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.

In the beginning

Hey all,

I'm realizing that this blog may not be updated as frequently as I had initially hoped, so the posts that I do make will be as detailed as possible.

For some background, I am volunteering with the Palestine Solidarity Project in the village of Beit Ommar, located in the West Bank. I have been in Palestine for almost a week now, and this is my first time out of the United States.

Coming into Israel was not easy. When I arrived in Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, I was interrogated four times in the space of an hour about my reasons for coming. Israel is very nervous about internationals who are coming to volunteer, so even though I dressed up nicely and had a plausible story not involving my actual work here, they still asked many questions. Thankfully, I was allowed in.

On my shared taxi ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of the first things I was struck by was the Apartheid Wall running along the road. For my readers who may not be familiar with what I'm referring to, this is also referred to in the media as the Separation Barrier or something similar. It's being constructed to protect Israeli settlements in the West Bank from being removed as the result of negotiations with the Palestinians. Seeing it for the first time, I mistook the barbed wire for some sort of nature preserve or park, but as it continued for miles I realized I was seeing in person this very ugly tool of the occupation. Further into the country the wall is sometimes concrete slabs and watch towers.

I attended two demonstrations last Friday. This is very important - much like legal observers at a demonstration in the US, internationals can help lessen the violence used by the Israeli military against demonstrators. The military is more than willing to use force against peaceful demonstrations by Palestinians.

Besides demonstrations, most of my time has been spent in Beit Ommar itself. Volunteering here means many things. Sometimes it means accompanying residents when they protest the occupation. Sometimes it means going on a bus with hundreds of crazy children to a water park outside of Hebron. I've enjoyed every minute of it.

I am very fortunate to be here, it's hard for me to describe. When you sit with families on land they have lived on for generations, talking about this and that and playing with children in the shade of the tree outside of the house, you know what you're fighting for.

There is much more I can say, but that's all for now.