Christmas in Palestine: Teargassed in Bil'in, Arrested in Sheikh Jarrah

I was teargassed in Bil'in and arrested in Sheikh Jarrah yesterday. Merry Christmas.

In the West Bank village of Bil'in, demonstrators marched to the Apartheid Wall and attempted to breach security and enter village land that had been annexed to Israel behind the barrier. Representatives of the the Fatah Party, including central committee member Abass Zaki, joined the march. Demonstrators dressed as Santa Claus carried a Christmas tree decorated with spent tear gas canisters and percussion grenades that had been used by the military against the demonstrations.

"Israeli soldiers, do not shoot," said Iyad Burnat, a community organizer with the Bil'in Committee for Popular Resistance Against the Wall. "Today is Christmas, and we come bearing gifts of sweets. Do not fire tear-gas."

Israeli Occupation Forces responded by immediately throwing concussion grenades and tear-gas canisters at demonstrators.

The weapon-garnished tree was carried in support of Abdullah Abu Rahme, a coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee. Rahme is currently being held in military prison and is being charged with incitement and weapons possession for collecting spent tear-gas canisters after the weekly demonstrations against the wall in Bil'in. The small West Bank village has had more than 60 percent of its land annexed by the Apartheid Wall in order to clear room for new Israeli Jewish settlements.

Dozens of demonstrators including Fatah central committee member Abass Zaki suffered from teargas inhalation.

The demonstration was short-lived, but exciting. After Israeli Occupation Forces began firing tear-gas at the demonstrators, Bil'in youth, faces covered with kufiyyas, broke off from the main march and began approaching the wall from the East and West, as well as straight up the middle. Some threw rocks at the wall. Others picked up undetonated concussion grenades and tear-gas canisters and threw them back at the soldiers. In every case, Israeli Occupation Forces quickly and efficiently fired back and methodically forced them to retreat. After the main body of demonstrators withdrew from the area, back and forth skirmishes between the village Shabab and the apartheid state security forces continued for nearly an hour.

Tear-gas is not that bad. If you catch a whiff of it, it burns the eyes, nose, mouth, and throat and is extremely painful. At first I felt like I couldn't breathe, like I was suffocating. But I remembered my training and forced myself to stay calm, and to convince my mind that I was able to breathe. After that, I was indeed able to draw oxygen from the air, although it was still incredibly painful. But the effects wore off after just a few minutes and the gas disperses from the air fairly quickly. Another trick is to just stay upwind. If you stay upwind from the gas, a canister can land two inches away from you and you can breathe with no ill effects, no problem.

A Maan News Agency account of yesterday's Bil'in protest may be read here.



After the demonstration was over, myself and two internationals took a taxi to Jerusalem to catch the weekly demonstration against the Israeli settlement project in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem was built by the UN and Jordanian government in 1956 to house 28 Palestinian refugee families from the 1948 war. But after the start of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, some Israeli settlers began claiming ownership of the land the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built on as their own. To date, four refugee families have been forcibly evicted and displaced by the Israeli government and an extreme right-wing settler organization has moved in to the vacant homes. The evicted families have erected protest tents outside of their former homes to maintain a permanent vigil and presence in the area. They face daily violence by the settlers.

A total of 28 refugee families are currently at risk of forced eviction and displacement, a process illegal under international law, especially the 4th Geneva Convention, which prohibits territorial annexation and the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territory.

The taxi dropped us off in the middle of the demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah. More than 300 Israeli Jewish anarchists, internationals, and Palestinians were present. But literally within seconds of exiting the taxi, a group of border police and Israeli Army soldiers broke through the demonstrator lines and began arresting people. Both myself and another international from Italy were among those arrested.

We were thrown into an unmarked police van and taken to the Shalem Police Station due South of Damascus Gate, where we were interrogated and detained for about six hours.

"I don't even know why I am being arrested," I told one police interrogator.

"You are being detained because you participated in a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah," she replied.

"Is it illegal to have a peaceful demonstration in Israel?" I asked.

"It depends," the interrogator replied. "This demonstration did not have a license."

"You refuse to grant the demonstrators a permit," I said. "But every Friday you let the settlers demonstrate in Sheikh Jarrah and throw rocks at the Palestinians. What's the difference?"

The interrogator ignored me.

According to the document I signed, I was arrested for "interference with the investigation or trial proceedings" and "danger to the safety of person/public/state."


I am also prohibited from entering the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood for the next 15 days.

According to a Ynet news story titled "Leftists: Stop settlements in Sheikh Jarrah", eight demonstrators were arrested at yesterday's nonviolent demonstration.

"Organizers of the protest claim police burst through lines of demonstrators and used excess force to arrest some of them unlawfully.

"There are currently eight detainees being held at the Shalem Police Station who were arrested illegally and in gross violation of a court order," they said in a statement."

Twenty-seven demonstrators were arrested at last week's protest, and 24 were arrested the week before.

It's getting harder not to let anger and frustration overwhelm me. Everyday I watch more or less uselessly as Palestinians are harassed and assaulted by both the Israeli Occupation Forces and right-wing Jewish settlers, state and nonstate actors alike who appear to be in open collusion with one another. Labeling the state of Israeli as an apartheid state is a gross understatement. Palestinians and even left-wing Israeli Jews are not granted permits to demonstrate, and even the most civil and nonviolent forms of expression and popular resistance are violently repressed at every turn. In contrast, the settlers spew hatred and bigotry at every opportunity, are anti-woman, anti-christian, and definitly anti-Muslim. They are basically given a free pass to deface property, commit vandalism, throw rocks at homes, beat up little children in the streets, throw refugees out of their homes, and worse. The Israeli security apparatus sits by and watches and does nothing.

Everyday that I have been here it gets worse. When human rights workers label Israel a colonial-settler apartheid state we are accused of being Jew-hating anti-Semites. But why is it that it is always the Palestinians who are kicked out of their homes, and always the Israeli Jewish settlers who get new ones? One laughs, the other cries.

This conflict is not about religion, it is about economics. It is about land and territory. And it's about power. The international human rights movement has succeeded in restraining the occupation forces somewhat, apart from the carpet-bombing of Gaza last year, Israel is now restrained from committing blatant massacres, but the reality is not much better. Through a complex process deemed legal by the apartheid courts, the Palestinian people in occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank are slowly but surely being dispossessed of their homes, land, and livelihood, and nothing that we can do is putting a dent in it. The Palestinians of Gaza are essentially living in an open-air prison. It is incremental change at its worst.