How to end a conversation in a Tel Aviv Bar
Jul 5th
Beit Jala 4 July 2010
It is hard to say the protest began as normal because there were only six or so Palestinians protesting but the protest began as normal in the West Bank city of Beit Jala yesterday. Palestinians have been holding weekly Sunday afternoon protests against the construction of the Israeli separation wall which will cut their city in half and annex large parts of their land to Israel. Recent protests have seen in escalation of violence by Israeli soldiers which now routinely fire tear gas into the densely populated city irregardless of women, children and other bystanders. Today was no different.
Palestinians approached the construction site of the wall, which was fully active with crains, drilling and a construction crew on site. Fifty meters from the construction site, the IDF erected a barrier of barbed wire and dispatched one unit authorized to use crowd dispersal methods such as stun bombs, high velocity tear gas canisters and arrest. After ten minutes of chanting and an attempt by one palestinian to physically move the barbed wire, the IDF began firing tear gas canisters at the protesters and in the direction of the houses of the village.
The crowd retreated into houses to escape the gas leaving a group of Palestinian and Israeli photographers standing near the line of troops. One soldier (an American from Ohio who studied at George Washington University) begin asking the photographers where they were from in the world. As this conversation began a Palestinian from Beit Jala named M, who was standing among us, whispered in my ear that “this soldier is a nice one”. The soldier heard him and a conversation between the two broke out about the legitimacy of the soldiers presence in the village.
The soldier maintained a clear line that the wall is necessary for the protection of Israeli citzens and he would not be there if it was not “for you people” pointing at M. He kept repeating “there has been no terror since the wall has been built” and grew frustrated with the questions regarding occupation like “do you know we live under an occupation” that M was asking him. At one point, M asked about the route of the wall and why it was not placed on the green line. The response was that the green line is not an internationally recognized border, thus Israel had no obligation to follow its path. In the soldier’s mind, as he stood with an tear gas gun in his hand ready to suppress a non-violent protest, the green line was not valid and the occupation was an involuntary act forced upon Israel.
The conversation continued for some time with small interruptions from the firing of tear gas canisters at civilian houses in the village. M kept looking at me and saying “this soldier is a good one” and “he believes in the Palestinian struggle”. It was hard to take M’s comments seriously as I believe that, while this soldier was in good spirits and chatting, his demeanour could change in a matter of seconds. Yet, I live in Tel Aviv and return home after the demonstration while M is forced to remain occupied. His ability to see the decency in soldiers through a mere conversation was inspiring given their behaviour in his city. I guess the simple ability to talk with a soldier was something of great importance to M. The conversation between the two of them ended with a promise to “talk about the situation” more in the future. Perhaps next week in Beit Jala they will continue where they left off.
Everyone was heading back to their cars and homes when stun bombs were heard on the upper edge of the city, close to the city center. We jumped in the car and arrived just in time to be caught between the Shabab and a group of soldiers. The Shabab were throwing stones and the soldiers were firing tear gas canisters directly at their bodies. This was all taking place in the heart of the city of Beit Jala while the city was trying to continue with its daily operations. Taxis were on the street, children walking, and shops open. Tear gas canisters were getting caught under cars, giving the strange effect that cars were on fire. The situation was surreal and finished quickly as the soldiers retreated close to the building area of the wall. As soon as the urban “fighting” began it was over and so was the Beit Jala demonstration for this day.
I returned to Tel Aviv and went for a drink with an old German friend of mine. It was jarring to feel in the midst of Tel Aviv society after being in Beit Jala. It is as if I am living two different lives which are deeply connected to each other. As we were sitting, some people starting asking my friend about the German football team and a conversation began among us. The young Israelis talking with us clearly just got out of the military and meeting a German in person was an uncomfortable experience for them. When we informed them that my friend lives in Ramallah and I spent the day in Beit Jala, their faces completely changed. The conversation slowed and we were left alone. Often the subject of the West Bank will end conversations in Tel Aviv bars. It is a sad reality of this country. My reality of living in Tel Aviv but spending most of my time in the West Bank reinforces a feeling that the disconnect between the reality of Israeli’s position in the West Bank and her desire to live a normal life is so far out of sync that only something truly revolutionary or tragic could break this never ending cycle of madness.
