Palestine Calling

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Monday October 11, 2004 21:57 by Alois Vincenzo - Galway Grassroots Network (personal capacity)

Irish anarchists' experiences in Freedom Summer campaign 2004

An article on the experiences of a handful of activists from Ireland's libertarian left in Palestine this summer. A belated personal account, some of which subject matter has been reported on this site as it happened by one of the other participants. See links below.

On Sunday 8th of August, along with two other Irish anarchists from the Grassroots Network and Workers Solidarity Movement, I joined Palestinians, Israelis and internationals in the Freedom Walk, the latest phase of a summer campaign to re-invigorate resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to the construction of Israel’s Apartheid Wall.

I had travelled mostly overland across Europe with one of the other activists, likewise a member of Galway Grassroots Network, to join our colleagues inside the West Bank. We entered via Israel with the intention of whiling away the remainder of our summer offering solidarity to an oppressed people.

The march set out on Friday 30th July from Jenin along the route of the semi-built Apartheid Wall for Jerusalem, 171 kilometres of dismembered agricultural lands, disfigured communities and repossesed promises away. In the razor wire and Irish
cement (the Irish firm Cement Roadstone Holdings has a substantial stake in the project) of the 'Secuity Fence' lies confirmation of the paucity of the Nobel-friendly 'Peace Initiatives' of the last decade and beyond, through which the onset of popular civil struggle, or 'Intifada' of Palestinian society against the occupation has been consistently dampened in favour of political amelioration.

In the midst of the latest motley wave of volunteers of the International Solidarity Movement, we bussed from Jerusalem to join the rest of the hardened marchers and locals in the village of Izbat Salman on the stifling Sunday afternoon. There we were
briefed on the situation faced by the community under the spectre of the Wall and of Israeli encroachment into the area; the village of 750 souls provided the backdrop for a story of multiple invasions since the creation of the state of Israel, and the slow execution of Israeli policies designed to drain the lifeblood of the village. Three quarters of the village's arable land now lies trapped behind the line of the Wall, under
the watch of the area's three Israeli settlements, gleaming and ominous on their carefully selected hilltop perches.

We proceeded in the direction of Beit Amin, the next village on our itinerary. The route meant crossing an Israeli checkpoint, and for the unitiated this foray was to provide a glimpse of the reality of life on the ground for Palestinians; as we neared the checkpoint, our march passed a crowd of fifteen to twenty Palestinian men detained by the roadside at riflepoint.

Conflicting reports as to the nature of the men's detention emerged. Some suggested the men had had their identity papers confiscated for no particular reason, while some suggested the men had been detained while coming out to greet the marchers, after being subjected to tear gas and violence.

Whatever, we took thedecision to remain at the checkpoint until the detainees had been freed. A standoff and fisticuffs ensued, at the end of which one of the more prominent marchers found himself in the clutches of the occupation troops.

Eventually the detained Palestinians were given back their identity papers and let dribble back to relative freedom, save for one man who was driven away in a military jeep in unclear circumstances. Initially the desire of many of the marchers was to refuse to leave the immediate area, but when it was considered that both men had already been whisked well away from the scene, it was decided that little could be gained by remaining.

Forward movement resumed towards Beit Amin, where we were greeted by locals, and from there on through the evening to Sanneria, where meetings, showers, food and sleep were divided up between the activists and between the two villages.

Monday 9th August had us setting out for Masha, and what the day lacked in terms of practical solidarity, it made up for in militancy and enthusiasm. Supporters of various Palestinian and Israeli groups were out in force, making for a rich tapestry of banners and slogans.

The procession was not without confrontation however, as occupation troops raced to
prevent the assembled throng from marching the full distance. The prohibited route led a local house effectively encircled by the physical manifestations of the occupation, and to the already notorious gate in the Wall that was some months ago scene of the shooting of an Israeli activist, when a crew of young anarchists momentarily tore open the gateway that so severely restricts the movements of the villagers.

After some scuffles, the soldiers acquiesced to let us proceed further down the road, albeit not as far as intended.

