Soldiers strolling around villages at night
So it’s hard to get back to sleep when you get those late night phone calls about soldiers strolling through villages at about 2:30 a.m.
One of the ISM volunteers in Bil’in just called. About 10 Israeli soldiers are lurking thorugh windows, taking pictures of houses, and just being creepy in general in the middle of the night. This is actually sort of normal and happens on the nights after most demonstrations against the wall in the village. Basically, it’s saying “we still run the show.”
I’ve taken planty of snaps in Bil’in myself. It’s a beautiful little village. But I haven’t thought to lurk around the shadows there at night taking snaps for any photo essays. Maybe they’re working on some sort of art project.
In Bil’in, it’s the soldiers that are the prblem, but all day here, the settlers have been stealing the limelight. For those keeping score at home:
- A pro-expansionist militant tried to set a guy’s gas station on fire to torch a family living nearby.
- A group of people demonstrating against the seizure of land were beaten up by some occupation army guys.
- A bunch of settlers ransacked a village near Nablus.
- Freaks hung a pig’s head wrapped in a keffiyeh outside the Hassan Bek mosque.
- Settlers went on a rampage in he West Bank village of Sebestia.
So it goes.
Thing is, eventually someone identifiable as “Palestinian” will get fed up with the daily harassment and constant humilitation. There are a few million people going through it. Someone will snap at some point and we’ll have our episode of Palestinian violence. How will it be played? How much of this other stuff will be brought into it? Will the stories mention the settlers who have killed people over hte last couple of days? Will they mention the stuff above? Or will it be another episode in a long series of trite coverage on how Palestinian violence threatens the peace process. Consider the few offerings listed above from today’s smorgasbord of horrible treatment. What peace process?
This is a giant theater piece designed to convince the world that Israel is taking steps towards peace, that it’s making enormous sacrifices. I have no doubt that there are settlers who genuinely don’t wish to leave Gaza; let’s remember they have been put there by the Israeli government. The extremist racist ideology expressed by many settlers has been encouraged and incited for decades by the Israeli government. … During the period that Israel has been talking about destroying 2,000 settler homes in the Gaza Strip, it has been building more than 6,400 settler homes in the occupied West Bank. … The settlers who have been enjoying the resources of Gaza for decades are receiving massive compensation packages of up to half a million dollars per family. … Israel is maintaining the occupation in the West Bank, and in Gaza they are simply moving the occupation to the edges. Palestinians in Gaza will not be free.
— Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada
“I have no emotional obligations to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds.”