More IDF Lies about Israeli Activists in the West Bank
Jul 3rd
During the weekly protest yesterday in the West Bank village of Nabi Salih, two Israeli demonstrators were violently arrested by IDF soliders. These activists, Matan Cohen and Yonathan Shapria, were standing among a group of children and other Palestinian and Israeli demonstrators when the army made a brash decision to arrest them. After the arrest, the IDF Spokesman’s unit tweeted, “2 arrested rioters in Nabi Salih who attacked an IDF soldier now in Israeli Police custody, the soldier is uninjured”
Max Blumenthal and I were in Nabi Salih documenting the demonstration. Max’s footage from the arrest shows that neither Matan or Yoanathan were behaving in a dangerous or violent way. The IDF commander in Nabi Salih made the arbitrary decision to arrest these two activists because they were asking why the IDF was firing tear gas at children and then mocked his “brave soldiers”. Max’s account of the day can be found here.
Yesterday’s incident shows that the IDF is threatened by the presence Israeli activists at the weekly Palestinian demonstrations against the occupation. When Israelis are present in these demonstrations, it is more difficult for the IDF to use the most violent forms of repression such as rubber bullets. Yesterday’s blatant lie about the “violent” Israeli activists is part of a general campaign by the IDF to portray activists as terrorists. We saw it with the flotilla and we are now seeing it internally in the West Bank.
David Shulman Reports from South Mt. Hebron
Jun 27th
The following is a report from Professor David Shulman about Ta’ayush in the South Mt. Hebron Hills on the 26th of June 2010.
June 26, 2010 Bi’r el-’Id
There’s a strange beauty in the viscous black mud that comes up from the depths of the earth, from the bottom, or somewhere near the bottom, of the well we are cleaning in Bi’r al-’Id. Bucket after bucket of it, lifted by pulley from down below, straggles to the surface, where we unload it and pour it out on the rocky escarpment. Its texture changes remarkably over the long morning hours from a watery top layer to heavy, shiny dark loam to a granular, sticky brown. It has a strong smell, like the sulphurous mud from the Dead Sea (not very far away) that people smear over their bodies for healing. Yehuda says the Palestinians of Bi’r al-’Id should bottle it and sell it at the airport: “Sacred Mud from the Sacred Desert.” There’s no end to it. The buckets go down and up, down and up, heavier each time; the rope attached to the pulley is now caked solid with mud, and the escarpment has turned into a mire. Amiel, Dolev, and Danny are down in the dark recesses, filling the buckets alongside Haj Isma’il. Suddenly Ezra arrives—he was released from jail only a few days ago—and immediately lowers himself, like Spider Man, down the shaft. You can’t stop him. When they emerge hours later, they are black troglodytes, covered with mud from head to toe; and we, too, working the buckets above ground, are splattered, encrusted, soaked.
When I said goodbye to Amiel almost five months ago, he said, “We will meet in the spring, and when you get back, things will be the same here, just a little worse.” But actually in some ways they’re a lot worse. The continuing struggles against the occupation, on the ground in the territories, take their usual grim course, but inside Israel hardly a day passes without some new and sickening jolt. The country is in the grip of violent nationalist paranoia spiked with inventive forms of wickedness and active hatred for Palestinians, of an intensity I’ve never seen before. Here, for example, is what Yulia Shalamov Berkovitch, a member of the Knesset (from the Kadima “centrist” party), has to say: “”Israeli academia apparently suffers from ‘Palestinomania,’ a mild psychological illness whose symptoms include self-hatred, an affinity for Israel’s enemies, Jewish anti-Semitism and/or anti-Zionism. The spread of ‘Palestinomania’ demands the immediate and painful treatment for all of our sake, and the sooner the better” (Haaretz, June 21). I wonder what treatment she has in mind: Lobotomies? Re-education camps? Firing squads? In the same report, we learned that the Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar, thinks that it is “important to examine the issues” raised by a rabidly right-wing group called Im Tirtzu in a report on “anti-Zionist trends” in Israeli universities. According to Im Tirtzu, 80% of the reading materials assigned in the departments of Political Science in Israel are anti-Zionist and anti-nationalist and should, one must assume, be banned. They seem to have a black list, which no doubt includes the works of Rousseau, Plato, and John Rawls. The minister, whom some once saw as relatively enlightened, apparently goes along with this. The next step, I suppose, is censorship in the classroom, followed by book burnings in the public square.
Milder signs of the times are everywhere; the mayor of Ramat Hasharon in the coastal plain has decreed that in all schools that require a uniform, the pupils, from next year on, will have to tie Israeli flags to their wrists. He must feel, perversely, that a lack of patriotism is eating away at the foundations of our national existence. Add to this the decision by Jerusalem’s mayor Barkat to demolish 22 Palestinian houses in Silwan—the same homes we saved by an international campaign in 2005—and the ongoing, indeed escalating evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Barkat seems intent on setting the city on fire.
