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 pieces of the Separation Wall.
Sometimes, 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 lifetime?” No one has 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 razor wire) and relocate it nearer to the Green Line.
The Bible commands us: “Rejoice not when thine 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 retroactive 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 a 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 and 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 combinations of traits:
(a) Steadfastness. The courage of the Biliners. In other villages, too, the demonstrators have shown courage, but here the sheer dogged persistence arouses admiration. Week after week they came 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 highfaluting speeches or sterile meetings in luxury hotels abroad. It was forged under clouds of choking tear gas, under the jets of water cannons, 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, cooperation 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 has 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 Bil’in 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 settlement 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?
— A report on and photos of the victory demonstration that took place in Bilin last Friday can be viewed at www.gush-shalom.org
