Bilin ! Bilin!

Down with all Fences

Vienna,14-09-2007:As I read this piece of writing
in the Arab News by Uri Avneri, an Israeli peace
now activisit, I was reminded of the late early
teens diarist, Anne Frank.I reprint it here with the
kind permission of Arab News Editor in Chief,
Mr.Khaleed Al-Maeena, with the hope both
Palestinians and Israelis would soon need no
barriers between them to live in peace.
-Kulamarva Balakrishna

WHEN MY friends fall prey to despair, I show them
a piece of painted concrete,which I bought in
Berlin.
It is one of the remnants of the Berlin Wall,which are
on sale in the city.
I tell them that I intend,when the time comes,
to apply for a franchise to sell the pieces of the
Separation Wall.
Some times, when I give a lecture before a German
audience, I ask:=how many of you believed, a
week before the fall of the wall, that this would
happen in their life time?= No one ever raised their
hand.
But the Berlin Wall fell.Last week it happened in
Israel too-true,only in one place,to a small section
of the fence,when the Supreme Court decided
that the government must dismantle the obstacle
(which at this place consists of a fence,with ditches,
patrol roads and razer wire) and relocate it near
the Green Line.
The Bible commands us:=Rejoice not when the
enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when
he stumbleth= (Proberbs 24.17).It is a very hard
commandment to obey.
The enemy,in this case,is the= separation obstacle=.
It is hard not to rejoice,even when it is a limited
joy,a conditional joy,because we have won a battle,
not the campaign.
First of all,a part of the land of Bilin has been
redeemed,but not all of it. The new fence will still
be far from the Green Line.The length of the
section to be dismantled is less than two
kilometers.
Second,Bilin is only one of many villages whose
land has been stolen by means of the wall.
Third,the wall is only one of the means of
occupation,and the occupation gets worse
by the day.
Fourth,in many other places the Supreme Court
has confirmed the path of the fence,even though
it steals Palestinian land no less than at Bilin.
Fifth,the Bilin decision also has a negative side:
It gives the court an alibi in the eyes of the world.
It confers on the settlers an apparent legitimacy
in many other places.It must not be forgotten
for a moment that the Supreme Court is essentially
an instrument of the occupation,even though
it tries sometimes to mitigate it
As if to underline this point,the court itself hastened
this week to issue another ruling,giving retro-
active authorization to another neighborhood
that has also been built on Bilin land.
Yet in spite of all this, in this desperate struggle,
even a small victory is a big victory.Especially
since it happened in Bilin.
For Bilin is a symbol.In the past two and half years,
it has become a part of our life.Here,every Friday,
for 135 weeks without exception, a demonstration
against the fence has taken place.
What is so special about Bilin, a small remote village
whose name was known before to just a few
outsiders, if any?
The struggle there has become a symbol because
of an unusual combination of traits:
(a) Steadfastness.The courage of Biliners. In other
villages,too, the demonstrators have shown
courage,but here the sheer dogged persistence
arouses admiration.Week after week they come
back.The activists were arrested again and again,
wounded more than once.The entire village has
suffered from the terrorism of the occupation
authorities.
More than once I was stirred at the sight of this
small village´s resistance. I saw the armored
jeeps storming in,sirens screeching hysterically,
the heavily armed policemen jumping out
and throwing gas and stun grenades in all
directions,young boys stopping the jeeps with
their bodies.
(b)Partnership.The three-cornered partnership
between the people of the village, Israeli peace
activists and representatives of international
solidarity.
This is a kind of partnership that is not expressed
in high-faluting speeches or sterile meetings
in luxury hotels abroad. It was forged under
clouds of choking tear gas, under jets of water
canons, under fire from stun grenades and rubber
-coated steel bullets, and in ambulances of the
Red Crescent as well as army detention
facilities.It has given birth to comradeship and
mutual trust,just when these seemed to have
been lost forever in our country.
Since the death of Yasser Arafat, co-operation
between Palestinians and Israeli peace
movements has declined in several spheres.
Many Palestinians have despaired of the Israelis
who have not achieved the hoped-for change,
and many Israeli peace activists have despaired
in face of the Palestinian reality.But in Bilin
cooperation flourished.
The Israeli activists,headed by the resolute young
women and men of the =Anarchists Against
the Fence=,have proved to the Palestinians
that they have an Israeli partner they can trust,
and the people of Bilin have proved to their
Israeli friends that they are reliable and determined
partners. I am proud of the part Gush Shalom
has played in this struggle .
Now the Court has proved that such demonstrations
which many considered hopeless,can indeed bear
fruit.
(c) Non-violence.Always and everywhere. Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King would have been
proud of such disciples.
The non-violence was entirely on the side of the
demonstrators. I can testify as an eyewitness:in
all the demonstrations in which I took part, I saw
not a single instance of a demonstrator raising a
hand against a soldier or policeman.When in one
of the protests stones were thrown from among the
protesters,video films conclusively proved that they
were thrown by undercover policemen.
True,there was violence at the demonstrations.A lot
of violence.But it came from the soldiers and the
border-policemen who could not bear, I presume,
the sight of Palestinians and Israelis acting together.
This combination of steadfastness,partnership and
non-violence is what turned Bilin into a beacon of
the struggle against the occupation.
The Bilin affair has another face,which was revealed
in all its ugliness over the last few weeks.
The Supreme Court has decided that the path of the
fence in this sector was not based on security
considerations, but was designed to enlarge the
settlement.For us, of course that was not a startling
revelation. Everyone who has been there, including
foreign diplomats, has seen it with their own eyes:
The path was fixed in such a way that the Bilin land
was annexed de facto to Israel, to serve for a huge
new housing project called =Matityahu East=,
in addition to the sttlement called =Matityahu=
(and also Modi in Illit and Kiryat Sefer) that is already
standing.
In a second decision this week, the Supreme Court,
for the sake of a spurious =balance= decided that the
housing project that is already standing in Matityahu
also on Bilin land, can remain there and may now be
populated, in spite of the fact that the same court
has in the past forbidden this.
And who built Matityahu? Some weeks ago, a huge
scandal was exposed.The culprit is a building
company called Heftsiba.It collapsed,taking with it
the apartments that its clients had already paid
for. Many of them have lost their entire savings.
The owner of the company fled and was tracked
down in Italy. the company´s debts come close to
a billion dollars.The police suspects that the fugitive
has stolen immense sums.
And lo and behold:This is the same company that
built the original Matityahu neighborhood,and
that intended to build the new Matityahu project
on land stolen by means of the =Security Fence=.
It also built the monstrous Har Homa housing
project and other neighborhoods in the occupied
territories.
Who can now deny what we have been saying for
years, that the settlements are a huge business of
billions upon billions of dollars,which is entirely
based on stolen property? Arab News.
( View www.gush-shalom.org )