But here we are in Bi’r el-’Id, where our Palestinian hosts are, miraculously, rebuilding the homes from which they were cruelly evicted over a decade ago. The sun is dancing, the wind fierce for a summer day, the sky endlessly open like the human heart at its best, like the desert stretching toward the horizon just below us. I ask my friend Muhammad how things have been during my absence. “Fine,” he says; “no problems.” Afterwards I hear that his father was recently assaulted by Yaakov Talya, the notorious settler-owner of the ranch aptly named Lucifer’s Farm, hardly half a mile away; when the soldiers turned up, they of course arrested Muhammad’s father. He is now awaiting trial. (Perhaps the military judges will send him to jail for the crime of having been attacked, as they have so many others we know.) And the road to Jinba, which we can see from our perch on the high ridge, has again been closed by the army after we punched it open with a water convoy last fall. Not long ago a boy from Jinba was seriously injured and had to be carried all the way up the mountain to the road near Bi’r el-’Id. Two weeks ago settlers from Chavat Maon entered Palestinian Twaneh, threw rocks at the villagers, and tried to set a Palestinian house on fire. In short: Plus ça change….
Yet mud-stained, back aching, thirsty, I surprise myself today. I am borne along on a wave of irrational, happy hope. I have missed these weekends in South Hebron—missed the people, the Arabic, the desert landscapes, maybe even the danger. Each moment we spend here has its own irreducible value. Each act of defiant friendship is self-fulfilling, self-delighting. There it is again, that odd, unpredictable happiness, the heady wine of inner freedom. Yesterday we marched in protest in Silwan—some 500 ordinary Israelis doing the simple, the decent thing—and at first I was wondering where the Palestinians were (most were standing at their windows and doors and watching us), and my colleague Yossi Zeira said to me: “This is our task. No one will do it for us. Every good action counts and adds to the pressure. Slowly they will add up and bring change.” Alan, walking beside me, said he had felt tired after a day at work and almost didn’t come, and then he remembered a phrase from the end of Stephen Poliakoff’s film “1939″: “It is when the good people, or even those who are only half-good, remain silent that evil flourishes.” And there are moments of still deeper insight. When Eileen heard the rhymed slogan we’ve been chanting—”Ein kedusha be’ir kvushah, There is No Sanctity in an Occupied City”—she said: “Maybe there is sanctity only in an occupied city.” I think she’s right. Nothing in my experience comes as close to the meaning of a word like “holy” as the act of protest against what the municipality and the police are doing in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
That’s also what Istvan tells me as we work the buckets by the well. He’s a religious man, and to him these Ta’ayush hours in South Hebron are what religion is all about: truth, for example, and loving-kindness. “The settlers think that they represent the true Judaism,” I say to him, “and sometimes I’m afraid they may be right.” “No,” he says, “they are certainly wrong.” At moments a great simplicity emerges in the mind, like cleaning a muddy well, and you taste a giddy seriousness, a sudden lightening of the heart. Sitting beside us is Ziad Muhamra, shot point-blank in the face by a soldier some years ago when Ziad refused to take his goats off his ancestral grazing grounds. He told me his story last time I was here. Ziad survived, thanks to a devoted Israeli surgeon. He was in hospital for a year, fed by tubes. Today he remembers happily the moment he ate solid food again for the first time—a banana. It took him half an hour to eat it, and the whole ward, the nurses and the doctors and the other patients, all gathered round to watch this astonishing event. Now he has come back to Bi’r el-’Id. When he mentions his doctor, searching for the foreign Hebrew name, it seems to me, for a second, as if this tough shepherd from the desert, a true survivor, is close to tears.
But some things are simpler than others. ‘Id has joined us today; we embrace like brothers when I see him. But his life in the village is perhaps no longer viable. People envy him—he is educated, articulate, self-possessed—and some don’t like the fact that he has Israeli friends. A few days ago Palestinians came to Umm al-Khair and tried to kill him; he managed to get away. He has a wife and a baby daughter, and it’s not clear where he can go; he’d like to study somewhere in Europe. He’s good with his hands, artistic by nature. Maybe we’ll be able to help him. Then there is Haj Isma’il, with his 33 children from four wives. How will he manage to support this huge tribe from his tent in the tiny, precarious khirbeh of Bi’r el-’Id? He wanted to take a fifth wife, but the Qadi wouldn’t allow it, not even when Haj Isma’il tried to persuade him he’d already divorced the first wife. “I still have my strength,” he says, “and I don’t want to waste it or take it with me to the grave.”
