Saturday was a burning hot day in the West Bank. Combatants for Peace, a group made up of Israeli ex-combat soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters, planned a protest at an illegal outpost adjacent to Shufa, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank that is very close to the Green Line. The illegal outpost was built by settlers from the settlement of Avney Hefetz over the last three weeks. They simply took over a hilltop on Palestinian land and constructed makeshift tents that are guarded by the IDF. While the tents are not settlements, the pattern is clear. Build a tent, then build a house, then another one and you have a settlement protected by the IDF that then becomes a “consensus area” too populated to ever evacuate.
Combatants for Peace decided that the best form of protest for this illegal behavior was to build a structure next to the outpost itself. We wanted to gauge the reaction of the IDF if we engaged in the precisely the same activities as the settlers – except for one major difference: We were invited by the landowner such that our presence there was actually legit.
Over two hundred Israeli, Palestinian and international activists approached the hilltop from two different angles to confuse the two units of soldiers protecting the settler outpost. The few soldiers that greeted us pronounced the area to be a ‘closed military zone’. Given the amount of people we had they could do nothing to bar us from the area. We arrived at the hilltop and began to build our protest tent. As soon as the structure—a few flimsy plastic tubes with cloth draped over them – was built, the IDF immediately moved in and destroyed it using stun grenades to remove anyone that was in the area. Their faces burned as red as that of the triangle on the Palestinian flag. We built the structure again and the IDF destroyed it again, finally deciding to confiscate the polls from us.
Combatants for Peace then held a press conference for the various Arabic language reporters on the scene. There were no American or Israeli media outlets present despite invitations by Combatants for Peace. The Arab media is evidently more interested in covering the story of nonviolent resistance to the occupation by Israelis and Palestinians than the US or Israeli media. During the press conference, an Israeli member of the Combatants for Peace made an interesting point about the role of the United States in this conflict. He proclaimed to the crowd, “We must remember that this conflict is between us and our Palestinian neighbors, and if we do not continue to remind the Israeli society and government of this, we will continue to wrongly believe that if we reach agreements with the Americans everything will be OK. No! The agreement must be made with the Palestinians and the construction of another illegal outpost damages our chances of reaching such an agreement.”
The conference came to an end and we began to leave the hilltop. As we were leaving, a settler from the outpost ran towards the group. The soldiers guarding the settler outpost immediately went after him as he was clearly looking for confrontation. As the soldiers approached him he pulled out a gun and pointed it directly at the soldiers. After a brief but tense pause the soldiers were able to get the gun from him. Had one of the nonviolent peaceful protestors attempted such an action they would have surly been attacked or shot. But there are two sets of laws in Israel and the West Bank: one for the settlers and one for everyone else. Imagine someone in the United States pulling out a gun and pointing it in the face of a police officer or soldier? What would happen to that person?
In the Wild West Bank these types of things happen every day and the violent people that perpetrate these crimes hardly ever have to answer for them.
