NI'LIN, WEST BANK // Some scrambled up the hill and out of range, eyes tearing, noses running, skin smarting. Others braved the soldiers and broke across the dirt track marking the route of what will become Israel's separation barrier and to the olive fields below. Three were detained and two needed treatment for tear gas inhalation. The Israeli army may claim to have devised a plan to ensure the peace during the olive harvest in the occupied West Bank, but in Ni'lin, on Friday, it was business as usual as about 100 Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists, attempting to help local villagers gain access to their olive orchards, were eventually dispersed by Israeli soldiers firing tear gas and sound bombs.
"We have no choice, we have to confront the Israeli army," said Salah Hawaja, 40, the co-ordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Ni'lin. "It is only through such non-violent resistance, supported by internationals and Israelis, that we can defeat the occupation." Ni'lin has become a focus of Palestinian grassroots action against Israel's separation barrier, a combined fence and wall that is being built in and around the West Bank and which Israel says is a security measure but Palestinians call a blatant land grab.
In Ni'lin, the barrier, as planned, will separate the village from about 2,500 dunams of land, belonging to 120 families. The village has already lost about 12 per cent of its lands to the nearby Jewish settlements of Modin Illil and Hashmona'im, built on adjacent hilltops just on the West Bank side of the 1947 armistice line and in occupied territory. Every Friday since May, locals and other demonstrators have gone to what will become the route of the separation barrier in Ni'lin and held prayers. The Israeli army has broken up the demonstrations, sometimes with deadly results. Two Palestinians, one a boy of 11, have been killed there in three months, both by live fire. Hundreds have suffered injuries and dozens have been detained. It was in Ni'lin that footage released by the Israeli human rights group B'tselem showed an Israeli soldier shooting a detained and bound Palestinian.
"What is happening here is unjust and illegal," said Jonathan Pollak, 26, an Israeli activist with Anarchists Against the Wall and one of the organisers of the Ni'lin protests. "I consider it my moral duty, as an Israeli, to take part in the resistance to the Israeli occupation." This past Friday was a little different. With this year's olive harvest starting across the West Bank, dozens of volunteers had come from Ramallah and Israel to help locals pick their olives. The olive harvest has become a time of increased tensions in the occupied West Bank, with local farmers often trying to reach lands close to settlements.
Israeli and international volunteers accompany Palestinian farmers to provide them with some protection against settler harassment. In Ni'lin, that means confronting Israeli soldiers, with about 5,000 olive trees belonging to Ni'lin farmers on the other side of the route of the separation barrier. Not all the demonstrators came just to confront soldiers, however. "It's a good way for us to get to get to know one another, to spend time with the women and children in the fields, picking olives," said one, Netta Cohen, 28, from Tel Aviv. Ms Cohen was not there to protest the barrier, she said, but only to help farmers secure their livelihoods.
That too was the case for Michel David, part of a delegation of the French Farmers' Union that had come to deepen relations with Palestinian farmers. Having seen up close what Palestinian farmers face trying to get to their land, Mr David said he was "horrified". "It's scandalous. These farmers have a right to pick their olives, just like everyone has a right to make a livelihood." As important as the olive harvest is to Palestinian farmers, it is the bigger political picture that is in focus in Ni'lin, just as it is in nearby Bili'n, where similar protests succeeded in delaying the barrier being built, while legal petitions convinced the Israeli Supreme Court to order the Israeli army to reroute the barrier there.
"Bili'n has become a symbol of what is possible," said Mr Hawaja. "We are trying to replicate that success in other villages across the West Bank. Ultimately it's about faith - people's faith that their actions can bring results." On Friday, it took soldiers a good 45 minutes before they finally managed to disperse the last of the protesters. They had fired sound bombs and tear gas canisters, sometimes simply rolling tear gas grenades into groups of demonstrators when they came too near. But they had not used rubber bullets, live fire or the newly developed "skunk" bombs, a noxious cocktail of foul smelling liquid in canisters fired from guns first tested in Ni'lin.
Mr Pollak was one of the three protesters detained. He spent six hours in detention at a nearby checkpoint, he said later when reached by phone. Ultimately they let him go because he said he "had done nothing illegal". He had no doubts about his own actions but said he and other Israeli activists could only play a small role. "The occupation," said Mr Pollak, "will end when it becomes unmanageable, when these demonstrations occur all the time, everywhere. Israeli and international activists can do their bit, but ultimately the answer will come from the Palestinian street."
okarmi@thenational.ae
