By Jesse Bacon
sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee. One issue raised by the extremely
well-informed director was how similar protests in other villages have
had difficulty duplicating Budrus’s success. A Budrus protest participant
told me that even Budrus itself could see its victory threatened as Israel
completes the building of the Wall. So it is inspiring to me that Ayed Morrar,
the Budrus leader, has continued to struggle on behalf of other less fortunate
“mainstream” outlets passed on it) in support of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, his
counterpart organizer in Bi’lin.
Budrus depicts our ten month campaign of protest marches in 2003-2004,
which included participation by men, women and children, and by representatives from all Palestinian political factions, along with Israeli
and international activists, to resist the construction of Israel’s
Separation Barrier on our lands. Young women, led by my 15-year-old
daughter Iltezam, ran past armed Israeli soldiers and jumped In front
of the bulldozers that were uprooting our ancient olive trees. The
soldiers regularly met us with clubs, rubber-coated bullets, curfews,
arrests and even live ammunition. But we won in the end. The Israeli
military rerouted the barrier in Budrus, allowing us access to almost all
of our land.
The film ends with Palestinian and Israeli activists heading to the
neighboring village of Ni’ilin where the struggle to save Palestinian
land continues today. But following Budrus’s success and faced by a
growing numbers of civilians protesting the confiscation of their lands,
Israel has responded with military might, attempting to quell this new movement. Twenty Palestinians have since been killed during unarmed demonstrations against the construction of the Separation Barrier.
In Ni’ilin, in the dark of night, Israeli soldiers have staged hundreds of
military raids and arrests of civilians from the village; hundreds more
were injured — forty by live ammunition, and five, including a ten year old,
were shot dead. Today, a horrid 25 foot concrete wall stands in Ni’ilin,
behind which lie 620 acres of village lands taken for the expansion of
illegal Israeli settlements.
Through a five-year protest campaign, another nearby village,
Bil’in, has become an international symbol of nonviolent resistance
to Israeli occupation, with world leaders from Jimmy Carter to Desmond
Tutu visiting to show support. On October 11th, Abdallah Abu Rahmah,
one of Bil’in’s most prominent protest organizers, was sentenced by an
Israeli military court to twelve months in jail. His crime — leading demonstrations in his village that were very similar to those I led
in Budrus.
During Abdallah’s trial, Israel’s military prosecution repeatedly demanded
that an ‘example’ be made of him to deter others who might organize civil resistance. The EU, Britain, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International have all condemned Abdallah’s incarceration, yet he
remains in prison.
Palestinians’ wishes are simple — we want what is ours, our land,
with true sovereignty. We want freedom, equality and civil rights —
what Martin Luther King, Jr. called in his Letter from a Birmingham
Jail “our constitutional and God-given rights.”
But Israel is sending a clear message — even unarmed resistance by
ordinary civilians demanding basic rights will be crushed. It is little
known that the second intifada began not with guns and suicide bombings
against civilians, but rather with protest marches to Israeli military
checkpoints inside the occupied West Bank, and with civil disobedience
in the tradition of the US civil rights movement. Israel responded by
firing over 1.3 million live bullets in one month into crowds of protesters.
When ordinary people could no longer afford to risk protesting, small
groups turned, in anger and despair, to armed resistance.
Budrus’s struggle showed that civil resistance can bring down walls,
both literal and those of the heart, and set an example for a bright future
for Israelis and Palestinians in this biblical land. Today Palestinian and
Israeli protesters are together confronting Israel’s military occupation
in other villages. But this hopeful possibility is now threatened again by
Israeli bullets and arrests.
For this future to materialize, those who are outraged by the violence
deployed against protesters must demand an end to the injustice.
If Americans want to see the example of Budrus continue to spread,
individuals, civil society groups and the US government must act to
pressure Israel to end its brutal crackdown on civilian protesters.
More Recent Articals:
|
