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Naalin under siege and attacked for resisting the Apartheid Wall.

On the second day of the siege in Naalin, village resident Hilal Al Hawaje, a guard at the communications tower of the Palestinian mobile phone company Jawal and painter by trade, received a telephone call from a friend. Al Hawaje, it appeared, left his car close to the tower at which he works, and now a friend was calling to tell him that he saw soldiers throwing stun grenades into the car until it blew up and was completely burned out. The request of the friend from the soldiers to allow him to leave his home in order to put out the fire was met with rubber coated bullets in his direction. 

After hearing the report from his friend, Al Hawaje ran up to his roof, from where he could see his burned out car. “When I saw what they did to my car I went out to the street with my family, to protest, because what is left for me? In response,” he noted, “they beat me, my wife and children, ran after us to the house and filled our inner yard with tear gas. Imagine that your children see you being beaten by soldiers. I wanted to die from embarrassment. I am no Bin Laden or Nasrallah – I am only a painter. Did I do something wrong? Arrest me, I am ready. But to do this?" 

Later that day the soldiers returned to Al Hawaje’s home, where they beat his elderly mother who came out to restrain them, and occupied a room in the house. A visit to the room one day after the lifting of the siege reveals an image closer to a garbage dump than a room. A television shattered, a sofa ripped up, closets tipped over and a picture of Che Guevara thrown on the floor. This picture was the first thing that Al Hawaje picked up. “This was my childhood room,” he said while trying to hang the picture up again. “Recently we gave this room to my younger brother so that he could study here for his high school matriculation exams. Now he can no longer sit here. Apparently the soldiers were bored,” summarises Al Hawaje later as he digs through the remains of the car to take out paper with colour samples. “Much damage in the village was caused by the soldiers’ boredom.”  Thus, for example, the soldiers knocked over a huge advertisement for jeans that stood at the entrance of the village and which still lays there, and they competed in sharp shooting at the various political party flags that were hung on homes and electricity poles.

Naalin made the headlines recently in wake of the video clip publicized by B’Tselem which shows Ashraf Abu Rahma, aged 27, who was shot several weeks ago at close range while tied up, eyes covered and held by the regiment commander. A rubber coated bullet penetrated his leg and injured him. This incident, filmed some two weeks ago by a 14 year old girl who was at the scene, is the type of moment that creates military history when it meets civilian resistance. And as always, until the clip was sent to the news reports, wrapped in explanations about the situation in which it was filmed, no one was aware that such resistance exists.

Actually, the story of Naalin has been going on for two months already. This is an unrelenting battles waged by the residents of the village for approximately one third of their lands, which are confiscated de facto for building of the Separation Wall. Three times a week, in the morning hours, hundreds of people from the village go out with tens of Israelis (from Anarchists against the Wall) and internationals (from the International Solidarity Movement) in the direction of the preparatory works for the Wall in order to halt them with their bodies. In some instances the soldiers stop the demonstrators far from the construction and no disruption is caused. In other instances the demonstrators reach the equipment of the construction company and cause the workers to retreat under military protection. In demonstrations considered particularly successful, demonstrators succeed in ‘conquering’ the bulldozers, i.e. in hanging Palestinian flags and damaging them.

The practical meaning of these ‘successful actions’ is at most a delay of two or three hours in the construction work – a negligible period of time in relation to the dizzying pace of work in the area. However, alongside it there exists a significance of awareness, and this is apparently what drives the military mad. To this pastoral valley the army has already diverted an entire battalion, the presence of which is felt strongly and physically by the demonstrators. The army disperses these demonstrations with more force than in the other villages fighting for their land, penetrates into the village and uses live ammunition in addition to the other known means for dispersing demonstrations – stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets. More than 200 injured persons to date have been taken to the village health clinic, of them four hurt by live bullets. Five injured Israelis were taken to hospitals in Tel Aviv. The combination of the summer heat with the massive firing of tear gas grenades has resulted in fires breaking out at almost all demonstrations. More than 100 olive trees, in the area not intended to be over the wall, have already burned down.

