Reprinted from "the Other Israel"

The persistent struggle of the Bil'in villagers against the Separation Wall/Fence being erected on their land is increasingly getting the attention and involvement of the Israeli mainstream.

In August and September, the army made a concerted effort to break the protests by force, and make of Bil'in an intimidating "example" to other villagers contemplating resistance to decrees and oppressive measures.

However, the repeated "preemptive" occupation of the village by large army forces, intended to prevent the weekly Friday processions, simply shifted the struggle from the Fence construction site to the narrow streets of the Bil'in built-up area. For village youth defying the imposition of curfew and playing hide-and-seek with soldiers, that was actually a better terrain than the open fields where confrontations usually take place. Also, despite the numerous roadblocks all around, the aroused Israeli peace activists found creative ways of reaching Bil'in - and even in far bigger numbers than usual (see TOI-121, p.23).

In October and November, the army tried another tack: massive surprise raids in the late night or early morning and the snatching of village youths (often chosen at random) from their beds, to spend months of quite unpleasant detention at the Ofer Prison Camp. Many of them are still incarcerated at the time of writing.

Efforts to get media attention were of no avail - detentions of Palestinians by the army are a daily (or rather, nightly) occurrence, and editors made no distinction between the ones accused of "terrorism" and the Bil'iners whose only crime was participation in civil disobedience.

Illogically but predictably, the media was a bit more interested in Israeli activists detained at Bil'in, though their detentions usually last no more than a few hours. (On one occasion, TOI-editor Adam Keller was among a group who were held at the Giv'at Ze'ev police station after chaining themselves to the pillars of a Fence section under construction. The news of his brief detention, sent out over our email list, evoked a heart-warming wave of responses.)

Also the arrests failed to intimidate the villagers. Quite simply, the alternative of giving up the struggle and tamely accepting the loss of more than half their lands and livelihood was far worse than anything the army could inflict on them.

In fact, at precisely this time the example of Bil'in was energetically taken up by the nearby village of Aboud, which stands to lose much land to the Wall and also become enclosed in a narrow enclave. The people of Aboud started holding regular Friday processions of their own, with the dedicated Israeli activists of Anarchists Against Fences dividing their time and energy between the two villages.

Meanwhile, Israel's First Channel TV - whose normal reports from Bil'in consist of brief snippets of a violent confrontation, devoid of any context - suddenly screened a prolonged and quite sympathetic in-depth feature by the veteran reporter Menachem Hadar.

This was the first time that Israeli viewers could hear of the background to the Bil'in struggle - namely, that the route of the Fence in this sector had been devised so as to make a deep indentation into Palestinian territory for the explicit purpose of providing for future expansion of the giant Modi'in Illit/Matityahu East settlement (whose original part had been built in the 1990's on earlier-alienated lands of Bil'in and other Palestinian villages).

Among others, Hadar interviewed Adv. Michel Sfard, the intrepid human rights lawyer who lodged a Supreme Court appeal on behalf of the people of Bil'in.

Sfard drew the TV reporter's attention to the real-estate aspect. The process of taking away Palestinian land and using it to house Israeli settlers involved turning parcels of farmland into whole new neighborhoods of high-rise apartment buildings, enormously increasing their value. Profits, conservatively estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars and possibly at billions, were unobtrusively flowing into somebody's pockets.

Hadar mentioned the real-estate aspect in general terms. Akiva Eldar of Ha'aretz, with a long experience in investigating the doings of the settler movement and its supporters in the government apparatus, eventually published a series of articles showing that the Bil'in lands had come into the settlers' hand through manifestly fraudulent "sales" and "land deals" - with active help from officials in the "Civil Administration" of the West Bank military government.

As described by Eldar, the settler construction company presented to the Civil Administration a sale document supposedly signed by an inhabitant of Bil'in, handing over his land to them. Such sales have to be witnessed by the Mukhtar (village headman) to assure their authenticity. However, the officials accepted instead an affidavit signed by the settlers' own lawyer, who had never set foot in Bil'in, since "the security situation made it too dangerous for a Jew to enter the village" (sic!).

The Civil Administration then declared the land in question to be "state land" and leased it back to the settler builders. The first the real owners in Bil'in heard of it was when settler bulldozers started to work on their land, protected by soldiers - and they had certainly never seen any of the money.

Further, Eldar revealed that the hundreds of the housing units being presently built on Bil'in lands, comprising the settlers' "Matityahu East Neighborhood", lacked any kind of a legal building permit. The officials (many of them settlers themselves) had turned a blind eye after being told that the necessary permits would be procured and presented in future.