“So how was jail?” I ask Ezra when he emerges from the well. “Akhla—great,” he says; “highly recommended.” He was imprisoned for a month after Judge Eilata Ziskind found him guilty of attacking a police officer during house demolitions at Umm al-Khair, where ‘Id lives. I have no doubt that the charge was cooked up by the police in order to punish a central figure in the non-violent resistance to the occupation. The first week in jail, in Jerusalem, was hard; they refused to allow him to receive books, so he went on hunger strife—for four days he ate nothing, until the prison authorities relented. Afterwards he was transferred to Dekel Prison in Beer-Sheva, where things improved. The cell was filthy, he says, and infested with cockroaches who paid no heed to human attempts to drive them away; they slept with him in his bed, emerged from his towel when he showered. One day he asked the commanding officer: “Are these part of the menu or part of the punishment?” He found a 50-meter stretch of corridor where he was allowed to walk, and every day he would pace it up and down, for hours. He lost a lot of weight. But there’s no trace of bitterness in him—quite the contrary, today he seems to me at peace, and full of hope. At lunch I say to him, “I hear you’re feeling optimistic.” He laughs. “Yes. Just look around. Two years ago we didn’t even know the name of this place. These people had been driven off their land, the houses and terraces were destroyed, the wells stopped up. Now we’ve brought them back and stood by them, and we’ve helped them to stand up to the settlers and the soldiers and not to be afraid. They are here to stay. They are home. You can train people so they become able to resist. Even a few people like that make a huge difference. In the end we will win. So of course I’m optimistic. You must be optimistic, too, otherwise why would you be here?”
Hundreds March Through Silwan Against Israeli Settlement Activity in East Jerusalem
Jun 26th
Hundreds of Israeli, Palestinians and international activists marched through the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on Friday afternoon protesting increased Israeli settlement activity in the disputed area. The march was peaceful with only small occurrences of Israeli settler rock throwing reported. However, the march saw the addition of many new Israeli activists who have deiced that the time to protest the dangerous policies of Israel’s government is now. The march was one of the largest Israeli protests against settlements in East Jerusalem in recent history. Video provided by Israel Putermam. Photos by Joseph Dana.
Israel to Reopen Tristan Anderson Shooting Case
Jun 26th
According to the Popular Struggle website:
The Israeli District Attorney announced today that the police will revisit its investigation into the shooting of American activist, Tristan Anderson, who was critically injured by a high velocity tear gas projectile that was shot directly at him by an Israeli Border Police officer during an anti-Wall protest in the West Bank village of Ni’ilin on March 13th, 2009.
The case was closed earlier this year on grounds of “lack of wrongdoing”, and will now be reopened following an appeal filed on behalf of Anderson’s family by attorneys Michael Sfard and Ido Tamari. The appeal, which pointed out grave flaws and negligence in the original investigation, was based on an independent investigation, held parallel to the one the police conducted. It shows clearly that the police decided to close the case despite the fact that the investigating team had never visited the scene of the shooting, and as a result questioned officers who had nothing to do with Anderson’s shooting and, in fact, could have had nothing to do with the shooting, as there was no direct line of fire between where they were positioned and were Anderson was shot.
A second Border Police crew, which was located in the area where Anderson was shot from according to all civilian eye witnesses, was never questioned at all. The force’s commanders, who carry responsibility for the shooting were also not held accountable.
A presentation explaining the ills of the police investigation can be viewed.
The decision to re-launch the investigation following the appeal is, in effect, an acceptance of Anderson’s family’s claims that the investigation which cleared the Border Police officers from responsibility to their son’s critical injury was fundamentally flawed and negligent.
Attorney Michael Sfard: “With this kind of negligence, it is no wonder that the world does not trust Israeli investigations. Our own independent investigation was easily able to show, despite our meager resources, that the shooting was done directly at Anderson and with absolutely no justification. We will not rest until the shooter is brought to justice”.
Nancy Anderson, Tristan’s mother: “We expect someone to finally take responsibility for our son’s shooting. It is unimaginable to us that soldiers will shoot unarmed civilians whose sole crime was to demonstrate, and that no one will be held accountable. The re-launching of the investigation, so we hope, is a much needed first step towards justice for us and for our son.”