Through the afternoon, the march buzzed cross-country towards Rafat, as individual marchers were subjected to snatch attempts and occasional pummeling by occupation troops, but without arrest. Through barren and uneven terrain, we proceeded to take in a vista of the lands that a local patriarch explained his kin would lose, as two thirds of their land would be hived off behind the 'security' barrier, as his family is subjected to repression in the shape of trumped-up arms charges on his eldest son.

As the terrain turned to that of rich olive groves, we hiked uphill to the village of Deir Ballut, the resting place for the night. There we were given an account of that community's recent struggles against the Wall by the Mayor, while casting our eyes on the partly-built new schoolhouse. The issue of the schoolhouse has been a focal-point of local and regional resistance to the Wall, and has marked a rare legal victory against it, its immediate destruction to make way for the Wall being forestalled through the Israeli courts after hosting an international peace camp for four months earlier this year.

Trekking resumed on Wednesday 11th August for the village of Budros, reputedly
home to some of the best-organised popular resistance to the Wall in all of the affected areas. In the afternoon the marchers defied the orders of troops by venturing onto the military road destined to run alongside the Wall while en route to the village.
Budros' reputation began to ring true as swarms of locals descended from the adjoining high ground to join us on the approach to Budros.

Internationals were heartened by the strong presence of local women, and troubled by the presence of Hamas appendages, two symbols respectively of some of the progress and problems embedded in the Palestinian social and political fabric.


The heavy-handed tactics of the soldiers, incensed by the marchers’ jeep-blocking and backed up by Uzi-laden private security contractors (many of Palestinian Bedouin stock), could not dampen the spirit of the march as Budros approached. Once inside the village we were given some detail of the community’s resistance to the Wall, encompassing thirty-eight demonstrations in the past year, an impressive tally for a populace of about 1,000.

However activities for the day proved not to be finished with, as commotion during the speeches signalled that a local youth had been picked up by soldiers on the edge of town. A detachment of internationals descended to where the army were still holding the bound and blindfolded 15-year old (ostensibly arrested for stone-throwing, but more likely as an excuse to flex the collective muscle of bored Israeli troops), and where a small number of activists had already begun negotiating for his release. We had resolved to block the soldiers' jeep in the event they attempt to drive their captive away, when the youth emerged from their clutches unharmed. It is anyone's guess whether the swift action of those present prevented a sojourn for the youth in extra-judicial detention for a spell of six months or more, a common punishment for Palestinians falling foul of the occupiers on foot of trivialities.


On Sunday the15th the march was buoyed up by a fresh wave of Internationals, as it continued to wind through villages threatened with virtual extinction by the Apartheid
Wall. In the seeming remoteness of these communities, those of us of pasty Irish origin remarked at the very un-Middle Eastern look of some of the locals, and could not help but find in the complexion of the (young boys) the appearance of wild Irish children. The similarity was in fact striking.

But in Palestine, one can never afford to romanticise about such curiousities. Whereas in Tel Aviv an Irish person can pass for an Israeli with a few words of Hebrew, highlighting the racial nonsenses of Zionism, deep in the West Bank one will find in the eyes of the Arabic-speaking children not just the products of genealogical oddities but the products of ethnic cleansing and population displacement.

One of those parched villages we visited that day, on the edges of desertification (a process not aided by the siphoning off of local water resources for the swimming pools of nearby Israeli settlements) was a ’48 village. It began life as a coastal hamlet on the sand dunes near what is now Tel Aviv, but had to move in 1948 inside what was then Jordan. In 1967, the inhabitants ceased to be arbitrary citizens of the contrived state of Jordan, and became citizens of no country. Israeli settlement of the adjoining lands soon commenced.

One Palestinian house still remains isolated within the boundaries of the nearest settlement, the product of grisly resistance against the enforced demolition to which its neighbours succumbed. Visiting that residence involves running a gauntlet of Israeli soldiers through a caged corridor fortified with razor wire and a devoted watchtower. Walking a circuit of the modest abode is also done inside a cage.

