The aims of the protest thus fulfilled, the demonstration concluded and the protesters returned to Wad Rahal.

The weekly action in Al-Ma’asara was today allowed to continue further along its route than is normally permitted. The demonstrators walked to the Al Ma’asara land on the edge of the town to which they usually cannot gain access. Once there the demonstrators – Palestinian, International and Israeli – sat on some rocks and talked about the success of their peaceful demonstration. Once the talk was over, everyone left.

Al-Ma’asara
Later Friday, a small group of activists from Al-Ma’asara marched towards their village lands. In a symbolic protest, one activist set fire to an Israeli flag. He then forcibly attacked and arrested by Israeli soldiers. The remaining demonstrators, Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals, sat down in the road to protest his arrest, insisting they would not leave until he was released. The soldiers agreed to a release, providing the group would back up 15 meters. While the activists complied, the soldiers did not keep their word (surprisingly), and drove away with the organizer. Israeli soldiers also began pushing the group further back, and eventually dispersed the demonstration.

Boys stood in front of the march, facing the Israeli military, one with a sign in Hebrew reading No Wall. Many carried flags, including the Turkish flag, and spoke words of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza and with the passengers of the humanitarian aid flotilla.

The marchers were nonviolent. A handful of settlers, including two children wearing bicycle helmets, stood on a hill above the road and watched the peaceful demonstration. No tear gas was used by the military. It likely would have affected the settler observers as well as the Palestinian, Israeli, and international demonstrators.

Also on Friday, a demonstration in Bil’in commemorating the loss of the solidarity activists aboard the Free Gaza flotilla was met with tear gas and arrests, including the arrest of Free Gaza organizer Huwaida Arraf, who had just been released after being siezed off the Freedom Flotilla day before. 2 others were arrested.

When asked how he supports himself now that he has lost so much land, Ahmed said he lived a simple life before. Now he lives even more simply.

An Israeli military jeep pulled up when we first arrived but immediately turned around and did not return.

Despite having to clamber down a precipitous terraced hillside to reach the site, a group of committed activists managed to seat themselves in the path of the leading bulldozer. By clinging determinedly to one another they managed to resist being dragged away into detention for upwards of an hour. They hung on even when the operator of the bulldozer put their lives at risk when he resumed excavating within a metre of them.

The exasperation of the troops at failing to remove the demonstrators found its expression in detonating sound bombs and throwing teargas canisters amongst the assembled journalists and photographers. Nevertheless, the most determined of them managed to hang in and record the event until the last demonstrator had been arrested, handcuffed and carried to the waiting police vehicle.

The six activists- all Israeli nationals- who were arrested were released the same day. The final act of violence by the Israeli Occupation Force was to enter the village and teargas a group of Palestinian children who had taken no part in the demonstration.

Upon reaching the road junction the protest march was met by a heavily armed contingent of Israeli Occupation Force soldiers and border police who immediately, and for no apparent reason, arrested two 16 year-old youths from the village . A day later they remain in detention. The marchers were then urged by the organisers to sit down in the road and maintain a non-violent and peaceful protest.

The commander of the Israeli troops then produced an order declaring the area a closed military zone. Almost immediately, and without warning, troops commenced to throw sound grenades amongst the assembled people, followed by successive volleys of tear gas cannisters which blanketed the area with dense clouds of choking, painful fumes. Two people were injured when hit by the cannisters. The most serious injury was sustained by Hassan Birjiyeh, a march organiser and member of the Al Ma’sara National Committee. He was taken to a hospital in Bethlehem with head and shoulder injuries which were later diagnosed as not life threatening.

Participants in the march were shocked by the level of violence and unprovoked aggression employed by the Israeli military. The French contingent (comprised mostly of middle-aged and elderly men and women) were particularly distressed to see and to experience such a disproportionate use of force. Even seasoned observers were surprised that tear gas had been used at Al Ma’asára, where protests are always peaceful and non-violent. They wonder whether this presages an increased level of repression by Israeli forces.

Al Jab’a, a village of 700 people, sits in the path of a section of the apartheid wall which Israel has scheduled for construction at a future stage. It lies south west of Bethlehem, just one kilometre from the 1967 Green Line – inside the Palestinian West Bank.
From the hillsideone can see, not too far distant, the colony/settlements of Bat Ayn, Betar Ellit, Nahal Gavot and the monstrous Gush Etzion, all built on Palestinian land. It is no wonder that the people feel that their future is precarious.

Present-day life is hard enough. For anything but the most basic necessities villagers rely on shops in the neighbouring town of Surif. In 2000 the Israeli authorities blocked off the road connecting the two centres, in what we in Australia would call an act of sheer bastardry.* Now the people of Al Jabá must walk the 400 metres from their village along a track to where taxis wait to take them to and from Surif. On their return trip, laden with anything from gas cylinders to groceries and household supplies, they must once again negotiate the track. If The Wall is completed as planned, Al-Jab’a will end up on the “Israeli side” of the Wall, separated further from critical facilities in Surif.

*Question: why would the Israelis do this?
Answer: to make life difficult, if not impossible, for the people of Al Jabá.

Question: how can the Israelis get away with it?
Answer: because we in the West do nothing.

On the day we were there we found two small children (see photo) crying inconsolably as they waited in the sun for their father, who was struggling up the steep track, laden down with some of life’s necessities for his family. This is the face of the Occupation.

Souad lives in the beautiful village of Saffa, next to Beit Ommar and close by the path of the Annexation Barrier. From her house in the village it is only a short walk to her land – an entire, rolling hillside, the summit of which has been stolen by the Jewish colony/settlement of Bat Eyn. No fence separates her fields and terraces from the settlement: Bat Ayn is one of only two colonies without such a fence in the entire West Bank, designed to make it easier, without a defining border, to make future land grabs.

The title deeds to Souad’s hillside have been in her family for over 100 years. Not that it does her any good – she cannot even graze her shepr without risking being fired upon by the settlers. She can only watch from a nearby hill while her peaches and grapes, soon ready for harvest, wither and rot on the vines and trees, or are stolen by settlers. She needs to work the land, to ensure the proof of continuing ownership and to keep the soil in good condition, but fears for her life if she was to venture there. She has watched helplessly as hundreds of fruit trees, replanted with help from international donors after the original trees were torched by settlers, were dug up and taken back to the settlement to be planted there.

The presence of the family, along with international activists from PSP and Israeli activists, on this nearby hill was soon noticed by Israeli soldiers patrolling nearby roads and it was decided to move back to the village, lest the soldiers enter and fire tear-gas into the village as punishment for the presence of international observers. As we left Souad ruefully remarked, “My hill is gone. Where we are standing may be next.”

It is difficult to see how villagers such as Souad can carry on. She may say, “With God’s help we will survive”, but, dependent wholly for her livelihood on what her land produces, her future is precarious in the extreme. From these hillsides it is possible, on a clear day, to see well beyond the Green Line and, they say, to Tel Aviv. Such a beautiful land. The Stolen Land. And the disappearing land.