All these disclosures made a very significant difference, both for the situation on the ground and for the attitude of Israeli public opinion.

The main handicap under which the Bil'in struggle Page 24 has been laboring, as far as Israeli public opinion is concerned, is the conviction of most Israelis that the Wall/Fence/Barrier is a vital security measure, necessary in order to keep suicide bombers away from the Israeli population centres.

For the potential targets of such bombers, the exact route of the life-saving barrier can seem a petty-fogging detail, and the taking away of Palestinian lands and olive groves - as a minor and unavoidable side-effect.

Indeed, some columnists have accused the Bil'in demonstrators of "trying to keep the terrorist murderers' highway into Israel open." But the construction and extension of settlements is a horse of a completely different color, an issue for which the average Israeli has little interest or sympathy; and for shady deals enriching real-estate dealers - even less.

As a direct result of the new disclosures, the Peace Now movement became increasingly involved in the Bil'in struggle. Peace Now, which shies away from the anti-Wall struggle but regards settlements in general and settlement extension in particular as its staple, organized a well-publicized visit to the settlement construction site, by Israelis far closer to the mainstream than those who were hitherto involved in this area.

The Bil'in villagers themselves, well-known for coming up with creative ideas, decided to take a leaf from the settlers' book: set up an "outpost" of their own, right next to the illegally created settlement neighborhood - and compare the army's reaction to this creation of "facts on the ground" to the action it takes (or does not take) when settlers do the same.

Money was collected in the village to buy a caravan and have it placed on a piece of land owned by a Bil'in farmer, about a kilometer away on the far side of the Fence route. (It was, in fact, the same kind of caravan used by the settlers, though they usually get theirs financed by government budgets.)

Within 36 hours the army issued an eviction order and took away the caravan, in spite of passive resistance by dozens of villagers and peace activists holed up inside it. The villagers immediately raised donations from groups such as Gush Shalom and within a short time a second caravan was bought and installed on the same spot.

There followed a memorable night, of which visiting groups were later to hear from Mohamed Khatib of the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall.

"It was a rainy day and the army only noticed the new one in the evening. The Civil Administration officer came, but we noticed he didn't have the right form for removing the caravan.

He told us: this will not help you long; I will return in the morning. We asked, why are you so hot about our one trailer? What about the 750 houses the settlers are building over there without a permit, illegal even according to your own law? He said: well, with fixed structures the procedure is more complicated.

That gave us the idea, but we had only a few hours. We did it, Palestinians, Israelis and internationals and, yes, also one sympathetic settler living in Modi'in itself. We worked throughout the night: bringing over the building materials, struggling through a lot of rain and mud.

The windowpanes we got from one of our Bil'in people, we told him how important it was and he immediately helped us dismantle them from his windows and bring them here.

You should have seen the face of the CA officer when he came back in the morning. We told him: you now have the form for taking the caravan, okay, you can take it. But about this brick house which is now here, you told us yourself the procedure is more complicated..."

Indeed, the CA issued a demolition order for the Bil'in Outpost - which was named "The Joint Struggle Centre" - but up to the time of writing did not carry it out. Volunteers regularly sleep there at night, anyway, and in the day it is the focus for various visitors and delegations.

Meanwhile, Peace Now lodged an appeal to the Supreme Court, based on Akiva Eldar's revelations and on further information gathered by the movement's Settlement Watch.

After a session in which the settlers themselves admitted they had no permit whatsoever for half of the housing units being constructed, the court issued an order halting the construction work on that half.

A later session got an extension, halting work in the entire site until the judges could take a thorough look at the validity of the permits the settlers claimed to have for part of the housing units. Moreover, the settlers were also forbidden to populate the apartments already completed on the site.

All this made the villagers and their supporters more hopeful regarding the outcome of Adv. Sfard's appeal, due to be presented on Feb. 1 (though it would probably not be concluded on that day). The court will be asked to change the route of the Fence so as to restore to Bil'in its lands on the other side.

There is already a precedent, in the court's ruling concerning villages in the Qalqiliya Sector, that it is inadmissible to route the Fence so as to include land earmarked for future expansion of settlements.

The people of Bil'in are, however, far from relying on that. The Friday processions continuing week-by-week, often encountering violence from the army - but no more attempts to suppress them altogether.

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This article was published in the January 2006 edition of the Other Israel.

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