The Nakba Continues, Pages 12-13, 33

Israel Responds to Palestinian Nonviolence With Violence and Repression

By William Parry

Forcefully dispersing demonstrators, an Israeli soldier standing in Nil’in’s olive groves prepares to fire on unarmed Palestinian youths. (Photo W. Parry)

“IF PRESIDENT Obama is to live up to his Nobel Peace Prize, then he should ensure that Israel releases political prisoners such as Mohammad [Othman] and insist that trapping Palestine’s emerging Gandhis and Mandelas behind walls, electrified fences, and segregated roadways is incompatible with a peaceful and just future.”

Those were the concluding words of an article by Jamal Juma about the recent arrests of friends and colleagues who, like him, are involved in organizing nonviolent protests against Israel’s separation wall on Palestinian land. Entitled “It will take more than a wall to silence us,” it was published on Oct. 28, 2009 by Huffington Post (<www.huffingtonpost.com>). Six weeks later, on Dec. 16, Juma himself was arrested and held in administrative detention, with no access to his attorney or family, until Jan. 13, 2010. Othman, who had been held in detention since Sept. 22, and who faced months of interrogation and solitary confinement, was released the same day. No charges were filed against either man.

While Israeli authorities were reluctantly preparing to release the two, its military was busy executing a dawn raid on the Palestinian village of Nil’in, to arrest Ibrahim Amirah and Hassan Mousa. They join Abdallah Abu Rahmah, who was arrested on Dec. 10. Such is Israel’s Kafkaesque merry-go-round of military arrests.

What links all of these men is that they are part of and advocate for nonviolent resistance to the construction of Israel’s illegal separation wall in the West Bank, and to Israeli colonization of Palestinian land, people and resources. Juma, 47, is a prominent human rights defender and coordinator of the Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, or “Stop the Wall.”

Othman, 34, also a member of Stop the Wall and the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign, is youth leader of the local anti-wall committee in his village of Jayyous. Abu Rahmah, 39, is a schoolteacher and head of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall. Amirah and Mousa are members of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Nil’in.

A memorial for Ahmed Moussa, 10, shot in the head with live ammunition in July 2008 while removing a barbed wire barricade in Nil’in. His blood-stained shirt is tied with the Palestinian flag. In the distance can be seen the illegal Israeli settlement of Hashmonaim. (Photo W. Parry)

Nor are they the only residents of these villages who participate in the weekly nonviolent protests to have been arrested and detained by Israeli forces—34 have been arrested in Bil’in in the past six months, and 94 in Nil’in over the past 18 months. Forty anti-wall activists currently languish in Israeli jails, in legal limbo. Juma and Othman, because of the advocacy talks and their participation in international conferences, are fortunate in that their detentions triggered an international outcry, and that diplomatic pressure secured their release. Israel feels confident that it can detain the other nonviolent activists without the same international backlash or interest: the “prisoner swap” that Israel staged by freeing Juma and Othman while arresting Amirah and Mousa—not to mention the 8,500 Palestinian political prisoners it holds—attests to a more tactical disregard for world opinion and international law.

One can only conclude, however, that the weekly nonviolent grassroots protests in villages like Bil’in, Nil’in and Jayyous are growing disturbingly effective, since these targeted arrests and detentions mark an escalation in Israeli tactics to try to undermine, fragment and destroy this form of mass popular struggle. Israel has added the removal of key organizers of the popular resistance movement through dubious arrests and detentions to its current repressive arsenal of tactics, which includes the use of tear gas, sound bombs, rubber-coated and live ammunition and “sewage” spray on unarmed demonstrators, mass arrests, nighttime military raids, and curfews to intimidate activists and shatter unity.

What should Israel feel threatened by, one might ask. The answer: Plenty. Nonviolent resistance can be a powerful catalyst for change. A broad, creative, well-organized and resilient campaign of nonviolence undermines much that feeds, camouflages and supports Israel’s ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, while empowering Palestinian resistance.

Indeed, the transformative power dynamics are visible. Nonviolent resistance delegitimizes Israel’s use of brute force, creating cracks and dissent within Israeli society and generating international criticism of Israel, while spawning support for, and sympathy with, the Palestinian struggle. Conversely, the popular struggle gains legitimization and gathers support locally and internationally. Nonviolent tactics also allow space for Israeli and international solidarity groups to join the struggle—an option not available to the majority of them with armed or violent resistance. This is visible at the weekly anti-wall demonstrations in villages like Bil’in and Nil’in, and in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah (protesting the taking over of Palestinian homes by Israeli settlers), where Palestinians, left-wing Israeli and international activists are met with increasing and unabashed Israeli police and army repression.