Whether the most appropriate analogy to this unrelenting experience lies in the domain of the prison or that of caged animals escapes this writer. The houseowner did not have the energy to tell us of his experience, as he felt he had told it all so many times before. But in the midst of the despair lies the grim and unmistakable resolve of ordinary people to refuse to be subjugated to a double nightmare. It seems that for this family, 1967 was not to be allowed become another 1948.

Disembarking from communal taxis on the outskirts of Beitunia on the morning of August 17th, an update reached us that locals were in favour of an action being carried out against the construction of the Wall there. This news was unexpected, as we had been led to believe that locally the struggle against the Wall had collapsed, after the slaying of a boy on a demonstration there had torn the heart out of the community’s spirit to resist.

Nonetheless, the decision was taken to go ahead with a token impromptu action. In practice this meant little more than bringing our march directly onto the path of construction rather than proceeding in its vicinity, and being a little more verbose than was planned. The nuance was not lost on the soldiers and private security contractors guarding the site, who viewed the stepping up of our visit dimly. Self-righteous speechifying of an unmistakably myopic Israeli variety was on offer from the troops, between of course threats uttered verbally and uttered from the barrel of an armalite.

For many of us, this was the first experience of live rounds being fired in our midst, but in this instance an element of ISM training rang true as barely a marcher flinched as the shots were fired over our heads, waiting instead for decisions to stay or go to be taken coolly and calmly, and in as democratic a fashion as possible.

The approach of the hired guns was less sophisticated. The largely non-Israeli dogs of war (and walls), meted out unbridled violence to the marchers, but we held our line arm-in-arm and refused to be drawn into hand-to-hand fighting. One international came out of the confrontation with a particularly ugly laceration from the magazine of an Uzi.

After the situation on the edge of the village had cooled down, we repaired to the local community hall for refreshment and debriefing. For the newer entrants to the march, the hair-raising nature of the morning’s confrontation had helped to frame the enterprise in general, and more particularly the next day’s push for Qualandiya, in the reality of the ongoing conflict, albeit in a small way.

We were now freed up for the rest of the afternoon to prepare for tomorrow’s finale (the Freedom Walk was coming to a close) and to visit local refugee camps, likewise an educational endeavour. Food and board, and hearty local entertainment, were provided in and around the impressive school campus of the village of Kofer Nameh.

By Wednesday August 18th, the bulk of Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons had come out on hunger strike for better conditions, and against the worst excesses of their abusive treatment. Wednesday had been called as a national day of solidarity for the fasting prisoners, and a large solidarity demonstration called for Ramallah, the sole enclave of Palestinian National Authority control in the West Bank. As the timing of the demonstration complimented that of our advance on Qualandiya, those of us on the Freedom Walk had the opportunity to fraternize in the solidarity tent in Ramallah, one of many having sprung up in the occupied territories to offer support for striking prisoners and their families.

Photographic displays there mixed images of U.S. prisoner abuses of the ‘War on Terror’ with ones of Israeli misrule in the Territories. And though the collages were compromised by the occasional presence of hoaxed or discredited pictures, something about observing such images in Palestine, surrounded by people who knew the austerity of life under occupation and under the desert boot all too well, made the viewing of the well-travelled images all the more jarring, even surprisingly so.

After the solidarity demonstration, we commenced our advance for Qualandiya checkpoint, several kilometres outside of town, now with several hundred locals joining us. No demonstration had ever made it past the notorious checkpoint, flying in the face as it would of the essential function of such bulwarks; like the Apartheid Wall, the checkpoints make up a component in the Israeli ‘security’ apparatus, placing a stranglehold on all areas of life for the Palestinian populace. This includes dissent. Consequently, hopes of safe passage were not high amongst those of us who marched.

But a decision had evidently been taken by the Israeli command to let the procession pass rather than attempt to stop it and be forced to engage in a mass arrest of the participants. This decision, as palatable as it was for many of the marchers, must be seen as a cynical attempt to ward off a propaganda victory for the international brigades in the event of mass arrest. The hoovering up by Israeli forces of dozens of internationals, standing shoulder to shoulder with Palestinians while confronting the occupation, is not the kind of copy sought by the press offices of the Israeli state.

