Face to face with the occupation

I went to my first protest in Beit Ommar yesterday, and it was pretty wild.

The march was to land occupied by a settlement called Kiryat Arba. Settlers have built a security fence which steals land from farmers in the village. Though they went to court for the right to farm the land (and won) in 2006, they have only been allowed to work their fields behind the fence twice.

The last time the farmers went to the land, one of them was brutally beaten by soldiers who kidnapped him and dumped him outside of the town entrance. This time wasn't quite as bad, but it was very messy.

The protests was made up of around 40 international activists, who accompanied around six Palestinians and some Israelis to the farmland near the security fence. Many of them came on the Welcome to Palestine action, or "flytilla," in which hundreds of people attempted to enter Palestine to support the struggle here. Their presence was a mixed blessing - it added many people to the action, but I think it drew more attention from the soldiers at the settlement. They also didn't know anything about what would happen if they got arrested, and had little protests experience as a whole.

The group marched up a line of soldiers, who said were weren't allowed to enter the land. They declared the are a closed military zone, which works kind of like the police declaring a protest an illegal assembly in the US. Protesters had 10 minutes to leave or they would be subject to whatever the military wanted to do with it.

During those 10 minutes, we spent time clearing the land of stones so it could be farmed. Once the time was up, they began advancing on the protest and arrested a few people, one of them very forcefully. I was doing media work, so that involved taking a lot of pictures, but things were hot enough that I was busier not being attacked by soldiers to get anything good. Even as we retreated beyond the field, the soldiers threw many sound bombs and chased us further.

It was pretty scary - the group wasn't very tight and communication was lacking. Many of the Welcome to Palestine group only spoke French, and the head soldier only made announcements in Hebrew and English. At least one of the people arrested who weren't Israeli is in the process of being deported, which is unusual and demonstrates the political nature of how the soldiers acted.

Unfortunately, attacks on Palestinian farmers attempting to farm their land are common is Israel. The military blocks their way, settlers beat them, and settler security attack them, sometimes with live ammunition. The vast majority of adult men in Beit Ommar are farmers, and they depend on this land for their livelyhood. The theft of land by settlements is expanding as well - if not by literal building of houses, then by expanding security fences which the settlement then grows towards.

Also, check out this awesome blog some friends of mine are keeping about their time here and elsewhere in Palestine.