How to incite violence

Abdullah (centre) mourning Bassem in Bil'in last year

Last Tuesday, one of the Palestinian leaders of the weekly protests against the Israeli wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in was convicted in an Israeli military court and accused with organising illegal demonstrations against what is in itself an illegal separation fence robbing villagers up to 60% of their land.

Abdullah Abu Rahma makes no bones about his leadership in the beleaguered village surrounded by barbed wire, settlements, checkpoints and fences.

He is always on the frontline every Friday, after noon prayers, facing the full might of the Israeli military that greets the unarmed villagers with tear gas, bullets and stun grenades. I have seen him marching on in the fields towards armed soldiers, his hands held up, under a shower of acrid gas and gunfire.

The gentle and soft-spoken leader of the Bil’in Committee Against the Wall, together with the rest of his fellow villagers, are not new to harassment from the Israeli occupation. Night time incursions and arrests have become a daily feature in this farming village. A relative of Abdullah’s was shot in his leg as he was handcuffed and blindfolded in the hands of an Israeli battalion commander two years ago. Filmed by a young Palestinian girl from behind a window, the incident caused an uproar as it was doing the rounds on TV and the internet.

Then last year, a cousin of Abdullah’s, 31-year-old Bassem Abu Rahma, was killed by a tear gas canister shot in his chest by an Israeli soldier, as he was peacefully protesting against what on his side of the fence is called the “apartheid wall”.

His death had jolted Bil’in, as Bassem was a very loved, peaceful figure among young and old and beyond the village of less than 2,000 people. Known fondly as “the Elephant”, Abdullah had told me on the day of his funeral how he noticed Bassem’s cat sitting on his grave, and how on the morning when he would die he fed a bird he kept in a cage and freed it soon afterwards, before heading towards the mosque to prepare for the demonstration. The elephant who freed a bird, I thought.

Bassem’s death was also caught on tape in April last year. He is seen urging Israelis not to shoot as a foreigner was hit in her leg shortly before he is killed. He did not have a stone in his hands when the tear gas canister fired by an Israeli soldier hit him fatally in his chest.

Despite the tragedy felt by the whole community, Abdullah and Bassem’s relatives had insisted that nonviolence remained the only effective resistance against the occupation.

“It’s more effective than anything else, and that’s why the Israelis want to kill us,” Abdullah had told me, while the village was still in mourning. “They’re terrified, they want to stop us at all costs, because they are seeing other villages following our nonviolent path, and Israelis and international activists are joining us.”

Over the last years, Bil’in has inspired other Palestinian villages, even those in Gaza bordering with Israel, to hold their own demonstrations against the Israeli land grab.

The villagers’ creative and nonviolent demonstrations have given a new face to Palestinian resistance – from impersonating the anti-imperialist Avatar characters to shooting footballs towards Israeli soldiers during the World Cup. Of course not all Palestinians agree this is the best form of resistance – some say it still doesn’t change the realities of the occupation, and detractors say it is not peaceful at all as young Palestinians end up throwing stones at the soldiers. But if that is violence, what word would be appropriate to describe the Israeli clampdown on these unarmed demonstrators?

“We want to continue our strategy of nonviolent action,” Abdullah had told me after Bassem’s death. “If someone from here had to fire a machine gun towards the wall, then the Israelis would have every pretext to come with planes and tanks and bomb all the village. And they would tell the entire world ‘they shot at us’ and Europeans would say ‘the Israelis want to defend themselves, they have a right to kill Palestinians because they’re armed with guns’. But that’s not the case here. We have told all our people we are not against Israelis, we are not against Jews, we are not even against the soldiers. We are against the occupation. We need our land to live in peace, we need it for our children.”

The International Court of Justice had ruled the fence and accompanying land grab to be “contrary to international law” as far back as July 2004, while an Israeli Supreme Court ruled two years ago in a case filed by Bil’in’s mayor that there were not enough “security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bil’in’s land”. In a separate, paradoxical Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2007, the settlement of Mattiyahu East built on Bil’in’s land was legalised retroactively.

No wonder Abdullah had no trust in the Israeli courts when it was announced last year that Bassem’s killing would be investigated.

“What can you expect from the occupiers’ court?” he had told me as we chatted on the rooftop of the local mosque while mourners came to visit Bassem’s family.

The military court ruled earlier this year that Bassem’s case did not warrant to be investigated. The fence is still there, the land stolen from the villagers is called “a closed military zone” giving Israeli forces a pretext to shoot at anyone approaching the area.

Abdullah is now in a military prison awaiting Israeli justice. Whatever the sentence, Israel will have managed, once again, to prove that it speaks only the language of violence, just because it can.