Palestine: Thank God it's Friday?

Weekends - made for waking up slow, taking it easy, going on day-trips - generally relaaaaaxing. Right?

Tell that to a Palestinian. Every Friday ('cause weekends here are Friday and Saturday), there's a rather more serious way to spend the day. Across the West Bank, there is a demonstration in towns and villages particularly affected by Israel (e.g. land being stolen by illegal settlers). And this is NOT your typical, reasonably civilised, UK demo (kettling aside...) - rather, the Israeli military will be out in force, and using force willy-nilly against peaceful protesters.

And for this, you're not gonna wanna be feeling a bit woozy after a heavy night, ready for a lie-in (not that there's booze here...but I'm running with this weekend comparison so just go with it) - because people are regularly tear-gassed, soaked with stinking 'skunk water' and shot at with live ammunition - or delightfully euphemistically named 'rubber bullets' (maybe the correct definition of 'rubber' hasn't got to Israel? These bullets seem rather more like a ball of steel covered in a millilitre of hard plastic. Update your dictionary Israel!!)

This Friday, in solidarity with the Palestinians who, incredibly, spend their EVERY weekend like this, we went to Nil'in, a village of around 5,000 people near Ramallah. Having convened in an olive grove, the protesters aimed to have a nice weekend amble through their land. However, they were hindered by some inconsiderate human rights abusing state having put a great whopping 10 metre wall slap bang in the middle of their land. 

 

This Wall (*cough* illegal under International Law *cough*) is an excellent way for Israel to grab a bit more land for their settlements (*cough*   illegal under International Law *cough*), which is exactly what has happened in Nil'in - now surrounded by five of these settlements on well over half of the village's original land. When the Wall was first proposed by Israel, the village mobilised immediately - soon they were lying in the way of bulldozers, collectively breaking  Israeli imposed curfew, all camping out on the land for months to stop progress and demonstrating regularly (at some points, every day - not just as a weekend treat). 

 Whilst they have had some success - e.g. stopping the Wall being built between 2004 and 2008, they have also had hardships - 350 people, mostly children*, have been arrested in the last 4 years, homes have been burned down, pregnant women have miscarried after inhaling new types of tear gas (this list goes on with more horrible details ad nauseum). Five villagers have died at the hands of the army, during demonstrations in Nil'in. The youngest was ten years old. I'll repeat that. Ten. Years. Old. The boy, Ahmed Mousa, was shot in the head at close range while villagers were trying to remove Israeli razor wire from their own land.

Today, no one died, no one was injured, no one managed to pull down part of the Wall (as they did on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall). The soldiers stayed on their side of the Wall and we stayed on ours. They shot tear-gas (with the wind blowing in their direction so it didn't ever really reach us, idiots.) and threw a couple of sound-bombs. Some villagers shouted slogans, some threw stones and some set car-tyres alight at the base of the Wall, throwing cold water on it afterwards to damage the concrete and hopefully eventually break through.

After the demonstration wrapped up, we spoke with Saeed, who is part of organising the village's ongoing resistance. He bought us ice lollies (MUCH appreciated in 30deg plus heat) and told us all about the history of the village, and also about his own work bringing the occupation to the attention of the world. He compared Israel's aims in ending Palestinian resistance to cooking frogs - put 'em in cold water and boil slowly so they don't even notice they've been cooked - with the key difference being that these Palestinian frogs know damn well they're being cooked and they're hopping right out of the pan. Or they're staying in the pan, but they're gonna get the sides of the pan removed. Or something else that makes this similie work (the bit that I added, not Saeed's bit which wasn't actually nonsensical at all). 

He pointed out that "there is something of the occupation in every single thing in our life" - the drudgery of checkpoints, not being able to travel freely, the feeling of tear gas on your skin for hours afterwards. During his travels around the world to tell people about Nil'in, Saeed found himself shell-shocked by the freedom that we have in Europe - "we were born under Occupation. We don't know what freedom means or tastes like" - apparently freedom tastes of vegan food (which he hated) and a trip to a vet (which was better equipped than the hospital in Ramallah) with a friend's sick dog, which had health insurance (which Palestinians wouldn't be eligible for). Feeling guilty yet? 

However, his favourite things about being outside of Palestine were:

1. Being able to sleep at night without being afraid that the army will do a night raid and arrest him whenever they feel like it. Here he doesn't sleep until 4am as that's typically when the army will stop invading villages to do this. Saeed doesn't fancy prison again.
2. Being able to move freely around and between countries - no checkpoints or whopping great Walls in the way!

Ah well, maybe it helps that actually in Nil'in (and in many areas across the West Bank) the concept of "week-end" doesn't actually strictly apply, because (as luck would have it), unemployment is at around 75%. Those lazy Palestinian farmers not farming their land.....oh, wait, where'd it go? Under a settlement, natch. Hard to farm without any land. But I gotta say, how considerate of Israel to obligingly remove it from them (and put a massive squeeze on the economy in general) so the Palestinians wouldn't be too tired to protest about it on their weekends, eh?

Well. Thank God Friday's over, I say. Time tomorrow for a lie-in and maybe a roast dinner...what's that?...oh. Turns out Palestine demonstrates on Saturday as well. Looking forward to more weekend activities at the Beit Omar demonstration (against the ever-increasing settlement on their land) tomorrow then. 

*Israeli policy-makers appear not to be able to count. They seem to think that although Israeli children are officially 'children' until they reach 18, Palestinian children are only 'children' until they're 12. And despite this , they CONTINUE to break their own (made-up) rules, arresting Palestinian children UNDER the age of 12 under adult conditions.