BILIN,
West Bank While the international media has been focusing on
Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, in my village of
Bilin, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, we are living an equally
important but overlooked story. Though Israeli forces plan to
withdraw from Gaza, they are simultaneously expanding their West
Bank settlements. On our village's land, Israel is building one new
settlement and expanding five others. These settlements will form a
city called Modiin Illit, with tens of thousands of settlers, many
times the number to be evacuated from Gaza. These settlements
consume most of our area's water. Throughout the West Bank,
settlement and wall construction, arrests, killing and occupation
continue.
One year ago, the
International Court of Justice handed down an advisory ruling that
Israel's construction of a wall on Palestinian land violated
international law. Today, Palestinians in villages like ours are
struggling to implement the court's decision and stop construction
using nonviolence, but the world has done little to support us.
Bilin is being strangled
by Israel's wall. Though our village sits two and a half miles east
of the Green Line, Israel is taking roughly 60 percent of our 1,000
acres of land in order to annex the six settlements and build the
wall around them. This land is also money to us - we work it.
Bilin's 1,600 residents depend on farming and harvesting our olives
for our livelihood. The wall will turn Bilin into an open-air
prison, like Gaza.
After Israeli courts
refused our appeals to prevent wall construction, we, along with
Israelis and people from around the world, began peacefully
protesting the confiscation of our land. We chose to resist
non-violently because we are peace-loving people who are victims of
occupation. We have opened our homes to the Israelis who have joined
us. They have become our partners in struggle. Together we send a
strong message - that we can coexist in peace and security. We
welcome anyone who comes to us as a guest and who works for peace
and justice for both peoples, but we will resist anyone who comes as
an occupier.
We have held more than
50 peaceful demonstrations since February. We learned from the
experience and advice of villages like Budrus and Biddu, which
resisted the wall nonviolently. Palestinians from other areas now
call people from Bilin "Palestinian Gandhis."
Our demonstrations aim
to stop the bulldozers destroying our land, and to send a message
about the wall's impact. We've chained ourselves to olive trees that
were being bulldozed for the wall to show that taking trees' lives
takes the village's life. We've distributed letters asking the
soldiers to think before they shoot at us, explaining that we are
not against the Israeli people, but against the building of the wall
on our land. We refuse to be strangled by the wall in silence. In a
famous Palestinian short story, "Men in the Sun," Palestinian
workers suffocate inside a tanker truck. Upon discovering them, the
driver screams, "Why didn't you bang on the sides of the tank?" We
are banging - we are screaming.
In the face of our
peaceful resistance, Israeli soldiers attack our peaceful protests
with teargas, clubs, rubber-coated steel bullets and live
ammunition, and have injured over 100 villagers. They invade the
village at night, entering homes, pulling families out and arresting
people. At a peaceful protest on June 17, soldiers arrested the
brothers Abdullah and Rateb Abu Rahme, two village leaders. Soldiers
testified that Rateb was throwing stones. An Israeli military judge
recently ordered Rateb's release because videotapes showed the
soldiers' claims were false.
The Palestinian people
have implemented a cease-fire and have sent a message of peace
through our newly elected leadership. But a year after the
international court's decision, wall building on Palestinian land
continues. Behind the smoke screen of the Gaza withdrawal, the real
story is Israel's attempt to take control of the West Bank by
building the illegal wall and settlements that threaten to destroy
dozens of villages like Bilin and any hope for peace.
Bilin is banging, Bilin
is screaming. Please stand with us so that we can achieve our
freedom by peaceful means.
(Mohammed Khatib is
a leading member of Bilin's Popular Committee Against the Wall and
the secretary of its village council.)