Anderson left Israel and returned to the USA with his family at the beginning of the month, after almost a year and a half of hospitalization in Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv. His condition remains serious as he suffered irreversible brain damage as a result of the shooting.
Whose protests are they?
Jun 24th
Cross posted on Pulse Media
Beit Jala is a small city outside of Jerusalem. The wall that Israel is building in order to expropriate land and create a physical barrier between Israeli and Palestinian society is being built through the middle of this city. Palestinians have decided to begin a series of weekly demonstrations against the construction. The demonstrations are usually composed of Palestinians, international activists and a handful of Israelis. In the middle of last week’s protest, baking in the summer heat, I wondered how helpful the international activists were. Instead of maintaining a low profile and letting the Palestinians demonstrate, the internationals were at the front of the protest yelling slurs at the Israeli troops in the city. The Palestinian right to protest, resist and demonstrate is real, yet I am curious about the outcome when internationals to engage in the same actions, with their own style and individual behaviors. Israelis that want to assist and take on a supportive role often do so at the directive of the Palestinians. The Anarchists against the Wall are the most profound example of this movement in Israel. Are international activists who travel to Israel for short amounts of time part of the protest movement in Palestine? It is one thing to support a protest movement and another thing to join a protest movement.
It is wonderful to see an international effort to assist Palestinians in their struggle, however, the question remains: how can internationals help in the most effective way? Westerners have an incredible privilege in this conflict with their access to foreign press, social media networks and ability to travel throughout Israel and Palestine. Documenting events seems to be the clearest path of using this privilege in an effective way since the internet has opened a space of fast communication from the front lines. Rather than getting arrested in a small village, it may be that documenting and disseminating events from that village will provide more positive results. An arrest in Beit Jala or Bil’in is an event that often goes unnoticed by the Israeli and International media and only serves to reinforce negative images of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement in the West Bank. These actions can increase the damaging mechanism against the Palestinian population and the architecture of the occupation. Arrests of Israelis tend to carry more influence in the Israeli press than those of internationals.
The Palestinians are happy to welcome internationals to the front lines of their protests. I asked a number of Palestinians in Beit Jala what they felt about the international involvement in their struggle and they presented me with different responses. Generally, they were very happy to welcome foreigners to their villages and places of resistance. They welcome the kind of international media coverage that videos on YouTube can generate. On the other hand, they were unsure about the lasting effect that internationals can have in this conflict. Abu Nidal, a Palestinian who might lose a large amount of land and olive groves to the wall in Al Walleja, argued that the protests in his village served to ‘blow off steam’ from the relentless life of occupation. He did not want to dismiss the international participation in the protest movement, but he maintained a pessimistic view of the future. The general response was one of indifference towards internationals, suggesting that there may be a large gap between the ‘help’ that internationals are providing in their minds and the reality on the ground.
Through my own experiences I have realized that many international activists are often not interested in the stories of Israeli activists who are engaged in the protest movement. What does it mean to travel to a foreign land in order to assist a resistance movement? If in the middle of an action, cars full of citizens of the country that we were resisting show up in order to join the struggle, would I ask them about their story, their involvement in the protest, their opinion about the occupation?
One cannot dismiss the passion that internationals bring with their opposition to the Israeli occupation. On the day that I was in Beit Jala, a 65 year old Irish activist collapsed from heat stroke and tear gas inhalation while filming the hours long protest. After a stop in the hospital in Beit Jala, he was back on the front lines filming everything again. Everyone can assist in some way throughout this process, but it will also be helpful to continue looking at our own actions in a critical way.
A clip from the June 20 Beit Jala protest filmed by the Irish activist mentioned above:
The Safest Drivers in Israel
Jun 19th
Nilin/ Nabi Salih 18 June 2010

It always strikes me how well Israeli activists drive. Of course, there is good reason to be afraid that every minor traffic violation could result in arrest because of political activities. Despite that the car travel to the villages in the West Bank, where the Israeli armed forces routinely fire tear gas and rubber bullets at us, is always the safest part of the journey.
The protests in Nil’in are getting smaller. Five people have died, countless injured, the village is routinely raided by Israeli armed forces looking for children that throw stones and there have been hundreds of arrests. On top of all this, the village has a concrete wall in the middle of their olive and farm grove. While the protest is losing numbers it does continue. On this past Friday, the normal procession of prayers and chants lead to the wall. The first hour was routine with lots of tear gas and some stone throwing. The protest moved along the route of the wall to the edge of a wadi where the wall goes from concrete to barbed wire fence. Groups of Palestinians run after tear gas canisters and try to stop them from discharging. The reusable tear gas canisters are collected and ultimately thrown back over the wall to the great excitement of the Shabab (Arabic for the Palestinian youth stone throwers).
