(13 including a photographer injured in Ni’ilin)
Neve Gordon in The Nation reported this story about a town in the West Bank of Palestine, Ni’ilin, which is fighting for its existence. Ni’ilin and many other places on the West Bank has shown its willingness to resist Israel’s military occupation, whose sole purpose is to colonize as much Palestinian land as possible, if not the entire West Bank.
Since 2003, the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW) has supported the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and specifically against Israel’s segregation wall. Week after week, AATW has joined the Palestinian popular resistance against the wall, in diverse areas of the West Bank, including the villages of al-Ma’asara, south of Bethlehem, Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, Bil’in and recently, almost on a daily basis, Ni’ilin west of Ramallah. There, the army is taking extreme steps to suppress the demonstrations, such as occasionally firing live ammunition and imposing siege and curfew.
Neve Gordon’s account tells a lot more about why most people are not getting information about the human rights injustices going on in Ni’ilin.
“Jerusalem bulldozer ‘terrorist’ kills 3 in rampage,” read the headline of a CNN article describing the recent attack of a Palestinian construction worker that left three Israelis dead and scores wounded. A Google news search indicates that the brutal assault was mentioned in 3,525 news articles. USA Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera as well as all the other major media outlets covered the incident. Lesser-known media sources, such as the Khaleej Times in the United Arab Emirates, the Edmonton Sun in Canada and B92 in Serbia, also featured the event. Indeed, one could safely assume that almost all news outlets around the globe provided some type of coverage of the attack.
(Demonstrator shot in the arm in Ni’ilin)Another Google news search, this one using the name Ni’lin, produces only seventy-five results. A few major outlets have carried the story about the brave resistance to Israeli seizures of land staged by the residents of this Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank, but CNN, the LA Times and USA Today have not. Sources like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times provided a short caption, no more. Considering that over the past two months the residents of Ni’lin have managed to make a mark on the history of popular opposition, the limited coverage of their campaign is not a mere oversight.
(A car burnt by soldiers during curfew)Ni’lin’s story is one of incremental dispossession. The residents of this agrarian town lost a large portion of their land in the 1948 war. After the 1967 war, Israel took advantage of the town’s location near the internationally recognized Green Line and began confiscating its land for Jewish settlements. First, seventy-four dunams (four dunams equal one acre) were expropriated for the settlement of Shilat. Next, another 661 dunams were seized to build the settlement Mattityahu. In 1985, 934 dunams were confiscated to build Hashmonaim, and six years later 274 dunams were appropriated for Mod’in Illit. Finally, in 1998, twenty more were sequestered for the settlement of Menora. All together, more than 13 percent of the town’s land has been expropriated for settlements.
LINK above for the rest of the story.
An afterword by Gordon is an appeal to help these AATW activists:
When the military realized that violence on the ground cannot stop the residents’ emancipatory drive, it began arresting both Palestinian and Israeli protesters in the hope that hefty legal costs would do the job. To support the legal expenses incurred at Ni’lin,
In appreciation and solidarity,
Anarchists Against the Wall
Video material on the Ni’ilin saga is available below. For the stories corresponding to the above pictures as well as the videos, CLICK HERE
(Five injured and a paramedic arrested in Ni’ilin)
(18 injured in mass demonstration in Ni’ilin)
(Ni’ilin: Bulldozers subotaged again)
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(Al Jazeera) July 20, 2008 – According to Michaela, Israeli military regulations stipulate that rubber coated steel bullets are not permitted to be fired within a 40m radius, and officials are advised to aim for the legs only.
However, B’Tselem reported in a press release that the rifle, which appeared to have been modified to fire rubber-coated metal bullets, was aimed at least 1.5m away from his foot.
The video shows a soldier aim and fire his weapon at a Palestinian man's legs“I think the incident wouldn’t have gained media attention had the video not been released and it forced him [Ehud Barak] to react. Otherwise, the incident would have been whitewashed and nobody would have known about it,” Michaela said.
BBC News Video Clip of Incident
● IDF Soldier Arrested for Unlawful Shooting Based on Video
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."What you have mentioned in nothing new.
This material is quoted by Lawrence of Cyberia about Israel’s targeting of civilians and children. Here you have a occupying military force attempting to colonize another people’s lands, while Israeli soldiers are given orders to take out Palestinian civilians.
Palestinian deaths during the first and second Intifadas were not unintentional collateral damage. It was terrorist murdering by an occupying force.
Israel’s claim that its soldiers adhere to a doctrine of “purity of arms” in dealing with the Palestinian civilian population has been going on for a long time. In the first intifada, Ehud Barak was the IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and proclaimed: “We do not want children to be shot under any circumstances … When you see a child you don’t shoot.” That was untrue then, just as Bradley Burston’s insinuation that Palestinian civilian deaths aren’t intentional is a lie now:
That’s how the IDF killed Palestinian civilians – children – during the first intifada. Not through a careless use of missiles or the occasional errant tank shell, but by individual Israeli soldiers pointing their guns at children in the Occupied Territories – even children under ten, even children who had turned their backs and were running away – and shooting them dead.
And the IDF’s record in the second intifada is much worse. Firstly, because the IDF announced in March 2003 that it would no longer routinely investigate the deaths of civilians killed by Israeli soldiers, but would allow individual Israeli officers in the field to decide whether to call in the Military Police whenever their troops killed a civilian, or to simply declare the killing an “unfortunate incident of death”, which required no investigation. A policy that has had the following, entirely predictable, result:
And secondly, because at the very beginning of the second intifada, the IDF issued extremely broad open fire regulations, concerning who might be considered a legitimate target:
The first suicide bombing in the second intifadah was on Dec. 22 (no Israelis died in it). By that time, 86 Palestinian children (<18 years of age) had been killed by Israelis http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/remember2000.html
The first Israeli child was killed on Jan. 17, 2001 http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/remember2001.html
By that time, at least 90 Palestinian children had been killed by Israelis.
Alison Weir, in her documentary Off the Charts, noted the following:
Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshots to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. Oh, yes. Let’s be fair. We did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.
In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed, in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel’s armed forces were deep into terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continued its long occupation, the stealing of Palestinian lands.
See Alison Weir’s short documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America for the names, ages, places, and dates of these child killings.
from the Neve Gordon essay is this kernel:
more here
Israel needs to change its behavior before the tide reverses…before hate boomerangs. As in a tsunami Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians will be swept away. Some day they who are oppressed shall overcome. It is written.
Where is Tony Blair? I note a false flag led him to cancel his visit to Gaza – “security reasons” Who are they kidding?
Thanks idredit for adding in more of Gordon’s essay.
Where is Tony Blair? I sometimes wonder if he himself knows where he is and what he is doing there. Perhaps that is a common position of people who yoke themselves to the Cheney-Bush administration. It has taken down a lot of people, and hopefully one more, McCain.