Collective Punishment

Three weeks ago on Friday, the army decided to put an end to the protest. It entered the village with large forces and declared a siege of ten days. The residents were informed by the Palestinian District Coordinating Office (DCO) that this was punishment for the large number of demonstrations. Finally the curfew was lifted after four days, but the damage done during this time was substantial. During 96 hours, all entrances to the village were closed with roadblocks, military patrols were conducted in the surrounding fields and jeeps drove through the empty streets. Several organised attempts to break the siege turned into street battles on the barricades, and several attempts of neighbouring villages and Israelis to organize solidarity convoys with food and medicines for the besieged residents were halted by the army and disbanded with tear gas and rubber bullets. The shooting of the bound Abu Rahma, a resident of the nearby Biliin village, occurred during one of these.

The siege, accordingly, was hermetic. At least three women who were ill and required medical treatment, in addition to three people who were shot by the army when standing on their roofs, were forced to remain in their homes until the siege was lifted. One woman gave birth with no assistance and the following day, a tear gas grenade was thrown into her home, as occurred in other homes. This, it appears, is part of a siege. 

Additionally, the burned out car of Hilal Al Hawaj, which remained in the village as a memorial to the Israeli military imperviousness, is far from being an exceptional matter. A walk through the village reveals numerous cars with at least one broken window, two burned out cars, particularly extensive damage to the Municipal Building for Regional Development, which was established with UN funds, and numerous houses in which windows and solar panels were smashed.

The psychological damage is also evident. “My wife and I were sitting during one of the days under siege, watching television, when our four year old son approached the window to look at the army out on the street,” relates Ibrahim, who lives on the main street of the village.  “We wanted to stop him but it was too late, and the minute he touched the window two rubber bullets were fired through it. The noise frightened our second child, aged two months old, who suffers from heart problems, but our medicines for him ran out and we couldn’t go out to get him more.” Luckily this story, like many others of bored and curious children who tried to look out their windows, ended with nothing more than slight cuts from the glass.

And in the Meantime, in Heshmonaim

We completed the tour of Naalin, on the first day following the siege, on the roof of one of the houses. It was possible to feel there the quiet after the storm and to see the view, lacking in lights, of the village. The closest lights are those of the nearby settlement of Heshmonaim, which is situated on the hill facing Naalin. Relations of the village with Heshmonaim range from dependence as a source of income to hostility due to the fear that lands will be taken over. Every morning more than 100 residents of Naalin walk from the village to the checkpoint of Naalin, where they undergo the oh so regular security checks, and enter Heshmonaim for another day of work. To their right, in the valley between the village and the settlement, in which the sewage from Modiin Ilit flows as a stream, the workers can view the huge bulldozers, guarded by the army, which are uprooting the olive trees of the village, leveling the land and preparing the ground for building the Separation Wall.

An additional tradition born in Naalin in the past few months, apart from the three demonstrations weekly, occurs at the beginning of the Sabbath. Then, hundreds of villagers go out toward the valley and the settlement for an additional demonstration. They are equipped with drums and whistles and shout in megaphones one main message: as long as Naalin isn’t quiet, it will not be quiet in Heshmonaim. However, in Heshmonaim it is actually quiet.

“Two things that we are really lacking here are a public swimming pool and a bowling alley,” said last week with a proud smile Dov Gilor (70), a resident of Heshmonaim who immigrated from the United States more than 35 years ago and came to settle in Heshmonaim 14 years ago. Indeed, it does appear that the small settlement, located between Modiin and Modiin Ilit, has everything apart from bowling. In three of the huge homes in the settlement are private swimming pools and it even has a baseball field (“the only one in Samaria,” say Gilor proudly).

Heshmonaim could be a typical upper class neighbourhood in Tel Aviv. The price of homes ranges from half a million to a million dollars and the residents, a majority of whom are national religious, many coming from the United States, work in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It appears that most of them do not attribute a special ideological value to living on the other side of the Green Line. The main problem that occupies them, apart from the lack of a pool and bowling alley, is that the empty lots in the settlement are gone, the prices are rising and the young generation is forced to leave. “Why should you live in Heshmonaim? Simply because this is the most beautiful place in the country,” says Moti Rosilio, Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves and secretary of the settlement for the past 12 years.