On this day, one of the tear gas canisters thrown back across the wall started a large brush fire. After the fire, the soldiers entered the village with guns draw under the cover tear gas. The protesters had already retreated from the area of the wall leaving only the Red Crescent medical team and one photojournalist slowly making their way back to the village. The soldiers quickly surrounded the medical team with guns pointed at their heads. One soldier took an orange medical stretcher from the hands of a medic, hit him with it and slammed it to the ground destroying it. The camera of a Palestinian photojournalist was destroyed and everyone was handcuffed and lead to the Israeli side of the wall. We learned later that the army is charging the medical staff with assault and as of this writing they are still in an Israeli jail. The IDF has also argued that the medical staff was not clearly marked from the protesters. Yet another surreal observation by the army as the medical were dressed in a full white Red Crescent uniforms and carrying a stretcher which the soldiers used to beat them.
After reviewing the footage from Nil’in in the village we made our way to Nabi Salih to join the weekly protest that has been taking place for the past six months. Before we arrived, the army had invaded the village and arrested one guy who was suspected of throwing stones. According to one of the people which observed the incident, “there was fiery resistance from the village women when Israeli Forces arrested a young man on the Orwellian accusation that he didn’t prevent the shabab from throwing stones at them from his property, the arrest was fiercely resisted with palpable anger and outrage and even when the soldiers had him cocooned in a jeep prior to being carted off to detention and worse, the vehicle was physically prevented from leaving until brutality, percussion grenades and tear gas forced a way.” Here is video of the events:
By the time we arrived from Nil’in, the entire village was outside on their decks, drinking tea or coffee as the youth of the village were throwing stones at the Israeli army jeeps parked at the entrance of the village. At one point, a jeep filled with soldiers charged into the village, the commander of the Israeli unit in Nabi Salih emerged, charged into a house with two soldiers, “looking for stone throwers”. The Shabam responded by throwing rock after rock at the IDF jeep and the soldiers quickly set off through the village, chasing boys to the fields of the village. The imbalance is striking, full clad military soldiers running through a village of 500 people looking for 12-17 boys throwing stones are their jeeps. Some of the soldiers in Nabi Salih on this day were from the notoriously brutal Kfir brigade adding to the uncomfortable feeling that many of the Israeli observers had while the army hunted for the children of the village.
Eventually the sun disappeared and evening cool engulfed the village. The army was still in the village dealing with problems of a broken jeep. As the hours got later, we made the decision to return to Tel Aviv leaving the Shabam and a group of internationals on one side of the village and the IDF on another. Another Friday of West Bank protests…
“we want to be”…settlers, activists and soldiers do a dance in the south Hebron hills
Jun 16th
Video from a last Saturday’s action in the South Hebron Hills. There are no English subtitles but the situation is quite clear. Soldiers remove shepherds from their farmlands, activists try to stop them and settlers attack Palestinians. The dance continues every day, every week.
Breaking their Own Rules of Conduct
Jun 10th
Various footage of Border Police Officers and soldiers firing tear gas canisters directly at protesters in the West Bank, rather than looping them through the air, contrary to orders. Because of this behavior people are injured or killed as in the case of the 21 year old American Jewish college student who lost her eye last week in the West Bank.

















Violence in Silwan Days After Major Protest
Jun 28th
Posted by Joseph Dana in Unarmed Resistance
3 comments
Two days after hundreds of Israelis marched through the East Jerusalem city of SIlwan in protest of expanding settlements, the Palestinian residents of the city experienced another reminder of their position as occupied in the holy city. Confusion broke out last night around one of the main settler houses in Silwan, Beit Yoantan. Palestinians thought an eviction was going to take place and became understandably excited. However, there was no eviction. A private security force that guard the settler house started shooting very closely into the house that the settlers threatened to evict, prompting the family (and the whole village) to think that they are trying to invade and take over the house. Rock throwing began and the border police began to fire tear gas into Palestinian homes in the village. 20 Palestinians were injured and a handful of border police troops. Video from last night below:
Days after one of the major protests of the Israeli left in recent history the question of how effective the protest movement has become is on the minds of Israeli protest planners. Perhaps the time has come for a change of tacit to the East Jerusalem problem within the Israeli left.
Palestinian Childern in Silwan Friday. Photo by Joseph Dana.