Moreover, nonviolent resistance belies Israel’s claims of victimization and reveals the true victims, thereby subverting Israeli propaganda, which has depended on portraying Palestinians as violent murderers in order to justify Israeli aggression and murder. It humanizes Palestinians and gives recognition and legitimacy to their struggle. And it empowers Palestinians who have, for the last two decades or so, seen their leaders squander their aspirations and rights.

The moribund political stalemate—which has achieved nothing but the continued Zionist colonization of Palestinian land and subjugation of Palestinian rights—seems set in the coming decade to be eclipsed, and dictated, by the grassroots movement, in conjunction with growing international support. Civil society rather than “diplomacy” is setting the agenda. Israel knows only too well that this formula has worked in redressing the rights of the indigenous people in India and South Africa, and in the civil rights movement in the United States.

Nonviolent resistance is hardly new to the Palestinians’ struggle for autonomy and justice, of course. It goes back to the Ottoman and British Mandate periods, and in recent decades has been creatively and effectively employed against Israel’s occupation—the tax revolts in Beit Sahour in 1989 during the first intifada being an excellent example (see November 1992 Washington Report, p. 30). Typing “Bil’in” or “Nil’in” into a search engine today calls up scores of videos from these weekly demonstrations, which graphically reveal Israel’s brutal tactics against unarmed demonstrators, and menacing nighttime military raids and arrests.

The contrasts are stark and powerful. Nonviolent resistance requires visibility, and what is important now is to increase the visibility of the struggle in order to generate the sympathy, understanding and support that the Palestinian rights struggle deserves. Hence Israel’s arrest of these key movement figures: deprive a fire of oxygen and it will burn out.

The anti-wall movement is closely allied with, and advocates, the BDS movement against Israel, called for by Palestinian civil society as yet another nonviolent means of forcing Israel to end its occupation, colonization and apartheid system. The BDS movement continues to gather momentum, as it certainly did following Israel’s massive 22-day war on the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. The images and reports of wide-scale death and systematic destruction against a beleaguered and impoverished people, circulated via television and the Internet, together with reports by human rights groups and the Goldstone report of Israeli war crimes, galvanized many groups and individuals around the world to adopt BDS as a way to make Israel accountable for its actions and to international law. In fact, it was largely as a result of Othman’s BDS advocacy trip to Norway that the Norwegian finance minister announced the State Pension Fund’s $5.4 million divestment from Elbit, an Israeli company involved in producing security and military equipment that aids Israel’s illegal occupation.

Israel is starting to show signs of concern and reacting to the negative criticism. In a move which smacks of desperation, it is pouring considerable resources into PR campaigns to delegitimize the BDS campaign (calling it the “new anti-Semitism”) and into pro-Israel spin in an effort to win back international sympathy and support. When Othman returned home from his trip to Norway, a hero for this achievement, he was arrested. His detention is a signal to the leadership of the Palestinian popular struggle of the consequences they face for their nonviolent struggle for justice.

Juma reportedly was back at work the day of his release, and quick to call for continued international pressure to guarantee the rights and freedom of other nonviolent Palestinian activists still imprisoned. “Like the other Palestinian human rights defenders in Israeli jails,” he noted, “there was never a case in the courtroom. Not a single charge has been put forth. The reason for my arrest was purely political—an attempt to crush Stop the Wall and the popular committees against the wall. Therefore, the reasons for my release are also outside the courtroom: the impressive support of international civil society has moved governments and used the media to an extent that made our imprisonment too uncomfortable...[T]he latest arrests and continuous repression show that we have not yet defeated the Israeli policy as such, as Israel remains determined to silence Palestinian human rights defenders by all means.”

Omar Barghouti, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), advocates further international pressure to drive the message home: “Intensifying BDS, ultimately, is the most consequential form of protest,” Barghouti says. “If Israel gets the message that its arrest of civil resistance leaders will only intensify the already massive BDS campaigns against it, it may think again.”

William Parry is a free-lance writer and photographer based in London. His book, Against the Wall, will be published by Pluto Press this spring.