A walk around the settlement, established in 1987, exposes a beautiful view of pine trees to the south and olive trees of the Palestinian villages in the North. However, the charm of Heshmonaim does not end with its beautiful view: the community life of the settlement also seems to have been pulled from a utopian dream. “I hear friends in New York asking each other ‘when was the last time you were mugged’, and I am surprised” said Gilor, previously a worker at IBM in Israel. “In New York people are afraid if their child goes out on the street alone, while here the children move about freely even though there are Arab villages around us. On our internal internet network you can see someone asking if his child has been seen, and after ten minutes someone will respond that ‘yes, he is in this and that garden with friends.’”

This same intimate connection, preserved formally through a yahoo internet group, is also nurtured through a telephone book that Gilor publishes and updates yearly. Through the telephone book people find rides out of the settlement and offer each other a wide variety of favours and assistance. Beds for guests, clothes for babies, a talent for designing invitations or to fix air conditioners – all of them contribute to a neighbour in need. Additionally, every evening a small delegation from the settlement goes to the nearby checkpoint with coffee and biscuits for the soldiers. “Our settlement is wonderful, it is such a Jewish thing,” says Gilor, “There are no worries or problems. The only problem is that if there is a bar mitzvah, it is difficult to know who not to invite.”

A deeper look reveals that there is a problem worrying the people of Heshmonaim: a new settlement established within the settlement, a settlement of Chabad people. “They broke in here somehow, someone gave them some kind of permit, apparently,” says Gilor with anger. “Now go try and get them out.” Gilor says the Chabad people have opened an underground synagogue and are beginning to try to convert others. He does not like their worship of their Rabbi and their missionary work among other Jews, and he hopes it will be possible to get them out of his settlement before they will expand even more. It appears that Gilor misses the similarity between the settlement activity of Heshmonaim and that which bothers him so very much now.

We Read about the Demonstrations in the Newspaper

Although Heshmonaim is built on what used to be lands of Naalin, the settlers emphasise that this is not the random confiscation of land, and that every piece of land was purchased at a high price from Jewish traders. They further note that most of the infrastructures were developed by the settlers themselves from their own money, and that each family invested approximately NIS 30,000 as, according to them, the state invests almost nothing in them. “The US president said that Jews are building in the territories? The truth is that all the homes here were built by Arabs,” laughs Gilor. Even at these hours it is possible to find on the streets of the settlement about 200 Palestinian workers from the surrounding villages, who work in local construction or upkeep and gardening. Most of the workers come from Naalin.

“Once there was a contractor who tried to work with Jews, but it didn’t work out,” relates Gilor. “The Jews want more money, they are sick at times – it simply cannot be profitable. We give work and an income to our Arab neighbours. In the city you don’t do this. All of those who love the Arabs don’t allow them to live. We provide them with a living as long as it is quiet. We have a good relationship with many Arabs in the area, but primarily employer-employee relations. This relationship is life, not dreams of those who say “we want everyone to be the same, when this can never happen.”

Beyond working relations, in Heshmonaim they don’t really know anything about the village across the hill, apart from the fact that up until the last demonstrations things were quiet. “For twenty years we have good neighbourly relations”, says Rosilio. “We didn’t even feel the Intifada. If there are differences of opinion we know how to sit with them, with two muktars from the village, to settle things. Prior to the autonomy of the Palestinian Authority the muktars had substantial power. Since then their power has declined, but they are still an address for issues.” In Naalin, the residents stress that for several years already the village has not had a muktar and that the village is managed by an elected council, the only body possessing the authority to take decisions and obligations on behalf of the village.

The tens of demonstrations in the past two months were barely felt in Heshmonaim, and those settlers who did notice don’t attribute to them much importance. “We heard that there are demonstrations, I read about it in the newspaper,” says Gilor, whose house is situated exactly in front of the valley in which the demonstrations in the past two weeks.

*This is an edited and translated version of an article by the same name which appeared in the Tel Aviv weekly newspaper Haair on 25 July 2008. Translated from the Hebrew by the Alternative Information Center.