What a beautiful face! Do you need to know any more about this human being? I don’t. Those eyes, that smile says it all. This is Bassem Tamimi of the tiny village of Nabi Saleh, photographed by Oren Ziv of ActiveStills on April 12 at his court hearing in Ofer Prison. My god, what spirit– as I sit here at my desk, wondering about going out to collect morels in the woods, and this man has no rights, and has been detained since March 25 on the charge of incitement, please. Why? Here is an excerpt of Max Blumenthal’s interview with Tamimi in January, posted at EI. Read the whole interview there.
MB: When did Nabi Saleh choose to wage an unarmed popular struggle and why?
BT: This village has a long history of resistance. It is part our culture.
We have had 18 martyrs since 1967. Most of our youth are taken away to prison. I have been arrested ten times and placed under administrative detention. We have experience in military resistance but we decided the best way to resist was nonviolent. We want to build a model that looks like the first intifada, an alternative to military resistance. Our village knows exactly what to do because we were involved in the intifada. And the reason the army wants to break our model is because we are offering the basis for the third intifada. For my whole life most of the Israelis I met were soldiers and interrogators. But when we started the popular resistance in 2009 I began to see that there were some Israelis who had removed the occupation from their minds. Like Jonathan [Pollack], who was the main person to bring Israelis and internationals here in the beginning. So we became friends. The occupation is continuous in Israeli society and this is why they lose — because they try to force us to accept them as an occupier, and that will never happen. We don’t have any problem with Jewish people. Our problem is with Zionism. We don’t hate them on the other side; we simply demand that they end the occupation of their minds. The separation between us is between different ways of thinking, not between land. If we change our ways of thought and remove the mentality of occupation from our minds — not just from the land — we can live together and build a paradise.
MB: Your demonstrations have been criticized by outsiders because the throw stones at the soldiers. Meanwhile, the Israeli army claims stone-throwing is an armed attack or a form of violence so the popular resistance is not really nonviolent. What do you make of these claims?
BT: We are building the popular struggle from our culture and our history. Only after we build an authentic struggle do we begin to debate our tactics. And throwing stones is a part of our culture. Historically we threw stones when something frightened us like a snake or a bear. Now, when a soldier comes into our village and shoots tear gas we won’t just sit there like a victim. They are protected from live bullets so we’re clearly not trying to take a life. With stones we are simply saying, “We don’t accept you here as an occupier. We don’t welcome you as a conqueror.”
…MB: What do you think army’s long-term objective is?
BT: The army is determined to push us toward violent resistance.
