m not going to apologize this time for not keeping people up to date with my goings on as of late. But it’s yet another cool evening in Ramallah, I’ve finally managed to get myself a little free time cordoned off, got the Delfonics playing, a good snack of sesame bread, grapes and coffee going, this loose, broken phone line seems to be staying in the modem now and not disconnecting, and the row of lights from Ofer Military prison and nearby settlement are twinkling the distance. So no excuses about why I’ve let this thing languish for so long. Instead of any more excuses, let’s just dive right in.

On display in Rafah:

Let’s start off with yesterday, back again in Bil’in. Because most the work I’m doing for the International Solidarity Movement happens in the media office in Ramallah, Bil’in has become a little bit of my adopted village to visit.

Really, if I had my dithers, I’d be out there more often. There’s something inherently comfortable about the place. For years it was just a small enclave of about 1,200 or so farmers, herders and small business owners who preferred to keep things fairly sedate, or at least as sedate as anyone can hope to when some foreign military controls your life, until the Israeli government decided to build a big-ass barrier through these people’s farmland to allow the nearby settlement squatters in Kiryat Sefer to plop down another subdivision that will likely look something along the lines of the rows of ubiquitous, cookie-cutter ranch-style tract homes that one might find sprawling for miles and miles in Simi Valley bedroom communities.

Simi Valley was stolen from the Chumash tribe, was Mexico for a bit, and then became a part of the United States. With the help of U.S. President Bush and a few billion in American tax dollars, Kiryat Sefer will expand onto land that Bil’in villagers have been sustaining themselves with generation after generation, eventually merging with other Israeli settlements such as Modi’in, Ilit and Matitiyahu to form a contiguous Israeli presence far into Palestinian territory, cutting off access to East Jerusalem, which is still considered Palestinian territory by international law and your more rational people who don’t think the Old Testament is in fact real estate deed. This ring of settlements is often referred to by people with lots of maps as the “Ariel Finger.” Wonder which finger it is that Israel is trying to show the Palestinians. I doubt it’s the pinky.

So Bil’in gets roughed up by soldiers quite often, a fact that gets detailed here and elsewhere. In between the raids, the tear gas, the midnight visits, the artillery firing, it’s a place where people sit in garden patios for long, drawn out conversations that go far into the evening, where people genuinely care and help their neighbors (the ones not making off with between 50 and 60 percent of their farmland) and where you can find hospitality at just about every store or home.

Yesterday, a small group of us from the ISM Ramallah office scurried over to Bil’in to see the big Women in Black demonstration. We were curious to see what it would look like. Would the soldiers treat the locals better if they were accompanied by 200+ middler-aged women from Israel, Europe, the U.S and elsewhere? The answer was, as it turns out, a little bit of “yes” with a side of “no.”

Before getting into that, I’d like to back up a minute. Monday’s demonstration in Bil’in was to be attended by members of Women in Black. The organization has been holding it’s annual conference in Jerusalem, and about four or five buses of attendees hit Ramallah for the day and then capped off the trip with plans for a vigil at the site of the Israeli settlement land-grab project sometimes referred to as the “security fence.”

Aside from securing themselves from the people whose land they’re sitting on, apparently settlers need to secure olive trees and grazing fields from Palestinian farmers as well. The WiB had decided to come out and take a look, and Abdullah Abu-Rahme, one of the coordinators of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall had stopped in to get help drafting a letter in english to give to them as a form of welcome. We drafted it up, printed it and he left with it to head back to the village to prepare for the multitude of guests on the way.

A little while later, Fionna, Lauren, Walter and I joined some other ISM folks already in Bil’in, where eventually I came across this teenaged girl, sitting under a tree to the side of Abdullah’s house, practicing her speechmaking abilities with the letter Abdullah and I had worked on. It seemed that once he’d gotten home, he decided it would be better for it to be read rather than handed over, so he picked this kid to do it. I instantly felt a little sorry for her. Had I known, I might have helped draft it to be a littler easier on someone attempting to speak in a language that’s not her own. We sat there and worked out pronunciation and the definitions of all these English words for a while until the crowds started coming. I wondered how she would do after listneing to her whipser the speech a few times. As it would turn out, the shy, demure young woman there would be someone else once the march got going.

I don’t know if the WiB ladies were prepared for Bil’in. These women tend to do silent vigils, sing a little, hold up some signs and then take off having made their message clear. Bil’in people get a little more active with the soldiers. With a horde of women from around the world there to support her, this girl who had been so meek while working on her speech, was in front of the crowd along with her pals, carrying a bullhorn, trying to spur chants, songs, and marching up the road at a brisk pace to where the soldiers were inevitably waiting to stop any access to the area. Once there, she and her friends were in their faces, pushing against them, dragging the razor wire away with their bare hands, and shouting at these guys who towered above them, brandishing machine guns and wearing full riot gear. They must have felt like such heros of the state, these soldiers, standing there trying to hold off a gaggle of teenaged girls.

For many of those in WiB visiting a Palestinian village for the first time, any stereotypes they lugged with them about how submissive these ladies were supposed to be were immediately put in question. A few of the guests started hanging back. Some wondered if they shouldn’t leave while others went up to the front with them.

Now, in every demonstration, the Israeli military needs to report that there was some violence, especially if Palestinians are involved. The best way to get this in the report and be, at least technically accurate, is to start marching forward into the village as the demonstration looks like it’s coming to an end or people start wandering off. As the WiB ladies went back to their buses for the ride back to Jerusalem, this happened as usual. When soldiers got to the usual point inside the village, the boys who had managed to elude their moms started with the whole stone throwing thing. Have to say though, the girls who picked up a rock or two that day were dead-eyes.

Obviously stone throwing is a fairly useless, counter-productive thing. Hit or miss, these kids will be shot at with “nonlethal” weapons that in fact have proven to be quite the opposite on occasion. They can often be beaten, arrested, injured and worse. I and a few others hung back with the kids because this was one of the first time many of these girls went out to a demonstration, and also to be on hand to see how the soldiers responded.

We quickly found ourselves in the crossfire as the stones flew from nearby olive tree groves and soldiers set themselves up on the roofs and balconies of people’s homes, slinging sound grenades and shooting tear gas canisters sometimes at torso-level up the road.

Usually, when locals throw rocks at your soldier, the message is pretty clear: “Please, stop invading as soon as it is convenient.” To put a few of the shame-shamers out there to shame, consider this: No rocks would be flying if there was no illegal occupation going on. There are the pious of nonviolent resistance set who decry this activity as utterly wrong, wag their fingers and walk off. These really need to be…

A) Thrust for a while into the Orwellian drama that is Palestinian life under the occupation.
B) Consider that these are kids armed with a few rocks they’ve picked up off the ground in their own village facing off against adults who have undergone military training and are invading someone else’s territory fully armed with the latest technology that U.S. tax dollars can provide.

There is nothing Americans or anyone else can tell the Palestinians here when it comes to how to protest. A few of the visitors kept trying to reign it in. To me, this was more counter productive than anything that could be tossed. Instead of telling people here what not to do, think about what you are doing. Israeli soldiers are already telling them what not to do. It’s not working that well for them either.

Visit Palestine.

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