In any case, those of us in the successful, checkpoint-busting main body had little time to soak up our apparent victory before realisation set in that many of the local Palestinians had not in fact passed but had chosen to hang back, whether through fear of attempting to cross or for whatever reason. It was considered that continuing on, minus the majority of the Palestinians, would mean a rather hollow victory; thus after some gleeful minutes of checkpoint redecoration by means of paint bombs and spray cans, the decision was taken to turn back and rejoin the Palestinians on the Ramallah side of the checkpoint, now becoming embroiled in rallies of stones and plastic bullets with the soldiers.

In scenes reminiscent of various war films, the innocents abroad ventured back through the checkpoint and across the no man’s land between the soldiers and the youths, amidst drifts of tear gas and the whistle of various projectiles being traded by both sides. We sought out the bands of soldiers in their firing positions on the high ground, surrounding them as they took aim, obscuring their lines of fire with our bodies, arm in arm. Uneasy banter broke out in jumbled English, at times embarrassing and naive but on balance making it harder for the young soldiers to do their job, playing to their racism by pitting them face to face with their Western peers.

It is difficult to judge how long this scenario played out for. But just as many of us were beginning to contemplate our exit strategy, considering the skirmish sufficiently de-escalated, we realised that we were being joined on the soldiers’ firing ground by the lines of Palestinian youth, streaming out of their cover on the streets behind to stand by our sides and confront their occupiers face to face. In the fevered emotion of these youths lay live and incontrovertible evidence of the positive effects, psychological and otherwise, of hands-on international solidarity. As the internationals and Palestinians moved away from the troops, we danced and sang. The next time that these youths faced their occupiers, they might not have had internationals at their side, but there is little doubt that they would have carried this experience of solidarity with them, and that it would have carried them.

Later on the possibility of continuing the next day to Jerusalem was explored, but it was considered that the action at Qualandiya had represented the natural peak of the Freedom Walk’s momentum. It seemed that those internationals who still time to squeeze out of their stay in Palestine would have better outlets for it in the various regions where there existed a solidarity infrastructure to absorb them, and abuses of the occupation to be worked against. Many of us made the journey to Nablus, then suffering under military curfew and army incursions.

In modern history, the story of Palestine is a tragic one, but one that is not atypical. However, one facet of the Palestinian situation that stands out is the very fact that international solidarity activists can some practical effect there, something that would be impossible in many other conflict zones around the world; the fact that the aggressor in the Palestinian context is the state of Israel, a state that sets itself up as a civilised liberal democracy in the Western mould, is indispensable in understanding this anomaly.

Israel, though the military goliath of the Middle East, is bound to some extent by the constraints of keeping up appearances as the respectable ‘liberal democracy’ of that region. This is not a tribute to the underlying benevolence of the ‘liberal democratic’ state, for it is just that entity that is undeniably best-evolved to dominate and spread its hegemony; it represents the pinnacle of achievement for the architects of global power. The constraints referred to above are merely the drawbacks of exercising dominance by means of the ‘liberal-democratic’ model. And it is these constraints that can be exploited to exercise international solidarity in limited sets of circumstances, such as in Palestine.

Handfuls of highly-motivated solidarity activists in flashpoints such as Palestine can alleviate the circumstances of everyday life for oppressed peoples. But to tackle war, oppression and human rights abuses, as well as the greed, democratic deficit and inequality in general that are inseparable from such issues, means first tackling complicity and complacency on every front, including the home front, and in their place inculcating meaningful solidarity in a very broad sense.

Israel, a country smaller than Ireland, could not hope to implement its expansionist policies without the support, tacit and otherwise, of the outside world. National governments and international governmental institutions have proved themselves unable or unwilling to remedy these problems. Logically then, it must be the responsibility of ordinary people to step into the role of assertive participation in how their world is run, from a local to a global level. This means lots of hard work, without easy answers, but leaving the United Nations and it ilk to solve the world’s problems would seem to be something of an empty, and unfounded, hope.



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